 Wir kommen zurück hier im Hamburger Chaos Studio. Hier geht es jetzt weiter mit der wichtigen Frage, was Vorgesetzte der Markt, Corona und Teammitglieder zusammen gemeinsam haben. Und zwar, sie können allesamt das Team stören und dazu spricht jetzt gleich Laura zu uns. Sie hat Unterstützung von ST und ja, Laura selber hat Erfahrung im Bereich Personalwesen, ist im Moment unterwegs als Agile Coach und im Bereich der Organisationsentwicklung. Gerade arbeitet sie an ihrer Dissertation und hat trotzdem Zeit gefunden, zusammen mit ST diesen Vortrag zu erstellen und sie spricht heute darüber, was man tun kann, um Teams messbar resilient, also widerstandsfähig, Gegenstörungen von innen, von außen, aber auch innerhalb des Teams zu machen. So, ST und ich beide arbeiten als Agile Coaches, aber wir haben verschiedene Persönlichkeiten, wir haben verschiedene Series und eine große Unterschiede ist das Thema, was wir interessiert sind. ST ist viel interessiert, um cool Dinge zu schaffen, was das ist. Es könnte in der Art Kontext, in der Tech Kontext oder in der Business Development Kontext. Most of the time, I am pretty much interested in how cool things are getting created. How does collaboration work? How do processes work? How is creativity going on? And how do people feel whenever they collaborate? The first question I have is, what makes you more upset? Are you more upset because of technical issues or are you getting more upset because of people? People, you collaborate with your colleagues, your customers, your teammates, your boss, whoever that might be. And before we start a little bit deeper, the first question might be, what the hell is organizational psychology? We work with a lot of different companies and therefore I want to give you an example how I as an organizational psychologist get to know a new organization. In order to get you in the mood of it, I want to start with three little situations. And maybe you can relate to one or another. So the first thing that I mostly get to see when I see a new customer, it is the kitchen. Because I enter the office, somebody might offer me a coffee and together we will go to the kitchen. And the first thing is, what do you see here? Do you see the mess, the garbage, the dishes standing all over the place? Or like me, do you see more something about the culture? Is there maybe a correlation between how the kitchen looks like and how people care for their work or how they document their code or how they deploy things? Maybe there is a little bit about truth in it that there is a relationship between how the offices look and how the work people do look like. The second question that is very helpful to get to know a new organization is how long does it take you to order something very simple, like coffee or a pencil. And this question tells you a lot about the leadership, delegation levels, the tolerance of people and how well the processes work. And a third example is, how do people solve problems? And does everything have to be very shiny and very chic? Or is it okay to be very creative in solving problems with very cheap solutions but that really tackle the problem that you want to address? So with this picture, I will see a lot about process and product innovations. So what, again, is organizational psychology. It is often defined as industrial in organizational psychology. Some people also call it occupational psychology or work in organizational psychology. And there is an association called the American Psychological Association. Something like the Chaos Computer Club for Techies, is it the same thing for psychologists. And they defined it as a scientific study that takes care of human behavior in organizations and in general in workplaces. So we take a look at different things within that. It's not only individuals, its groups, its teams and its organization as a whole. And with all the knowledge that we have, we always want to solve problems that occur during collaboration. So now you might have the questions, what problems do we address within that? On the left hand side, you see some examples that are maybe more easily to measure like recruitment or selection processes, training and development, performance measurements or even reward systems. On the other hand, we have aspects that are often more called the fuzzy ones because it's about workplace motivation, quality of work or the structure, how people collaborate and organizations develop or even how customers behave. So maybe the first answer for the question was that you're more upset about people and the question is why is collaboration so exhausting and why does it make us upset every now and then. So throughout the whole talk I want you to keep three things in mind as a new organizational psychologist. We always work with very complex systems. It is hard to make things measurable and we have different levels that we take a look at. And I want to give you a little bit more about those three aspects that you have some background information. So the first thing is about complexity. And I once read a quote, which I observe everywhere. So people are afraid of detail and afraid of complexity. That is a pattern that we observe a lot and I want to give you an example where we observe it. So we as a people often are getting in complex situations and we try to oversimplify things in order to have the good feeling of having everything under control. So this is an example where we try to make visible how collaboration might work within our organization and the power of this structure lies within the hierarchy. The next try is that the power is accepted to lie within influence and the knowledge. But in real life there is a difference between formal and informal ways of information flow. And in real life it is pretty much like that. So the value creation, the collaboration, communication mainly works in those ways, which are not that pretty to visualize, but the first thing is always to accept that it is the case like that. In addition we have several players within our organization and we have effects not only within our organization but also in the outside world. So the relation between a manager or an employee or two employees is not only those people involved but also always a little bit more. Because it is really important what organizational culture we have around those relationships. Is it a healthy organization? Is it a very competitive market? Do we have a lot of satisfied or unsatisfied customers? What is the environment that those people work together? When I work with software teams we often have to do with roles like coaches or scrum masters, low hierarchies and self-organizations, our words that always come up. So therefore we always have roles like an agile coach and maybe they even have to establish a relation between leaders and employees because we do not have anything like that before. And in addition to these additional roles that help us to collaborate, the organizational culture is important as well because that forms the setting and therefore has an influence on the collaboration itself. So let's take a look a little bit closer on measurability. How do we measure and what do we measure? When we get to know new teams we always ask them a playing question. What do you measure? So it's very unprimed and the first thing that often comes up is we measure our revenues. We know our costs. Maybe we have some measurements of customer satisfaction like a net promoter score or something like that. But then we will continue asking. So what else? Is there any other than the business dimension that you measure and keep an eye on? If we are lucky, then the teams also measure technical key performance indicators in order to know what is the deployment time, what is the deployment frequency, maybe things like the meantime to recovery that comes to their mind. Often they even have a dashboard that shows how well they are set up within that. But we will still continue asking because there is another important dimension missing and we do not have an answer to it right now. So we ask for team numbers. But when we ask that we mostly get irritated looks because besides of we know that we still have sometimes of bank holidays in front of us or I know I will visit a conference, there are no more numbers around this team dimension. And we always hear that it's about a gut feeling that I know everything is under control or someone has a problem. That's nothing where we can help us with measurements. So we will get the question how on earth can I measure team dimensions and how can I even improve them. Psychologists may forgive me, but I will try to make a real easy example to know and compare how we can measure team dimensions. The easy example is how do you know that it is winter in Hamburg right now? When you take a look out of the window, it might be rainy, you might see a grey sky, you might see people with very warm clothes. The sun goes up very late, goes down very early and there might be a lot of rain. So the fact that we have the season winter is only observable and measurable because we divide it in subdimensions that we can measure. We can measure the hours of sunlight, we can measure the amount of rain, we can see what we need to wear in order to stay warm and in a psychological context we call seasons like winter a construct. That helps us to cluster the observation but then we need to break it down into several dimensions that are operational and then we can measure it. So that is the same thing for the team dimensions. We can measure team dimensions when we make use of those so-called psychological or hypothetical constructs and in the behavior science we make use of those in order to facilitate the understanding of human behavior. So the constructs are so-called building blocks of scientific theories. But how do we get closer to the measurement is the next question. We can observe real life problems that we have within our collaboration or situations that occur every now and then. Like we have problems when we deploy or we have a lot of discussions about certain topics. People really need their vacation because they feel very stressed right before every holiday. So those can be observations where we know there might be a problem within the situation which is definitely worth taking a closer look in starting to measure. But how can we do that? If you observe things, take a look in the theory and there might be some helpful tools for your observations and problems. Identify with the help of theory how you can operationalize your constructs. You can use self-assessments where people just simply answer a questionnaire. You can for example choose easy things like measure like a mood board with a scale from 1 to 10 and people tell you what their impression is or you can measure by using data. For example, the amount of holidays that are taken very early in the year and versus very late in the year. How many sick days do we have? How many conference do we visit? How does the collaboration look like? Do we improve it every now and then or do we not take any look on the collaboration itself? And you can also use experiments in a lab or in the field to make things measurable. Then whatever state you have in the beginning define actions, how you plan to tackle your problem that you identified earlier and then re-measure to see whether the actions that you took bring you closer to the goal or not. So you might be taking some actions, measure again and see whether you've reached your goal and thereby solved the problem that you had within your collaboration. And then repeat. And it doesn't matter where you start with an observation, with a theory that you want to test within your team. It's just about curiosity and things that might help you to improve collaboration. The third thing to keep in mind is we have different levels within our organizations. So organizations are complex systems with different levels and every interaction influences other aspects. So whenever we start working for a company, start working for a team, there's an individual signing a contract and starting to work. Probably the person will work within a team that will interact with other teams or other employees within the company. No matter how low hierarchies are, there might be a certain form of leadership person that is in charge for the teams and also legally in charge. And in addition, we have the organizational level also shaping and creating an atmosphere and having an influence on all the other players. Before we start with real life examples, there's one aspect that is really important because we have the feeling that it's getting mixed up a lot of times. Remember the quote of people are afraid of detail and complexity. I have the feeling that we can clear that up right now and maybe you could make use of it within your working days. So remember what Henry says and now we will dig a little bit deeper into complexity. Have you ever heard of the Canadian framework? It is a helpful tool to identify in which situation we are and what challenges we are facing. The Canadian framework was created by Dave Snowden and the word Canadian is Welch for the word Habitat. And Habitat already gives you an indication that we can conclude how to behave and how to deal with situations. Here you can see four areas and we will get briefly through all of them. So the first area is that we are in a clear or simple state. So the relationship between a cause and an effect is obvious to everyone who is involved within it. So we simply sense, see what we have, arise and directly respond. We can make use of best practices because it's very easy to identify what helps us to solve this problem. The next area is the complicated one. That means the relation between a cause and an effect requires analysis first. Maybe some expert knowledge is needed but as soon as it is sensed and analyzed then we can easily respond to it because we have good practices that are tested and that help us whenever the problem occurs. And whenever the problem occurs is a pretty good hint because when things are complicated they are repeatedly made. So it is like a habit that comes every now and then. So we have things that are challenges maybe every week or every day or several times a day and therefore after the analysis we really know what to do to tackle the problem. Now comes the interesting part because it's about complexity. What does complex mean? The relationship between a cause and an effect can only be perceived and identified in retrospect. So after that event took place we can probe, then sense and respond and maybe we are lucky and tackle with our emergent practice that we do maybe we tackle the problem become closer but it might be not a second time that it appears in the same way that it did the first time. So complexity is about dealing with new things where we do not know what to do right now we can only try it out and see in retrospect whether it helped or not. And the fourth situation is chaotic. So there is no relationship between a cause and an effect at the system level and therefore we need to develop totally new and novel practices. We act, sense and respond but this is really the biggest challenge. And then we have the part in the middle what does that mean? So whenever we do not know what causality exists we talk about disorder. So in this state people go back to their own comfort zone when making a decision maybe they are stuck and they do not know where they are what to use and how to handle problems and challenges. But the most dangerous part is the catastrophic one. So whenever we have chaotic situations and people try to become a master of the situation by using simple best practice solutions that is really catastrophic because it does not tackle the problem at all and even worse people do not even accept the situation of the chaotic situation. So we try to manage it by oversimplifying it remember that pattern from a little bit earlier and that is really risky. So when we take a look at the Canadian framework those give us a hint where are we, what can we do in order to become master of the challenges that we are facing and if people tell you the next time that things are complex maybe you can make use of your new knowledge and try asking questions like is it really complex or are you feeling in a state of disorder and do not know what to do. Within organizations we have the effect that we only know in retrospect whether the action that we took helped us and was suitable for the cause or not. So therefore keep in mind now we have a shared understanding of what complexity is and we can take a look at some examples. I would like to make it more practical with you and therefore we brought three sentences and three situations we faced with a lot and we hear those sentences at least every other day and maybe you can relate at least to one of those three sentences. The first is I'm afraid to make mistakes the second is we need to be more innovative and the third is I have a one track mind or ich bin im Tunnel which is very often heard and said by developers. Those three sentences are your new sensor, your new detector and now we can take a look what does this mean what constructs do we have in psychology. So let's start with I'm afraid to make mistakes. I'm afraid to make mistakes. You can set that sentence in the context of teamwork and collaboration and some years ago Google did a lot of studies on collaboration and they found out some teams need so called psychological safety what does that mean it means that psychological safety is the state where people feel comfortable and do not have any kind of fear in the situation and team they work for. So this is a belief where one knows I will not be punished I will not be humiliated whatever idea I come up with whatever question I ask whatever concern I raise or whatever mistake I make it feels for an individual like taking an interpersonal risk because I'm offering that I do not know something or I have a crazy idea and therefore I need to feel very safe when working in a team to raise those aspects. And Amy Edmondson she's an American psychologist working with medical teams a lot of years ago and she measured their psychological safetiness with a self assessment and observations and she observed the following she said her results showed that psychological safe feeling teams to make more mistakes than teams with a low psychological safety by taking a second look at the effect tells you a lot about the effect that it can have on organizations and collaboration as a whole because when you feel safe you admit more that you have made a mistake and therefore people can react and maybe help you earlier before things are getting for example catastrophic. So when teams feel safe it is very beneficial for the organization because people will raise their hand will state their concern and then we can solve problems together. A simple question is how often in your team context did you not say what you should have said because you didn't feel comfortable with raising a question or stating a concern whenever you observe that people do not discuss within a discussion a meeting but afterwards or only with a certain person that is a hint that there might be a certain state that psychological safety is not given so when you observe it you can maybe use the questionnaire and some items are when someone makes a mistake in this team it is often held against him or her or it is difficult to ask other members in this team for help and the scale and the items developed by Edmondson can be a helpful tool for you and they are also set in relation to the learning behavior and the shared culture. Another thing that you can be aware of from now on is how fairly are your language shared steps to be rooted within your team is there only one or two people talking a lot and others being very quiet that can also be an indicator that there might be a certain situation that needs a focus in order to solve it and make people feel psychologically safe so that was the first question one of my favorite psychological constructs and I hope you can make use or maybe relate to the first situation the second example is that we are often confronted with a situation that we hear we need to be more innovative especially when we start working with new teams we ask what help they need we ask leadership people what are your expectations what do you need, where do you need help and they say we need to be more innovative but mainly they mean you as a team need to be more innovative and no matter what there is no doubt that organizations need to be innovative in order to be sustainably successful but what does it mean and what is the process behind it and this is an area of interest that is already pretty well known within psychology but little known within the IT context and maybe it helps you to have a more precise understanding so there are four phases of identifying by west already in the 1990s and first whenever you have an idea it doesn't have to be at work it can be at home at work or having a coffee you might have an idea and whenever you feel comfortable with it you might grab a coffee and then a second step talk to somebody in the kitchen to your colleague and tell the person about your idea if you tell it to more and more people or even raise it and ask for a budget you might get some resources like money, collaborators in order to be able to create a product and when you have created a product and customers buy it then there might be a certain habitat of standardization making routines, making it better customizing the product and if you have made this experience then you might probably be in a situation that you raise another idea whenever it comes to your mind and this circle aspects that are needed in order to be innovative and we can measure that with assessment for example, which is called the team climate inventory for innovations and what does it mean to be innovative, remember what does it mean that we have winter in Hamburg we can break it down into four dimensions and the first is do we have a shared vision do we have a shared goals whatever aspects are helpful to reach that vision and therefore they can really make the first check whenever I have an idea does it help us because it relates to our company vision the second thing is do people feel safe enough and remember psychological safety to raise even crazy ideas do people feel safe do people have people they trust and so they can share their ideas and the fourth thing is do people in our company get support for innovations whenever they come up with ideas do they get time do they get money do they get collaborators in order to form a new product and the fourth aspect is whenever it's about standardization do people have the knowledge how to do that how to improve how to make customer how to make and then they realized that there is another aspect that is pretty important which is the so called social desirability people have the tendency to behave the way that others might respect them or even support them or think that they are cool persons and therefore the aspect of social desirability is very important do I state things or behave only because others thereby like me and this is another aspect that is measured within this questionnaire so whenever you hear the sentence we need to be more innovative you can make the check for those aspects with the vision participative safety support for innovations and task orientation another example is D I have a one track mind so being what is that with a psychological perspective we call it the flow experience and flow experience is a construct that is also really old in psychology and that means to come up with new ideas and deliver them and as soon as you experience the flow is a state of mind when you feel optimally challenged you are fully observed in the activity and it feels very enjoyable and engrossing in addition research found out that it is beneficial for an organization because things relate to one another remember the different levels that we have here we also have the opportunity to measure it with a questionnaire two sample items of no difficulty concentrating or I don't notice time passing that can be indicators that you experience flow there are always two sides of the metal and the other side of experiencing flow is that people do not want to feel worried when they fail and they do not want to hesitate to make mistakes remember the psychological safety so this is another construct where we can take a look at and when SDNI started measuring more and more things within software teams we were getting confronted with is there any relation between those things that we can observe and therefore we started a first study this year and took a look whether the perception of a team climate for innovations has an influence on the experience of flow or worry and research several decades ago always dealt with innovations and in a study from January of 2020 there were several characteristics related to the team climate for innovation but not the flow experience that we hear a lot when we work with software developers and therefore we asked software developers to state their opinions on those two effects and I want to briefly share with you the results of our first study when it comes to the perceived team climate for innovations we used here a simple ample logic so traffic light logic which says when it's green we have no problem when it's yellow, oh there might be a certain attention and when we have a red issue then there's really a problem so we want to share these results with you and what we can see here is that when we compare the results that we perceived with norms and comparable groups we see that for software developers there's often the situation that they do not have a clear vision they do not have clear goals that they can contribute to whenever they have an idea they feel supported they get the resources and they know the tasks they have to do in order to optimize the product although we had an anonymous survey the social desirability tendencies were pretty high compared to others so this was the first hint that it is important to work on a shared and clear and inspiring vision whenever you want to be more innovative we also took a look at the flow and worry experience and what we found out is that software developers experience a lot of flow which is very cool because remember it is really enjoyable for an individual and it is beneficial for an organization but on the other hand they were pretty much worried about making mistakes which also gives us an indicator of how we can be very social desirable and therefore this is an important point because we hear a lot about making mistakes it is okay in our culture and nobody will be punished but how can it be that those teams do not feel it although leaders state it and that can be a point to work at in order to improve the collaboration so we found out that a high perceived team climate for innovation is significantly related to the flow experience so it was a positive correlation between team climate for innovations and flow but we could not find any significance correlation between team climate for innovations and worry so we set up another survey to do more research on those effects so remember the three things to keep in mind it is that organizations are very complex and now you know what questions you might have to ask in order to figure out whether it is really complex or just a state of disorder remember the example with the weather conditions and that you can make whatever you want with measurable remember you can make it measurable if you ask people directly if you observe things if you make use of data if you do experiments however you want to tackle the problem that you identified and the third thing is we have different levels so to summarize that accept complexity successfully because the first thing that you know it is you can only inspect and adapt and try new things to be successful but we will only know in retrospect the second aspect is measurability make measurable whatever you can set your goals, share your vision take actions and then come closer to your goals and the aims that you have and the third thing is identify the level of the problem is it within individuals, teams leadership or the organization as a whole and then adjust your measurements and adjust the actions that you take and I hope from now on you won't be afraid of detail and complexity also when it comes to teams and not only when it comes to business and to customers so I hope the priorities will shift and you realize that customers and business numbers are as important as team numbers remember all the options you have you can observe things you can realize and then identify what to do take a look in the theory books get inspired on things that you can take an eye on ask people about their perceptions be aware that there is often a difference between perception and action so therefore you might need another setup like an experiment or take a look at certain numbers to make things measurable identify and define actions and I see whether you can closer to the goal that you want to reach we started with two studies this year the first one tackled the individual and team level and now we had a second study taking a look at the organizational level and next year we will conduct a third study as part of my PhD and we are about to pre-register this study right now so 40 minutes is not much for organization of psychology but I hope you are now a little bit more interested and not afraid of collaboration and emotions and people and if you want to know a little bit more about what we do and what we measure and maybe get some inspiration or input you can find some more information on our website and I hope that at least some of you are from now on not only interested in creating cool things but also getting interested in how cool things are getting created thank you with me now is Laura thank you very much so we actually have one question so if you want to ask any questions feel welcome, be and hack in and go ask any questions you like sometimes you also monitor Twitter for that thank you very much our signal angel 95p at the moment working hard so the question we have at the moment is this framework only useful for software teams or can you use it anywhere else you can actually use it anywhere else and the early beginnings of using such frameworks or such measurements are never in the software or IT area it's always in more established areas especially in medical teams in learning environments anywhere else so you can use it wherever you want to use it it doesn't only have to be at work it can also be within your freelance activities within sports teams in the kind of team that you have you can even try to think about for example psychological safety within your family or your relationship or your friendship so don't let yourself narrow down to just one target area the interesting point is if you want to compare it so are my measurements that I have for the area I did it I did my survey so in the low and then you can focus on other reference groups on norm tables and for example for the team climate inventory for innovations there are several norm tables where you can compare your values to the same as for flow and worry so no it's not only useful for software teams yeah I saw in the last slides there just a short answer on that that there is something planned for 21 so the oncoming year now is there anything this community can take part in the studies yes that would be really great so we plan the third study in the beginning of 2021 and the target group for our next third survey is also all roles that are important within software teams so it's not only software developers product owners from masters agile coaches so leadership roles are part of our interest so whenever you want to join our third study you can pre-register on our website and we will let you know whenever the third study is live yeah we have another question incoming you say the flow number for software teams is very high do you know some examples of fields where the word is high as well or where the word is very low by now very high or very low I cannot tell you this is a third job group that is comparably really low in experiencing flow no but it's comparably high because you can take a look in the statistics and normtables for the flow short scale and if you're interested in that you can also go on to the source and see what other target groups are within the studies alright there's another comment coming in and I think that's the last for now so it means that the framework can be used at open source development teams also sure any kind of team then always be aware that whenever you use self-assessment surveys you also have a certain kind of bias because people first need to realize that something is taking place then they might reflect and then the third step is that they give an answer and might be afraid of the social desirability so this is the effect that you have to keep in mind whenever you use self-assessment surveys so another way of triangulating and taking another perspective is making use of certain kinds of experiments or measuring things like the chat protocols how distributed are your language shares everything can be done anonymously so no afraidness of the data that is being used but yeah that is a very interesting part to have those perspectives the one that is the self-assessment perspective and the other one that is the measurement done within an experiment or making use of data you already have all right thank you very much for your talk thank you for the questions you answered and I think we should do some self-assessment now and wish you all lots of fun on RC3 enjoy the 2D world everywhere and have a good night, see you later thank you