 Today I'm here wearing my hats as an agile coach and also as the managing director of Agile Alliance. So I just want to put a shout out Agile Alliance is helping to host Agile India this year. And if you want to chat with me after this talk, I will be in the Agile Alliance booth at the break time. But during our time together now, what I want to talk a little bit about is making working agreements, especially with remote teams. I think working agreements are a really important practice for teams to use to figure out how are we going to work together to be successful. And the reason for that is that good teams have a lot of diversity on good teams. There are lots of different sorts of, you know, people are bringing different experience. They have different opinions. Conflict is kind of inevitable. And actually we want teams where people can express their differences, right? It's essential to creating a state of productive disequilibrium. And we want disequilibrium in a living system because in a living system, a human system team, the only time that you've achieved a state of equilibrium is when things are dead. So we need to anticipate that we're going to have differences that we need to work out. And it's helpful if we can figure out in advance how we're going to do that. So I did not invent this idea of working agreements. This is something we've been talking about in Agile Spaces for a long time. Kent Beck in his book, Extreme Programming Explained, talked about the need for teams to identify the shared values and principles that they have. Because identifying those principles helps the team to choose. When decisions come up, it's a tool that you can use for figuring out, what are we going to do in this situation? How do we act in this situation? In Diana Larson and Ainsley Nees' book about liftoffs, which is a fabulous book about how do you get a team started, they talk a lot about the need, about how to define working agreements, that the team comes to agreement about the kind of working environment we want to have. How will we interact with each other? People become more aware of their own behavior and the effect that it has on the team. So there's a couple of ideas that we want to play with when we're creating working agreements. One is the idea of principles, which are what are those guidelines that we want to live by? I mean, hopefully you're all familiar with the principles from the Agile Manifesto, but they're really higher level rules of thumb about how do we be together. What I like to identify in working agreements is specific behaviors. What are the things we are going to do in order to be an effective team where we have diversity and thinking, but harmony in behavior, because that's really what we're after. An example, just to give you a sense of the difference, is a principle is something like be present. We want to be here. We want to be in the moment. A behavior is something like put away your electronics during conversations. Don't have headphones on in the team room if you're in person. Maybe about how we monitor Slack. That may be an example of the behavior that we want to put in a working agreement. So why do we want to have working agreements? I did talk about this a little bit already, but just to be super clear, it's about aligning people's expectations. We all bring different experiences to a team of what it means to be a great team, and we want to make sure that as we're putting a new team together, or as we're revitalizing a team that's in progress, maybe one that has suddenly made a shift to remote working like we all have this year, that we are aligning expectations about this is how we want to be together. The other purpose that making this explicit serves is when we do this in public together, we make these expectations transparent. It gives us a way to hold each other accountable to these expectations. If we've all agreed that this is the way things are going to work, when this seems to be going off the rails, this will happen because we're all people and at the moment we're all under a huge amount of stress. Having agreed, hey, this is the way it's going to be, it gives everybody on the team a bit of a tool to go, hey, we made this agreement and I don't see this as happening here. What do we want to do about it? And by making it easy to understand, by making it clear, by making it transparent, by having a respectful conversation before the going gets rough about how this happens, it makes it easier for the team to focus on how do we get things done together, rather than navigating how are we going to work together as a team. And again, I just want to stress it's about encouraging diversity and thinking so that we can have harmony and behavior. So the kinds of questions that we might want to ask as we're putting together working agreements. A lot of teams when I first introduced the idea of working agreements really focus on when are we going to meet and how are we going to use email and very practical logistical considerations. And really what I want to encourage you to do is to dive into having a quick conversation about what's really important to me as a team member and to us as a team. What are the things that we value as a team and how do we show this in our process and our behaviors. Fundamentally working agreements are how do we want to treat each other because if we come from different backgrounds, if we have different experiences, we might have very different ideas about what respectful behavior looks like. One common place where people have differences opinions is about how we disagree with each other's ideas. Some people find that very challenging and think it's disrespectful to contradict somebody. Other people view it as a sign of respect that no, we get along well enough that you're willing to challenge my ideas. So again, surfacing those expectations and making them explicit is really important. And then the next thing in here that we want to consider in the working agreement is it's one thing to make the list of agreements but talking explicitly before things happen about how are we going to handle it when things go wrong. That's what makes a working agreement really powerful. One team that I worked with where we made working agreement together, they were a really conflict avoidant team. And so we were having this great conversation about so what are the behaviors we really need to pay attention to to be effective. And this team was, as I said, kind of conflict avoidant. It was an environment where people didn't like to challenge each other. And they came up with the idea of using a code word and their code word was broccoli. So what they had agreed to do was that any time that they saw that things were going off the rail, anybody on the team was empowered to go broccoli. And that was a signal to the whole team that, hey, let's stop for a moment. Something's going off the rails here. We need to address that. And it was such a simple thing. But having made that agreement in advance, gave all of the team members away. They knew how can we hold each other accountable? How can we call it out when we are deviating from how we have agreed to behave together? And this helped to build trust on the team. Because really this is what is at the heart of creating a working agreement. It's about how do we establish the conditions that we have trust on our team so we can work together effectively. So a good working agreement, and I've been scattering examples of these through this presentation, are short and informal. This is not a big formal code of conduct with many, many steps to it. It should be something that's short, that's written in behavioral language, that's really simple to understand. And that it's easy to find, that it's front and center. There's no point in having this conversation if you come up with an agreement about these are the things that we're going to do. And then you drop them in the electronic oobliette somewhere and we don't see that list again. Ideally you want to have them prominent in the team space any time the team is getting together so that we can have, so that we can refer to them when we need to and update them as we need to. Because good working agreements are also living documents. Oh my gosh, and I have somehow just a second dropped off of this. Sorry, I'm having a technical difficulty at my end. I am just trying to find my browser window again, if you can bear with me for just a second. I will be right back with you, hopefully. I don't know if, oh my gosh. Yeah, you're all right, I think we just lost your presentation. Yes, I know we've lost my presentation and I have lost the menu bar on my computer at my end. So I really apologize for this difficulty. I just had a phone call come through on my computer that I don't know where it came from. And it totally, totally, totally killed everything. So I'm just going to quit PowerPoint for a moment and then go back in, cancel. There we go, slideshow. I'm going to start the slideshow again from where we're. And let me know if you can see it because I can't see the floor show anymore. Okay, slideshow play from current slide. Okay, can you see my slides? Yeah, it is perfect. Go ahead. Awesome, thank you. Sorry about that. I don't know what happened at my end. Okay, so we were talking about having good working agreements and making them visible and easy to find part of your visual management system. So one thing you need to hear are some of the kinds of questions that I like to use to explore working agreements. And these are things that I use a lot of Lego serious play to do this, which is why this presentation features lots of little Lego heads. Of course, we can't do that online, but I found that using playful activities like even asking people to pick an icon or an emoji that helps frame their answer to this question has been really useful in bringing a playful element to the online discussions that are really quite deep and personal. So questions I like to ask are things like describe the best or worst team member ever, because that gives us a sense of what, you know, what kind of behavior people value or really hope not to see in team members. What's the superpower that I bring to the team? Not just what's on my resume, but what's that particular skill that I have that will help this team be successful that people might not see on first meeting me. This is a really important one to ask the next one. What kind of help do I want from my team members, because we're accustomed to showing up as professionals were hired for our skills because we're so good at what we do. But really, what makes the difference between an OK team and a really great team that I've noticed on really great teams, people are not reluctant to ask for help as soon as they need it. It's not viewed as a sign of weakness. It's viewed as, hey, I'm stuck. I need help. Let's get through this together as quickly as possible. And so being really open about the kind of help that you might need in order to be the best team member possible is a really important thing to keep in mind as we're putting together the how will we be together working agreement. I think all of these questions are even more important with remote teams because there's what's missing working in the remote environment. What's missing working in the distributed environment is that we don't have those opportunities to interact with each other outside of the meetings we're in outside of the conversations in the zoom channel. And so that limits our ability to get to know each other quickly. And so I think it's really important for remote teams to actually in its critical for remote teams to spend a little bit of time up front getting to know each other and understanding how can we help be an effective team team together because the communication channels are so much narrower. The other question that I want to point out here that's really critical as you're putting together working agreements is this idea of if we have a certain behavior or a certain principle, what will we see in here. A lot of the times when I'm working with teams to make a working agreement, people will come up with things like be present, which is a great idea. But it's a principle. What does that look like in practice, because that's what we want to establish clarity on so that people have a shared understanding of this is how we behave in this team to create the culture that we want to have. So I've talked a little bit about this is before here, but I just want to stress again, this is really super critical when we're working with remote teams. Some other things when we're focusing on working remotely that I would encourage you to spend a little bit more time on is what kind of communication channels are we going to use, how we communicate with each other. What are our expectations about how fast we'll get back to each other because as we're working asynchronously on, you know, we're working remotely, a lot of us are working asynchronously across a number of time zones. Being clear about, hey, when I drop something in the Slack channel, this is how I expect you to acknowledge that you've seen it. This is the turnaround time I'm expecting on an answer can help the team align on expectations about how information is going to flow around the team. This is super critical. The other thing to build in is how are we going to have social time together, because we're really good on focusing about how are we going to get our work done together. But how are we going to spend time getting to know each other? How are we going to spend time having that chit chat that happens around the water cooler that happens around the coffee pot or, you know, the tea, the tea station. When we don't have that with a remote team, we're really losing a valuable part of building the relationships on the team. So as part of with the team working agreements that I've been creating lately, this is one of the things we've been building in. How will we have time to hang out as well as getting our work done. So these are just a couple of examples of working agreements that teams have built lately, teams that I'm involved with have worked, have built lately. One of them, in fact, one in the top left corner is the Agile Alliance Board of Directors. These are the working agreements that we use for our online meetings about how we're going to speak to each other. How do we make sure that we keep things focused? How do we make sure that we time box our conversations so that we can use our time most effectively? The other one is from a client that I'm working with and we had a great conversation about what are the kinds of behaviors that we expect. And they went back and they add the little drawings to help remind themselves of these are the kinds of behaviors. This is who we want to be or this is who we don't want to be. But this is how we want to behave together when we're working together as a team. And because these electronic artifacts are part of the team's visual management system, this is part of their workstation or part of their work, their visual work tracking, right? It's something that's front and center and really easy to refer to when we need it and really easy to review and update as, because as a team matures, the things that are in your working agreements are probably going to change, right? So we want to review it regularly and keep it fresh and make sure that we're focusing on the things that we really do want to focus on. So how do you build a working agreement? There's a simple framework. There's a lot going on in here. But if you're thinking, oh, wow, I need to create a working agreement with my team the next time we meet, here's a series of steps that you can follow to make this possible. First of all, have a bit of a conversation about why is it important for us to have a working agreement? How will we work together? Why is it necessary for us to have this conversation? Spend some time having these exploratory conversations, the lists of questions I proposed about how do we want our team to be? What's important to us? What kind of behaviors do we want to see in order to help us all be effective? How do we want to handle it when a conflict comes up and possibly how are we going to make decisions together? Although, to be honest, I usually have the decision making as a separate conversation to formalize it. But having that a little bit as you're making the working agreement helps everybody understand and this is how we want to be a team together. After we've had that time to sort of share experiences and surface expectations, I ask team members to propose an example of what's one specific behavior that you think this team needs to focus on right now. And have everybody propose something that they think that's important based on that conversation that we just had. Once we have ideas from everybody on the table, we have the team a line on which are the behaviors that we need to focus on now. And as I said, it should be a short list, maybe three or five things. I know the examples that I showed had a maybe up to 10. I wouldn't go too long though because you want people to be able to focus on it. And then once you've got the team agreed on the list, just confirm buy-in, make sure that everybody is really on board. And a checkout question that I like to use in this meeting to help people really focus on it is to get them to think about what do they think is the most important behavior in this list? What's the one that's going to make a difference for them so that they can think about, again, part of the purpose of a working agreement is to help promote individuals on the team, each of us, to think about how am I behaving on this team? So getting people to think about what their favorite behavior is is a really critical thing. And sorry, my timer is going off and I can't make it stop. So just in case you've got want to do some further reading on this topic, I wrote a blog post about building working agreements and everything that's in there applies to how do we work with remote teams? If you want a broader investigation into the how do we create working agreements together, Diana's and Ainsley's book is fantastic. And Jimmy Janlin wrote a blog post about bootstrapping working agreements that I found really helpful. And I think all of these things are equally applicable to remote teams as well. So I'm going to stop there. Thanks, Ellen, for sharing your experience with us today.