← Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
Why the Us-Versus-Them Mentality Is the Fastest Path to Team Self-Destruction | Lai-Ling Su
00:16:54
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- [00:04]
A
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- [01:12]
B
Hello everybody. Welcome to our team Tuesday. This week we have with us Lai Ling Su. Hey, Lai Ling, welcome back.
- [01:19]
C
Hey Vasco, thanks for having me back.
- [01:22]
B
Absolutely. So, great story yesterday. For those of you who haven't heard it yet, make sure to check it out today. We're also going to talk about another failure story. Although it's not our failure, it's the failure of a team. But before we dive into that, Lailing, share with us. In your whole career, what was the book that most inspired you?
- [01:42]
C
Oscar, I was asked the same or a very similar question when I was mentoring a group of new Scrum Masters at one of our big four banks in Australia a few years ago. And I was reflecting on this earlier in our conversation. Now, I don't think my answer's changed since then. I don't think there's been one book that has fundamentally influenced me on its own. But I do think books as a collective have made me the person that I am today. And I believe that because to build wisdom and perspective, I think you need to regularly read within your own domain of expertise. But read far and wide across all topics and genres outside of your domain of expertise, like your life depends on it. And one of my favorite things to do when I do that is to look for patterns and lessons in the most unexpected places and see how they can apply in your own life and at work. And I'll give you a few examples. Behind me, I've got on my shelf a collection of books written by medical doctors. There's four here by a surgeon and a literary genius called Atul Gawande. He writes about complex adaptive systems in the context of life and death scenarios in war zones, in trying to eradicate disease from third world countries, and in situations that are in state of the art hospitals that the best money can buy. And often we talk about in Agile and Scrum. We ridicule and despise things like checklists because they there's sometimes perceived as taking away autonomy, taking away somebody's ability to think and all those sorts of things. But he wrote an entire book called the Checklist Manifesto, which, you know, it was fabulous in terms of breaking that perception. He wrote about how checklists are a rapid fire communication tool that is the difference between whether a seriously injured soldier dies on the battlefield or makes it to a war hospital and then back to a stateside hospital with a really good chance of survival. So you could then start to question things like, you know, checklists, are they good or bad, is it binary, are there shades of gray? And you know, those sorts of things start to percolate through your mind when you read far and wide. Another book in my stack is, you know, When Breath Becomes Air. Um, it was written by a really highly accomplished surgeon who became a cancer patient himself. And he had to navigate a huge identity shift from, you know, during the change between going from a doctor to patient, you know, going from being at the top of his career, having to then having his role, his status and his competence taken away from him and replaced by something he didn't want and didn't understand. And if you take away the words of surgeon, cancer patient, doctor, those sorts of things, it sounds a whole heap like the identity shift we ask leaders to make every single day when we start implementing new operating models, new ways of working and disruptive and innovative changes to the organizations that we work in today. And then the last kind of example in the stack of books that I'll share with you, written by medical doctors, is Catherine Mannix. She's a palliative care doctor who's written books on how to hold the space for and have tender conversations about taboo topics like death, which no one is prepared for, but need to have the words to have those conversations in those moments when you're emotionally charged and you're trying to process things but still need to be able to communicate and converse every day when we talk about, you know, being inside organizations, working in product, working transformation, working as Scrum masters, every day, every one of us is trying to find the bravery and the courage to have these sorts of emotionally charged conversations in pretty high stakes environments and context and Situations, right?
- [06:38]
B
Absolutely.
- [06:38]
C
So yeah,
- [06:42]
B
these are amazing books and we'll put the link to all of those in the show notes so make sure everybody to check them out and talking about charged conversations. One of those contexts is when teams start to implode or explode. They kind of self destruct in many different ways, sometimes because of what we do and hands up if you haven't done it, you haven't tried hard enough and sometimes despite what we do, I don't know what story you have to share with us but Leiling share with us the team that self destructed. What were those behaviors that maybe started as just simple signs, simple anti patterns small enough to let slide but eventually develop into a full blown conflict in the team?
- [07:30]
C
I truly believe that the quickest way to self destruction is to have an us versus them mentality because it permeates into every behavior, every action or inaction, and it impacts every single outcome as a result of it. I'll illustrate with a leadership team that I worked with in the healthcare technology space. They had multiple layers of us versus them dynamics working against them that they needed to unpick and reshape for them to be able to constructively move forward together. I was engaged by the CEO and cto who were a couple of the most human, emotionally intelligent and adaptive leaders I've ever worked with, and they could see their teams were self sabotaging their way into non delivery, so much so that their critical commercial outcomes were at serious risk. But the team themselves couldn't see was invisible to them. So there were probably about three layers to unpick in terms of the us versus them mentality. The first one was derived from recent M and A activity. So a larger corporate entity had acquired a smaller, more nimble agile entity and they operationally merged the two together once the deal was done, expecting them to work seamlessly together from day one. Magic. You put people together and they magically work together beautifully, perfectly. Even though they come from complete opposite ends of the cultural spectrum, obviously they didn't. And so the larger entity actually wanted to. They wanted the speed and the innovation that the smaller entity had, but they were at the same time strangling them with bureaucracy. And even though the new leadership team was comprised of half half from each of the two merged companies, people were ferociously loyal to the leaders from their old organizations and so decisions and therefore delivery was compromised from day one because of that M and A activity and the consequences of not consciously dealing with the differences that were there from before they even merged. The second layer that had to be unpicked is probably the department versus department separations. So this is one of our many, many classics where business goals were separate to technology goals and everyone, in lieu of a genuinely connected single purpose, fell back to people pleasing to those in their direct reporting lines, rather than working collaboratively together to understand, well, what's the purpose of the merged entity and how are they going to best achieve and deliver the value for the customers, the community, and the commercial outcomes? And they worked slowly. And because they work slowly and because the priorities weren't clear, they actually stopped and started multiple times, even the most simplest things. And then they had to rework quite a lot of what they'd done over time because of avoidable design flaws, avoidable bugs, and other factors that had they had the good, deep conversations up front, would have surfaced the issues and been able to be fixed quite early on. And then the third layer of complexity around the us versus them mentality was probably around their growth ambitions versus needing to address legacy activities. There were people who. I know this is what actually hurts quite a lot because we call them classics since they emerge and they present themselves so often and people recognize them. But when you're in these scenarios, when you're in these classic scenarios, it's invisible because you just accept that it's just a part of doing business.
- [11:59]
B
Or it's like asking a fish about water, right?
- [12:02]
C
Yeah, exactly. So it's not so different that you call it out, you just accept it, and it becomes invisible. It's. It's destructive, right?
- [12:13]
B
And in this case, in some cases, it's destructive in a very visible and stormy way. And other, other times it's just destructive in a very silent way. Like stuff just gets piled up, nothing gets done, nobody's mad at each other, but no objectives are achieved. I. I like the fact that you put those three layers. So first, it talks about how there are many things interacting at the same time. I further like the fact that you talked about three classic patterns that were, in this particular case, interacting together at the same time and very likely reinforcing each other, which is another aspect of systems thinking, which is that sometimes you only have them, like as kind of specks of problems in your windshield, but then they just kind of help each other and soon enough the windshield is all scattered and you have no windshield anymore. And. And then the other aspect is the recognition that we, as leaders and as Scrum masters, we also lull ourselves into a sense of comfort, because that's how it has always been before, right? And we want the agility of the small team, but also the bureaucracy of the big team, which gives us the control and the visibility. And we try to put all of this together and then we are surprised when they don't work. And I think that this also kind of points to a very big responsibility we have as Scrum masters and agile coaches and leaders in general, which is run the risk of being seen as the odd ones out by pointing at these things and saying, hey, look, I've seen this in the past, here's what happened in the past. And maybe nothing changes at first, but just the awareness that we generate by pointing those classic patterns may help us avoid catastrophic outcomes.
- [14:05]
C
Yeah. We should never underestimate the simplicity of creating awareness. Right. Because until somebody can see it, they can't do anything about it even if they wanted to.
- [14:17]
B
Yeah. And never, never overestimate the ability of others to see things that are obvious to you. That's a very important aspect. Speaking things out loud respectfully and diplomatically, at least at first, is very important. Thank you for sharing that story, Lailing.
- [14:34]
C
My pleasure, Bhaskar.
- [14:38]
A
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- [16:28]
B
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