#AgileAfrica Keynote: Self Selection

This is a post in a series on the talks that I attended at my first ever Agile Africa Conference in Johannesburg. All posts are based on the sketch-notes that I took in the sessions. 

I’m not sure if you recall our first experiment with self-selection? Imagine my surprise when I realised that our keynote speaker on the topic, Sandy Mamoli, was the very same person who had been part of the team that created the material we’d used for our own self-selection attempts. As we’d also run a second less successful experiment, I was quite interested to hear a little more “from the horse’s mouth”, so to speak.

There were some key points shared by Sandy that helped me understand a little more why our second attempt had not succeeded from an expected outcome perspective, but had, in fact, succeeded from a feedback perspective.

1. Purpose is important. Squads form around a strong purpose that they can buy into.
2. Self-selection will always fail if management selection is going to be done afterwards to ‘tweak’ the outcomes. (Her solution: make the blueprints for the new squads very visible everywhere as soon as possible after the session.)
3. She shared a story where squads would not form around a particular vision or goal and usually where that happened there were deeper issues at the root which needed to be resolved before a team would be successful.
4. Self-selection should NOT directly or explicitly impact reporting lines.

So, upon reflection, after comparing our first and second experiment and adding in some of the tips from Sandy, these were my conclusions:

• Self-selection should happen independently of reporting lines
  • The first time we did it, there was no impact on reporting lines; the second time we did it, reporting lines were impacted by which squad you moved into.
• Try keep “people owners” as observers not players
  • There was a subtle form of “Liar Liar” in our second attempt as every time there was a significant shift in numbers to one or other ‘cost center’ then the managers (who were also the Product Owners) had a quick chat about how to re-balance things. In our first experiment, everyone remained in the same “cost center”.
• Ensure the Product Owners are well prepared in terms of their vision
  • The second time we ran self-selection, one Product Owner had a very clear and mature view of what the squad would be achieving; whereas the other Product Owner was new to the space and hadn’t really had time to formulate their thinking and strategy properly.

Sandy also advised the following:

• Where squads have fully formed after a couple of rounds, move forward with those squads (regardless of the state of the others).
• Where squads aren’t fully formed because there just aren’t enough people, have the squad members identify what ‘imaginary friends’ they need to ‘hire’ to form a full squad.
• Where squads haven’t formed for less obvious reasons and/or people refuse to participate in the process (and choose no-squad), revert to traditional management selection for those people and root cause the reasons for the resistance.

This keynote was very valuable to me as it shifted my perspective of our second attempt from being a failure to being a great source of useful feedback about the state of a particular space. Have you tried self-selection? What was the outcome? What did you learn?