Agile and servant - Leadership - week 10

Agile Teams are Self-Organising Teams

Peha’s (2011) version of the 12 principles of the agile manifesto reinterprets the last two as follows:

• The best ideas and initiatives emerge from self-organizing teams
• At regular intervals, teams reflect on how to become more effective, then tune and adjust their behavior accordingly

We will explore this idea using a combination of Boris Gloger’s Ball Point game (Gloger, 2008) and Mike Rother’s Kata in the Classroom (Rother, 2015).  Kata is a term from martial arts. The Improvement Kata is a repeating routine for continuous improvement. 

The following diagram of the improvement kata process is adapted from material on the katatogrow.com website.

The goal of the ball point game is for each team to get as many balls as possible to pass through the hands of every team member in 2 minutes. The game involves both estimation and self-organisation. 

- You have four rounds to iterate quickly and improve by trying different strategies.

- You always have 2 minutes in between the iterations to update the scorecard and re-strategise.

The four  basic requirements of the game are that:

1. As each ball is passed between team members, it must have air time
2. Every team member must touch each ball for it to count
3. No ball to your direct neighbour on either side, you must pass to your front
4. Every ball must end where it started. For each ball that does, the team scores 1 point (make sure you count your points)

Scrum is an Agile Process

Scrum is a lightweight process framework for agile development. It is an iterative process that consists of a series of sprints that each deliver something useful. It enables teams to self-organize and collaborate, and accepts that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined up front.

In Scrum, the product backlog (of user stories) is broken down into a series of sprints. In each sprint, a priority list of stories (the sprint backlog) is chosen for completion. The sprint lasts for a certain period of time (e.g. 2 weeks, 30 days etc.). There are daily stand up meetings during the sprint, and at the end of each sprint a working increment of the software is delivered. In other words, it is only a successful sprint if it delivers something useful.

CC image from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Scrum_process.svg

Agile Leadership Styles

Agile leadership is situational, adaptive, empowering and inspirational. The most important leadership theory applied to agile is that of servant leadership (Highsmith, 2009).

“For the Agile Leader, servanthood is the strategy. Situational actions are the tactic” (Filho, 2011).

The key characteristics of the servant leader include awareness, listening, persuasion, empathy, healing, and coaching. Situational leadership means that the servant leader may act as a democratic leader, a laissez-faire leader, or an autocratic leader in different situations (Koganti, 2014).

Servant Leadership

The originator of the servant leadership concept (though inspired by a Herman Hesse story) was Robert Greenleaf. “The servant­ leader is servant first... It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead.” (Greenleaf, 1970). A longer extract from this work, which was this week's flipped preparation activity, is in this week's media

Teachers as Servant Leaders

Servant leadership has been applied by a number of authors to teaching. “The teacher as servant leader functions as a trailblazer for those served by removing obstacles that stand in their path. Part of unleashing another’s talents is helping individuals discover latent, unformed interests. Art, music, and science teachers are prime examples of educators whose genius lies in leading students to discover unarticulated interests.” (Bowman, 2005).

Ten Characteristics of a Servant Leader

1. Listening
2. Empathy
3. Healing
4. Awareness
5. Persuasion
6. Conceptualization
7. Foresight
8. Stewardship
9. Commitment to Growth of People
10. Building Community

These characteristics, that come from Northouse (2013), are outlined in a blog post by Penn State (2013).

You may find this Servant Leadership in Teachers tinyurl.com/TMLServantTeacher blogpost a helpful source to create a story card in the Trello board's learning backlog.

This Week’s Software

We will be using Trello for one of the activities in this week’s session. One of the flipped preparation activities is to set up an account and familiarise yourself with this tool in advance. Please take a look at the Trello 101 guide before the session.

Mindset of an Agile Leader - The best always want to get better

Agile Methods

The Agile movement proposes alternatives to traditional project management. Agile approaches, such as Scrum and eXtreme programming  were designed for the software development to help businesses respond to unpredictability. Aspects of Lean production (from the Toyota Production System) are also increasingly utilised by agile practitioners, for example Kanban boards, where limiting the number of current work items enhances workflow. Kanban's 'pull' model makes the flow of work visible across the team. In software development, 'Scrumban' is a popular fusion of Scrum and Kanban.

Nowadays Agile and Lean practices are used in industries outside of manufacturing and software development. Agile is recognized more generally now as simply a great way of getting things done in rapidly changing and highly unpredictable situations.

Agile and Lean Ideas in Learning

In this week's classes we ponder what Agile and Lean methods can offer to the education sector. Even though Agile was developed within the software industry, and lean in car manufacturing, the link is that they are fundamentally about learning, people, and change. Many are amazed at how easily Agile and Lean ideas translate into education, and how perfectly-suited they are, for example, to running schools.

Whakataukī

Ka pū te ruha, ka hao te rangatahi
As an old net withers another is remade

Related Standards for the Teaching Profession

Learning Focused Culture
Develop learning-focused relationships with learners, enabling them to be active participants in the process of learning, sharing ownership and responsibility for learning.

He ahurea akoranga
Me whakawhanake i te whanaungatanga i roto i ngā mahi ako i te taha o ngā ākonga, e āhei ai rātou ki ngā mahi hihiri i roto i te tukanga akoranga, me te whai mana whai haepapa mō ā rātou mahi akoranga.