Agile Pub Quiz 2 (Mar 14 2023) Lookback

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  • 8 teams of 24 people altogether / Product owners, Scrum masters, Agile coaches, Developers, Network engineer, Business analyst, Manager
  • 12 True/False statements
  • 12 incomplete sentences to fill in blanks
  • 4 scenarios, each with 4 solutions (we guessed which answers came from which persona - one of the 3 real Agilists or an imposter CorpoRat)

Major discussion topic: “Turn on cameras”

  • Context: You are a scrum master. Your team consists of introverts not participating in the meetings actively. What would you do?

  • Most people agreed with solution “I’d ask privately if people feel uncomfortable and see if they open up as to why” , some argued that “I’d ask the team to turn on cameras…” should also be considered a valid solution

  • Cameras on policy being a discomfort for introverts seems as a premise. Typically, it’s the problem with people not being really involved in a meeting over being an introverts. In order to help introverts, the goal is to be able to figure out just right enough stress outside of the comfort zone which can be helpful

  • take under consideration e.g. woman can have a bad hair day, or they don’t feel confident without the make-up. To address this, share the camera policy in prior of the meeting, so people can prepare

  • it’s a problem when technical authority doesn’t respect the camera policy, because rest of the team will follow. Consider to incorporate this as a company culture, clear when hiring people

  • main objective for Scrum master should be to assist with the creation of the safe environment for everyone. Whatever it means for specific composition of the organization

Collected feedback for Quiz organizing

  • question numbering mistake brought the confusion
    action: organisers to have someone else reviewing the deck
  • some questions were ambiguous
    action: clearly state where it’s vague on purpose, and where we expect stating the fact
  • changing the pointing system during the quiz brought confusion
    action: don’t change the rules, don’t be “too agile” (a.k.a. people pleaser) when the questions seem too hard
  • correct answers expectations from “Do you think like an agilist” were not clearly defined
    action: refine the pointing strategy for this very subjective round
  • people were not familiar with some of the methodologies before, goal achieved to enourage the curiosity to discover other ways of working
    action: share the materials which inspired us [DONE, see Content inspiration in this blog post]
  • when slide contained more text, people had to get up and come close to read
    action: not sure yet since some of the questions will have a more text in order to get the whole context. Some people took a picture of the slide, and sat back. So we may make this as an option for the next round.
  • people enjoyed the event, they were interested about frequency and format of this gathering
    action: keep collecting feedback and ideas. So far, we’ll stick with the local quiz format until we’ll have enough content and until people would enjoy it
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Major discussion topic: “Turn on cameras”
Context: You are a scrum master. Your team consists of introverts not participating in the meetings actively. What would you do?
Most people agreed with solution “I’d ask privately if people feel uncomfortable and see if they open up as to why” , some argued that “I’d ask the team to turn on cameras…” should also be considered a valid solution

I had to leave at the beginning of the discussion, but here are some paraphrased arguments I remember and my opinions on them:

“I think it is rude to have the camera off…”

This is a fraction that appeared in multiple arguments, so I decide to pick it separetely. Here I would say that labeling behavior “rude” is a matter of either a cultural or a personal belief, which can’t be just generalized and instantly extended to anyone around. Management decisions and policies should be driven by increasing effectivity in production, not extending personal beliefs to other people.

“It’s just switching on the camera, what’s so difficult about that…”

I remember this one being put in the discussion by a woman casually looking better than most of the developers I know put together, definitely used to make herself presentable, possibly looking forward to switching on the camera on any call. Introverts don’t function like that and for them “just switching on a camera” might be as complicated and confusing as for you “just spinning up a server” … talk to the person privately and understand them before you simplify their worldviews enough to cause an unnecessary (and expensive) interpersonal problem

“It is rude towards the customer / other team members that we all have our cameras off except one guy on our team…”

I already reacted to the “rude” part above, so here I will focus on the “towards others” part. When you are on a meeting and you start forcing someone to do something instead of dealing with him privately, you are just making the other attendees uncomfortable + driving attention to something that is definitely not the agenda of the meeting and so wasting time and energy of everyone involved.

Bottom line is that as an agilist you are supposed to avoid producing waste, which also means separating one issue from another and for each of them find the time and place in which they can be resolved effectively. When it comes to people, private conversations are definitely a good choice to avoid chain reactions that can end up in a way too expensive outcomes.