I managed to get a seat at Agile Yorkshire this month, I’ve missed a few of these recently partly due to other commitments but also the sheer popularity of these events.

Royd (from NewRedo) organises and coordinates these evenings, this week he’d arranged for Chris Cheadle and Sean Craig from NHS Digital and John Le Drew who runs The Agile Path to speak to us.

Chris and Sean went first, they spoke to us about an event they’d run a little before Christmas. They’d called it Firebreak, during a two week period almost the entire organisation downed tools and worked on “whatever they wanted”.

They’d started with almost a kickstarter approach, people posted ideas on postit notes and their colleagues pledged their time – once a project was fully resourced it was banked and it would go ahead.

I love the idea of this sort of thing, really opening the doors to let teams work on what they want – what they feel wild make a difference. Anything from process improvement to a proof of concept or a piece of server maintenance. It certainly seemed to be a positive experience for the NHS team, some of the projects saved thousands of pounds on licence fees!

The second talk of the night was about Safety and how important it is to effective teams.  John explained that he considered safety to be “free to make suggestions, give feedback, and make mistakes without fear of punishment or humiliation.”

For me this feeds into the fundamental requirement of trust which Patrick Lenconi described in his book Five Dysfunctions of a Team. He postulated that without trust (or in John’s words safety) teams would not challenge each other and discuss ideas.

John had a few examples of this, my favourite was a role play exercise where three characters were so determined to avoid taking the blame for pressing The Big Red button which would overload the nuclear reactor they refused to cooperate to press the three buttons which would save them. Contrived? Perhaps… but it makes the point that if you are scared to look foolish then you’ll naturally be less confident to make suggestions.

Something which did niggle me was the idea of accountability, as managers we need to hold our directs responsible for their performance but this is challenging without undermining that feeling of security. In Lenconi’s book he encourages the team to hold each other accountable, finding the balance between a blame culture and safe, self motivating team is a difficult balance to find!

I’d certainly recommend listening to John if he’s speaking in your area. At the very least I’d say every manager should hear his views about engagement and workplace stress! I for one will be listening to his podcast.

It was a great night, as I’ve said before I’d always suggest Agile Yorkshire if you’re a Leeds based  geek!