Trying to get it to add up

Theoretical Physics is not particularly intuitive. I mean, it used to be when it was simpler, when apples bounced off of Newton’s head. Rather than Einstein’s spooky particles and undead cats in boxes. What you find out when you study it academically is that it’s all mathematics and very quickly the real universe tends to melt away and the your understanding of what is going on just becomes an ordered parade of Greek letters. (Burroughs said that ‘Language was an alien virus from space’ which probably makes math the black plague…)

Such was my experience when I did a degree and PhD. In the subject. Calculations and derivations, especially in the dice rolling field of Quantum Mechanics, can stretch to pages and pages of A4. This is all well and good until you have to repeat them in some way. Say for an exam, or a viva. High level mathematics is not just ivory tower BODMAS. Sometimes you have to apply different tools or walk down paths to see if it proves (or more accurately disproves) and idea or result. So when we’re talking about amounts of text that would give Tolstoy a cold sweat, how do you remember them?

Good Question.

Fortunately for someone who is involved in coaching, Agile is orders of magnitude closer to common sense than physics. But sometimes that is the problem. Take the Scrum values for instance. Focus, Respect, Openness, Courage and Commitment. All good simple words (shut up Burroughs) with easy to understand meanings. Okay the context is specific to Scrum but you can probably wriggle your way to an understanding of what is meant by them, even then.

But, and this is for all you Scrum Masters out there, try asking your teams what they are. Much of the time they simply can’t remember. They normally get commitment because it’s beaten into them during Sprint Planning, and sometimes Openness due to the SM banging on about transparency all the time. But they don’t tend to be part of the mindset. But why not?

Good Question.

I’ve been coaching and training for a while now and I know why people can’t remember the Scrum Values. Because it’s easy to teach them badly. In my first forays as a teacher I did what most inexperienced trainers do. I cut and pasted them out of the Scrum guide and stuck them on a PowerPoint slide. Then I, for all intents and purposes, read them out, watching my audience slowly de-focus and think about what they were having for tea that night or what to watch on Netflix when they finally got away from me saying things at them. It didn’t take long for me to realise that it probably wasn’t going in and if it was it certainly wasn’t going to stay there.

I hunted around on the internet after and found that a lot of organisations would use iconography to represent the values. So on my second time around I used these. I was just getting into visualisations and convinced myself that this would obviously solve the problem. It did not.

It’s easy to forget that iconography has a cultural bias. For instance one of the symbols was that of a rocket ship blasting off. It isn’t blatantly obvious what this represents but with a bit of cognitive okey-cokey (how’s that for cultural bias!) you can rationalise that westerners, in particular Americans, could see this as ‘courage’. But it’s still a bit of a walk. And again, unless presented with the icon later, it didn’t seem to greatly help recalling the values.

Enough of the good questions. Let’s have some answers

Let’s get back to the joy of inexplicable physics. Like Newton’s plummeting Granny Smith a happy accident occurred whilst I was in a university bar. An Israeli housemate of mine, Modi, was having a friend visit who just happened to be a mathematician. He was a pleasant enough chap and it was obvious he was into the math due to his t-shirt. On it was a set of equations which formed the capital Greek letter sigma. Underneath was some text in what I’m pretty sure was Italian. Rapidly running out of small talk I asked him what it said on his top.

‘ The sum of all fears’ he said.

I didn’t fully understand the point of the top but what I did get was the fact that the designers had formed a picture out of the archaic symbols.

I started to do the same with my own equations. My pages turned into dinosaurs, cars, faces, trying to tag the equations with some sort of theme or thought that was relevant and would aid recall later. And it worked.

So if it worked for something complex surely it would work for something simple…

The problem with the Scrum values is that they live in isolation. Teams are asked to adopt them but they are very rarely taught in a team sense. So recalling my paint by numbers equations and having a bit more experience with regards to graphical representations I had a bit of a think. What if the team had a goal that they had to achieve and had to utilise the Scrum values to do so. At the time I was working with a team that was transforming from a Waterfall process to Scrum and hence it sort of designed itself. The team would scale a rock face to the top of a waterfall and then conquer it by diving from the top.

The success was relative. On average it seemed to improve the recall of the five values but occasionally it seemed to drown (irony) them out. Often I would ask a team to tell me what they were and they would say, to my horror, ‘what that waterfall thing ?’

It was time for a rethink. What had made it work for me but not for them? And then I realised. Because I was using the equation diagrams which I had created, not just trying to remember them.

It wasn’t just the equation pictures that were helping me to remember the math, it was recreating them. The action of making the thing was the secret, and making the thing was aided by the picture. I didn’t need to show people a representation, I needed them to build it themselves to concrete the information. The brain creates new structures during the action of building and it was this that was missing. But I still like the principal of the original poster. I just needed the team to create it instead of me.

As with all coaching the skill is teaching more than one thing at once without telling people you are doing so (Although of course if you are a fan of Sharon Bowman’s ‘ teaching from the back of the room’ you might engage in a bit of debriefing after…).

In the exercise above the teams have a number of iterations in order to position the blue team members on the waterfall, rock face and greenery. Also they need to place the label which the figure represents next to it. At the start the team declares how many iterations they think it will take for them to get it right. Each iteration the coach scores how many labels they have correct and how many positions. For those that are Scrum friendly you can see what I’m up to here. Commitment in Sprint Planning, feedback from stakeholders, using Scrum theory to adapt. But the core of the exercise is getting them to think about how the values are represented. Debating between themselves as a team which of the avatars represent the labels. This makes them use very different parts of the brain, the abstract and artistic parts that are not normally engaged when asked to learn something verbatim. Even when asked later, if they give the response ‘that waterfall thing’ then the decision making part of their thinking is activated as they have decided what the values represent, the communication part too due to the interactions with others to make that decision and the aesthetic part due to the graphical content. All of which is a much better aid to recall than simply ‘telling’ them the information.

Burroughs was mostly right. The alien thing is probably a bit mad (I mean he shot his wife playing William Tell) but he was right about language being a virus. The difference between this one and the infection that we’ve all grown sadly used to over the last couple of years is that this one won’t kill you.

It might even help.

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