The Liberators Podcast The Liberators

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How diverse is your team? Do you have members from different age groups, different genders, different roles, and different cultural backgrounds? Is that diversity beneficial to team performance, or is it challenging, or both?

This was the research question of an academic study we performed with Prof. Daniel Russo. This study has been peer-reviewed and published in the journal "Transactions on Software Engineering". This episode provides a non-technical overview of our investigation, core findings, and practical implications. 
Read the post:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/in-depth-the-double-edged-sword-of-diversity-in-teams-765ff72a55da

Read the peer-reviewed scientific publication:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2023.3339881
Support the show
Support the show, our research, and community offerings via Patreon:
https://patreon.com/liberators

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

The first thing people tend to see when they look at the Scrum framework are the roles, the artifacts, and the events. But that is only structure. There is much more going on in Scrum teams that we can understand better from other perspectives.
One such perspective is motivation. Scrum is deeply rooted in insights from academic research into what motivates people and teams to become high-performing. And while those roots are strong, they are also mostly invisible and unknown to practitioners.
In this podcast, we take a scientific perspective on how Scrum can create motivating environments for teams and individuals. We also translate these insights into practical tips that you can use to make the work for your team more motivating.
Read the full post behind this episode, including all the links, here
https://bit.ly/3HKZRuE
Support the show
Support the show, our research, and community offerings via Patreon:
https://patreon.com/liberators

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

“We consistently observe that teams struggle with continuous improvement. Instead of keeping it small, simple, and practical, teams go for ambitious — but vague and unclear — improvements.”

The improvement actions that come out of Sprint Retrospectives and other reflective practices are weak when there is no sense of scope, no sense of timeline, and no sense of who is involved. Interestingly, this creates a clear connection with something else that good Agile teams spend a lot of time on: refinement.

In this episode, we explore how to refine your improvement actions to make them more actionable and thus easier to accomplish. We also offer a lot of practical tips for how to create better improvement actions.

Read the transcript here:
https://bit.ly/3KqtfGA

Or get our "Unleash Scrum In Your Organization"-kit which contains - among many other cool things - a deck with 100 Improvement Actions categorized into different areas. These are a good source of inspiration for your own improvements. Or you can use them verbatim:
https://shop.theliberators.com/collections/frontpage/products/scrum-teams-superpower-kit-also-for-virtual-teams
Support the show
Support the show, our research, and community offerings via Patreon:
https://patreon.com/liberators

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

What makes a good Product Owner? How much time should they spend with their team or with stakeholders? Or writing items for the Product Backlog? Do Product Owners require a full mandate in order to be effective? What strategies make them more - or less - effective?

In this episode, we explore scientific research that investigated Product Owners. We also share some of our own research.

Read the transcript here:
https://bit.ly/2XXBaZ7

Or download do-it-yourself workshops to encourage shared product ownership:
https://shop.theliberators.com/collections/do-it-yourself-workshops-meetups-and-strings/build-what-stakeholders-need
Support the show
Support the show, our research, and community offerings via Patreon:
https://patreon.com/liberators

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

"SAFe destroys autonomy", "estimation is a waste of time" and "Scrum Masters can't also be Product Owners" are just a few of the strong claims that are often made in our professional community.

But where is the evidence to support these bold claims? We sampled 50 posts with similar bold claims and found that only 3 offered *any* kind of evidence. Two of those were purely personal experiences. We also explored some actual research into these questions and found more nuanced results.

We wonder: why doesn't our community - that is all about empiricism - apply empiricism to itself and its claims? Why don't we gather actual objective evidence? Why do we allow each other to make bold claims that either lack evidence or aren't proportional to that evidence? Are we not harming our profession with this low bar?

In this episode, we discuss a professional crisis in our field. We also offer five things we can do to improve our profession. Ultimately, if we rely more on objective evidence we make a much stronger case for what we believe to be true. Or we may discover that our beliefs aren't actually true - which is a good thing too.

Read the transcript here:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/why-doesnt-the-agile-community-practice-empiricism-12082e48ffba
Support the show
Support the show, our research, and community offerings via Patreon:
https://patreon.com/liberators

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

"It slowly started to dawn on me that something else was happening during these gatherings. Something I hadn’t seen before so clearly in my previous work with groups. I saw so many happy faces around me. I saw so many people intently listening to each other as each shared a personal story. And I saw so many people touched by the awareness that others were really listening to them as they shared those stories."

This  episode is about the psychological power of Liberating Structures. They are like a language for how people interact. Once you learn to speak and recognize its symbols and its grammar, you see its potential everywhere people interact. I know how weird that sounds — especially when you’ve never experienced them before. This potential affirms my belief that we should use Liberating Structures everywhere people interact.

Unfortunately, even experienced practitioners tended to limit their use to the more obvious settings, like workshops, classes, and training, but not to other settings, like recurring meetings, social settings, and other informal settings. And that includes us too. And that's a waste, as we explore in this post.

Read the transcript for this episode here (along with pictures)
https://bit.ly/2Z8uk3M

Join an upcoming Immersion Workshop via:
https://liberatingstructures.nl
Support the show
Support the show, our research, and community offerings via Patreon:
https://patreon.com/liberators

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.