The Liberators Podcast

How does working from home influence teamwork? This question came to the forefront during the COVID-19 pandemic. Most companies switched from fully co-located work to fully remote work for most of the pandemic. But since then, many of those policies have been reverted under the assumption that working from home negatively impacts performance, productivity, and teamwork.In this episode, we bring a scientific perspective to this question. We review the current scientific evidence around h...

Have you ever noticed the many parallels between organized religion and Scrum? Or with Agile methodologies more broadly? It's been a recurring joke between us as we attend conferences, interact with critics and advocates of Scrum, and follow the comings and goings in our profession. Some of these parallels are merely funny to point out, whereas others are a bit more concerning.So for this episode, I invite you to imagine that you’re future archeologists who uncover the traces of our Agile com...

"Agile is dead" is a contrarian opinion that gets thrown around a lot on social media. While it's a nice way to get attention, what does the evidence say? Agile can only be dead if it doesn't work, if it doesn't result in more effective teams and more satisfied customers.In this episode, we take an evidence-based perspective. We explore the business case for Agile from three perspectives: stakeholder satisfaction, team morale and overall business outcomes. We report results from our own analy...

“How do I prevent my high-performing team from burning out?” is a question that recently came up in a community meetup. It's an intriguing question because it starts from a positive situation. If you’ve ever been part of a high-performing team, you know how exhilarating it can be. But paradoxically, it's also a place where people for people to lose themselves in their work together and collapse under the strain — as I did.In this episode, we apply an evidence-based perspective to this questio...

We're back!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,...

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.I...

“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: refi...

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/2XXBaZ7Or download do-it-yourself workshops to encourage shared produc...

"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: w...

"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 a...

A common belief among Agile practitioners is that Scrum works best in smaller organizations. Things are simpler there, and you don't have all those impediments of your typical corporate. Since much of our day-to-day experience is also with smaller to medium-sized businesses, we are also included to believe this.But is it consistent with the facts? We believe that you should always ground your beliefs in evidence as much as possible. So we explored scientific studies and performed our analyses...

Are Scrum Masters perhaps too focused on the process, and too little on whether or not that process actually delivers valuable outcomes? How is that for you, as a Scrum Master?This is a hunch based on countless conversations we've had with Scrum Masters, including our own practice as a Scrum Master. But what do the facts say? So we read relevant scientific studies and collected data through a large poll (500+ participants) and data from almost 2.000 Scrum teams. We were also fortunate to use ...

We are creating the Scrum Team Survey to help Scrum teams and Agile teams to diagnose their process. We also give tons of evidence-based feedback. One of the cool things about developing a product ourselves, and with our own money, is that we get to learn (or reaffirm) a lot of valuable lessons about Agile software development. In this episode, we share our 10 biggest lessons. Be prepared for some technical stuff though, as several of these lessons involve architecture, design, and code quali...

Do your Daily Scrums feel like a pointless ritual where everyone just lists what they’ve done yesterday, and what they do will do today? Does Sprint Planning feel like a waste of time because everyone only wants to know what they have to do? And does your Sprint Review consist of team members listing their individual accomplishments? If so, you are probably dealing with a complete lack of coherence and cohesion.This episode is an exploration of scientific insights that help us understand what...

Do you start a new Scrum team by explaining the roles, artifacts, and events? Do you rarely consider how to build coalitions and persuade people in power to support your work with Scrum? Are you thinking about the psychological needs of people and how to motivate them to work with Scrum? You may be engaging in a bit too much blueprint thinking.In this episode, we explore how blue-print thinking is too dominant in our profession. There are exceptions. But much of the professional discourse is ...