In Publicize Good Behavior with the Hotel Towel Strategy, I talked about making behavior contagious at the individual and team level. In the embedded video above, I talk about the designated driver and how it illustrates contagious behavior at the societal level. We learn how the techniques for achieving it can create contagious behavior for your organization.
Jay Winsten and the Designated Driver
The authors of the book Switch tell the story of Harvard public health professor Jay Winsten. In the 1980s, Winsten studied a Scandinavian concept called “a designated driver”. In the United States at the time, this concept didn’t even exist. So Winsten and his team brought the idea to the US. Winsten believed that you could make behavior contagious by repeatedly exposing people to it in many different contexts. This worked even for fictional contexts.
So Winsten worked with the producers and writers of prime-time television shows. They inserted mentions of designated drivers into the plots of more than 160 prime-time shows, including “Hunter”, “The Cosby Show”, “Mr. Belvedere”, and “Who’s the Boss?” Winsten only requested five seconds of dialogue featuring the designated driver idea.
And the result? Three years after the campaign launched, 90% of Americans knew the term “designated driver”. But more importantly, American behavior had changed. 37% had now acted as a designated driver and 54% of frequent drinkers had been driven home by one. Alcohol-related traffic fatalities dropped from around 24,000 in 1988 to around 18,000 in 1992.
Contagious Behavior in a Software Development Organization
So how does this apply to a software development organization? Think of some of the ideas you wish more teams at your organization understood. Maybe it is the idea that daily standups are not status reports and shouldn’t last an hour. How do you repeatedly expose the people of an organization to this idea?
Communities of Practice
My suggestion is that those who facilitate such meetings are the ones who most need this exposure. When can they get it? This is where a community of practice becomes valuable. A community of practice provides a forum for both discussing these ideas and possibly demonstrating them. Demonstrating the skills to run an effective “community of practice” meeting month-after-month will repeatedly expose the Scrum Masters to better facilitation techniques.
Lean Coffee
For example, you might choose to run your community of practice meetings using the Lean Coffee style of meeting. Lean Coffee time-boxes and focuses the conversations in these meetings. Exposure to such focused meetings can inspire and educate your Scrum Masters to bring the same level of focus to their teams’ standups.
Walk The Board Standups
You may also want to get specific. Devote one or more of these meetings to the different styles of standup. Demonstrate the benefits of, say, “walk the board” standups. Get people to stop thinking in terms of status reports. Get them to start thinking in terms of how they can get the board to a desired state. Devote a meeting to the three questions and their limitations. Talk about why it might be better to replace them with something else.
Roleplaying
Use a community of practice meeting to role-play a standup. Demonstrate ways of refocusing the team on the real goals of the meeting. Cut out status reporting by having people give yes/no answers to questions like “Is this story done?” and “Is the story blocked?”. Then, if necessary, asking “What can we do as a team to get it unblocked?”
Repeated Exposure
The main idea is that exposing the people of the organization to these ideas once is not enough. Americans adopted the designated driver idea only after they were exposed to it via 160 prime-time shows. Don’t expect one exposure to a well-run standup to suddenly transform all your company’s Scrum Masters into master-facilitators. Also, think about mixing up the context. Maybe schedule one-on-ones between Scrum Masters and an Agile coach (if your company has one) to reinforce the concept.
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