HH 001 - Butterfly. Grow and split.
Periodic thoughts on Dynamic Reteaming - how we thrive through changing teams while delivering software
I was once called a butterfly by a senior leader. This was many, many years ago. He told me, “Heidi, you are like a butterfly. You float from topic to topic.” At the time I didn’t like that statement. I thought it implied that I lacked focus or was somehow “doing it wrong.” His words stayed in my mind over the years.
I’m older now and in a different space. Time helps you see things differently. I like butterflies. They are a symbol for change. They are about morphing, growing, developing and becoming new again. Call me a butterfly. I’ll own it now. :)
And we typically associate butterflies with metamorphosis, however, I like to think that even after the caterpillar changes into a butterfly, that the butterfly itself still has the capacity to go through other subsequent changes and transform. I mean, why limit them? I visualize the butterfly transformation like the image below, in an ecocycle, a concept from my book Dynamic Reteaming.
The butterflies in this illustration start in the birth phase at the left, continue through time down and up and to the right, and ultimately get disrupted (creative destruction). The disruption could be their demise. Or it could be a less dramatic blip in their existence. It could be a highly resonant and life changing shift for them. Maybe it's the discovery of a new flower, or the discovery of a sweet tasting candy wrapper left on a city street. Some curious kid might have caught them in a net and relocated them to a beautiful garden. These butterflies might feel extremely liberated and free with their new change. As they proceed up and to the left they are feeling so different that they even start to look different. They’re in renewal and ready to start again with a new, fresh perspective. Can you relate?
At the right side of the ecocycle is the rigidity trap. The space of stagnation. How many of you “out there” are feeling a sense of stagnation now? It’s like when you’ve been doing something for a while, and the energy has left. Maybe things feel flat. You’re not thrilled with your current life, and you yearn for change. It takes a lot of energy and courage, though, to make the change happen. Writing, journaling, meditating, working with a coach or close friend can help shift the dynamic. If someone else imposes a change on you it could shift you out of your funk as well. That kind of forced surprise could be the best thing that’s ever happened to you. Sometimes we initiate the changes and sometimes other people do.
Remember the concept of panarchy from my book Dynamic Reteaming? This ecocycle concept happens at different levels like the individual level we’ve been talking about so far, but other levels too like team, dept, organization, industry and so on.
In teams and organizations we can also feel stagnation at times. Teams can get into ruts. At the team level it could be that the team has grown big and things aren’t as swift and quick as they were before. It could be that meetings take longer, work has diverged, and when trying to plan together, people aren’t paying attention to each other. At some point someone might notice this, and suggest a shift. Like splitting the team in two or more teams as depicted in the image below, the grow and split pattern of Dynamic Reteaming.
At the level of the organization, we might have a regular, predictable cadence of work and delivery. Sometimes that can feel like a grind. Shifting the dynamic up with a hack day can do wonders. When I worked at AppFolio years ago we held periodic hack days that we modeled after Atlassian’s ship it/Fedex days from way back. I remember once when we had one, the whole feel of our office that day felt different. People self selected teams that stayed together for the duration of the event. It was awesome. I mean, it’s not a daily occurrence to have had our engineers out in the parking lot building a trebuchet to launch fruit (how did we get away with that?), or putting together geocaches to hide in tiny containers all around our local city. Those were really great memories and what they did for our teams and organization was to give us resonant shared fun experiences that we had full agency in designing. Later, if things got difficult when we were building software, we had the currency of these memories of fun creativity together to pull us through. The hack days that we had became a key cultural tradition in our company, and repeating them through the years has served as a sort of glue for the long term cultural identity of the people at the company.
So this is my newsletter, and that was a taste of the type of content to expect here. Some of you subscribed to my mailing list years ago via my web site heidihelfand.com at which I promised infrequent posts. I haven’t exactly kept that promise as there have been no posts until this one. :) So “welcome back” to my newsletter, and if you’ve just found me, welcome! I’m glad you’re all here.
And by the way, this is my first newsletter. I’ve never had one before. So I’m excited about it and will use it as a vehicle to express myself and share ideas on building dynamic teams and organizations as well as what I’m up to, in case you want to join me at a future conference or other learning opportunity. Speaking of that, if you like what you’ve read today and want more, here are some upcoming events.
Upcoming Events
Drumroll time…I’m teaching my first ever online cohort course on Dynamic Reteaming in April! It’ll be three 2 hour sessions April 18, 19 and 21, live via zoom on the Maven course platform. Join this waitlist to learn about future courses or if you’re ready to join in April, Sign up here. And feel free to tell your friends!
I’ll be heading to Nelson, New Zealand as a keynote speaker at Agile on the Beach March 24-26. My topic is Dynamic Reteaming Interactive. It should be a lot of fun since they have a no technology rule. So I’ll be using a lot of movement and liberating structures to teach some basic Dynamic Reteaming ideas. I’ll also be teaching a masterclass on how to have coaching conversations which is another topic that’s near and dear to me as an international coach federation professional certified coach (PCC).
I’ll be returning as a speaker at the Craft conference in Budapest May 18-19. There I’ll be doing a talk on Dynamic Reteaming and teaching a course on how to have coaching conversations. Check out the great speaker lineup and maybe I’ll see you there.
Some notes, credits and inspiration - the concepts of ecocycles and panarchy mentioned in this post are referenced in the amazing book Liberating Structures by Lipmanowicz and McCandless. They use different words in the metaphor than I do, and they have an activity where you can look at your work items in terms of their aging through their model. My contribution is applying the notion to teams. They reference another book called Panarchy by Gunderson and Holling who also talk about ecocycles and the multidimensional panarchy concept, with other words and references. If you are interested in facilitation patterns that scale explore Liberating Structures. If you want to get into concepts like panarchy and ecocycles and explore well beyond software and work, pick up Panarchy.
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