Raise Your Hands if Your Teams Have Changed
For the past 9 years as I’ve been doing talks about Dynamic Reteaming around the world, I’ve asked people a variant of the following question: “Raise your hands if your teams have changed in the past month…maybe someone joined your team or maybe they left your team.”
I remember when I first built this question into my slide deck. I was so scared. What if no one raises their hands? What if my research was wrong about team change? What if it was really just a “Southern California” experience that I had as a member of fast-growing startups? This fear reoccurred a couple of weeks ago when I keynoted the Scrum Gathering in Tokyo.
During my keynote, as I asked the “raise your hands” question, there was no turning back. Now the 400ish-person audience was located in various rooms. I was in the main English language room, and there were a couple of other nearby rooms with live Japanese translators, plus more than a hundred online participants. So I couldn’t see everyone all together, but I did see people in the main keynote room. And what I did see was people raising their hands. And, someone at the conference snapped this photo that I share with you today.
And what I learned was that in Japan, just as it is in other places around the world, people experience a myriad of team changes at their companies. They experience these changes because change is a normal and inevitable property of teams, in the West and in the East. Team change is a thing, even if sometimes we might feel shamed into the old advice that insists that we keep our teams constant or stable. Like if only things were that easy. It would certainly be highly convenient in work and in life if we didn’t have to navigate team changes. Yet here we are. Welcome to reality. Let’s lean in and get better at dealing with change.
This conference was mostly in Japanese however there were some other English-speaking presenters as well. And, one of the organizers gave me an ipad with live Japanese to English translation for use during Japanese-only sessions. How cool was that?
Besides opening this conference with my keynote, which really was an honor and a dream for me, there was also a vibrant Open Space on the last day of the conference. For those who are not familiar, open space technology (OST) is a facilitation pattern where the participants propose and create their own conference schedule of sessions following an opening circle. This particular opening circle was lively and playful, complete with people in costume as butterflies and bee keepers. When it was time for participants to propose sessions, there were literally more than 200 people immediately forming a line to announce their sessions. That was a lot faster than I’ve ever seen at an open space in the U.S. Check out how the list of sessions looked - I particularly love that sessions were overlapping and vibrant.
Everything was in Japanese, however I did manage to butterfly around and join sessions that had an active “pac man” rule in play where it was particularly welcoming to new joiners. All in all this was an amazing experience and I can’t wait to return to Japan again.
While in Japan my Lenny’s Podcast episode also aired! I’ve never been on a podcast with quite the hoo ha as this one. People have been contacting me from all stages of my career as well as new folks I’m just meeting. I’ve been fielding a ton of inbound requests and I’m totally grateful to Lenny and also to John Cutler who referred me in for this experience.
Thanks for reading my newsletter! Here are some ways I can help you:
If your teams are going through change and you want some help along the way reach out! I love working on a retainer basis and am always on the lookout for the next company to join for the long run.
If you want to listen to my Lenny’s Podcast episode, here it is.
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Have a great week!