Make It Visible! — The Effect of Transparency
Scrum is based on empiricism and the three pillars of empiricism are Transparency, Inspection, and Adaptation. While all three pillars are important, the simple act of making things transparent can have a big impact on its own.
In this post, you’ll learn how transparency helped me eat healthier, what a bread basket and magnets had to do with it, and how all of this might help you and your team.
Eating Healthy
My wife and I are trying to be more conscious about what we eat: Less meat, more healthy stuff, and not too much highly processed food. Compared to a year ago, we certainly are eating healthier, but we both felt that we could do better.
*What is considered healthy might be subjective. We do have a “Definition of Healthy”, but as this is not the point of this post, I won’t be diving deeper into this. If you want to learn more, I can highly recommend the book Spoon-Fed by Tim Spector.
Bread Basket & Magnets
During a discussion, my wife brought up the idea of “tracking” when we manage to eat healthy and when not. As a Scrum Master, I immediately thought that it was a great idea, making things transparent is the heart of any empiric process after all.
We were thinking how we could track this? An excel sheet or maybe in our journal? My wife laughed when I proposed to use our bread basket in the kitchen as a “board”. She agreed to give it a try anyway, so we grabbed a couple of magnets and tape and redecorated our bread basket.
On the tracker, you can see all days of a week, three different meals per day plus whether we had our daily portions of fruit & vegetables. To distinguish between the two of us (we don’t always eat together), we have differently shaped magnets.
That was it, a short discussion and 10 minutes of “decorating” the bread basket and we had an MVP of our meal tracker.
Chocolate or Banana?
Our bread basked is located in the kitchen — you must pass it several times a day. This makes it a highly visible, real-time picture of our eating habits. And that had an almost magic effect: As you were seeing it so often, we talked a lot more about it.
Before grocery shopping, we would consider what we can cook so we would get points. While preparing meals, we’d consider changing some things so they would fit our “definition of healthy”. And when I was craving a snack and I did not have my fruit points yet, I was more likely to opt for a healthy option over chocolate.
It’s not that we always manage to get our points (neither is it the goal), but having it “out in the open” and seeing that you get points is highly motivating. After 3 weeks we even had to order more magnets, as we ran out of them during the week.
Takeaways
I’m eating healthier, but why would you care about this? You’re most likely not reading this because you wanted dietary tips from me.
However, some takeaways can help you improve how you introduce changes to your daily work-life. If you are involved with a team and want to drive change, the following points might be helpful to you.
Measure It
First of all, think about your goal and how you can measure progress towards it. Whether it’s the time your work items are already in progress, the quality of your code, how often you speak to your customers, or anything else that helps you and your team assess the current state of things.
You don’t need a fancy tool for this, better keep it simple and get started right away. If a bread basket and magnets do it for us, you don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars for a tool either.
Make it Visible
Once you have measurments, it’s important to visualize them. You want to visualize it not just anywhere, but in a place where people will see it often, without specifically looking for it.
If “there is a wiki page for that”, chances are nobody will ever look at it. And once it’s out of sight, it tends to be out of mind.
Compare this to the bread basket in the kitchen. We had to pass by it several times a day, making it very hard to ignore.
You want to make it as easy as possible for people to see the information. There should not be a need for anyone to do something to get the information (like browse to a website, open an application). Instead, bring the information directly to them.
In remote setups it might be more challenging — but it can done as well. For example, you can send automated reports or notifications to your virtual collaboration tool (like Slack or MS Teams). Or you make it part of your daily routine, by sharing them in your dailies.
Inspect It & Adapt
After you start to measure and are exposed to those measurements on a daily base, you might automatically start to inspect and make adaptations.
While my wife and I don’t run dedicated events to inspect and adapt, making things transparent and highly visible has lead to conversations and immediate inspection and adaptation for us, for example adjusting our shopping lists to be aligned with our “definition of healthy”.
Once you expose the data and make sure it’s been seen on a regular basis, you might see a change happening right away. People start talking about it over coffee or during dailies and propose changes to improve.
On top of that, you can always use the data in specific events like Sprint Reviews or Retrospectives for deeper inspections.
Gamify It!
A side-effect we noticed while getting “magnet points” for healthy habits was that it was slightly addictive. We wanted to do better than last week. We were chasing the high score.
This kind of gamification can be an ally to creating new habits. If done for the right reasons, it can be a catalyst for your improvement efforts.
You should also be aware that it can lead to “gaming the metrics”. If people are incentivized to “win”, this might cause problems instead of helping. Make sure that you don’t reward egoistic behavior over the team and the overall goal.
Conclusion
We often want to make changes to our behavior. Whether it is eating healthier or improving how we work. Measuring and making those measurements highly visible can support you with the introduction of new habits.
This transparency allows you to frequently inspect where you stand and adapt accordingly. And once you are frequently exposed to the measurements, you might not even need dedicated events to inspect and adapt, but it will happen naturally on a regular base.
What are you waiting for? Stock up on magnets and start improving!
Special thanks to Matt DiBerardino and Florin Manolescu for reviewing the post! 🍻