Thanks for taking the time to read our weekly newsletter to help you get Unstuck! Check us out every week for your dose of agile inspiration. We’re striving to keep the content in our 4 Qs brief and powerful so you can get a lot of impact from a little reading!

We’re doing a series on Marty Cagan’s new book - “Transformed”. If you’d like to see the other parts of the series, check it out:

Part 1 - Empower Teams with Problems to Solve

Part 2 - Focus on What You Solve for Customers, not Features

Part 3 - Increase Ownership

Quintessential Thought

Principle 4: Build Collaboration

In order for us to bring the best ideas to life, we need to know what they are. The challenge is no one person always has the best ideas, so we need to increase the diversity of perspectives without losing our vision of what we’re solving. In “Transformed”, Cagan gives many examples of how we can increase collaboration.

At Unstuck, we’ve found that all good collaborative conversations share 4 ingredients in their shape:

1. Context - why are we here? What problem are we trying to solve?

2. Divergence - we diverge on different ways to solve the problem without shooting any down. Free creative space.

3. Convergence - we look through the options presented and use criteria to determine which ones are most helpful for our problem.

4. Action - we gain clarity on which steps we’re going to take, who owns it, and how we’ll inspect the results.

By setting up our conversations differently, it enables the perspective we need to get the results we want.

Quotes

No one can whistle a symphony. It takes an orchestra to play it. - H.E. Luccock

The kind of errors that cause plan crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication - Malcolm Gladwell

Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is sol powerful and so rare. - Patrick Lencioni

Quick Step

Start with a collaborative conversation - pick one thing where you need input, grab an hour on the calendar for a few people, and walk through the steps. Learn more about the details of a collaborative conversation here.

Question

What perspective are you missing? How can you move a step further to getting it?

Want to chat? Reach out to info@unstuckagile.com so we can help you get Unstuck!

Also, subscribe to our YouTube channel or connect with us on LinkedIn, where we’re posting content that goes beyond the ~200ish words we have in this newsletter.