Posted on

Tribal Leadership: Is It a Game?

 

The book TRIBAL LEADERSHIP lays out 5 stages of culture. The 5 stages are basically stories that people tell themselves…and others.

 

 

 

 

Here are the 5 progressive stories:

  • Life Sucks
  • My Life Sucks
  • I’m Great!
  • We’re Great!
  • Life is Great!

What I have come to realize is that the content of this cultural self-talk is related to games.

Games have 4 properties:

  • A goal/set of goals
  • Rules
  • Ways to get feedback on progress
  • Opt in participation (you can opt-out)

My current belief is that the 4th property, “opt in participation”, is an absolutely huge factor. It is highly correlated with levels of joyfulness, satisfaction, feelings of well-being, and overall life quality.

When you are forced to play a game, it is almost never fun.

When you opt-in to play a game, things get interesting!

Here is a summary of what I think is going on with these stories. These five stages of TRIBAL LEADERSHIP are actually stories and related self-talk, and are actually about the ability to make choices, about game structure, and about control, progress, belonging and meaning:

 

TL Stage Your Story The GAME connection
Stage 1 Life sucks! I’m forced to play games I do not want to play and/or do not understand. I have no options. I have absolutely no sense of control.
Stage 2 My Life Sucks! Some people play enjoyable (opt-in) games, but I don’t. I’m forced to play and cannot opt out. I get it, yet I have a low sense of control and almost no sense of progress.
Stage 3 I’m Great! I’ve figured out how to win. Further, I now define MY game, and now you have to play it. You ARE playing it! I’m now in control & now making great progress!
Stage 4 We’re Great! I opt-in to play a bigger, cooperative, goal-seeking game, with others. I now have a sense of belonging.
Stage 5 Life is Great! I opt-in to play a bigger, cooperative goal-seeking game, with others. And this time, we play big and intend to change the world. I now have a sense of higher purpose.

 

Summary

In my book THE CULTURE GAME, I explain the concepts and facilities available to create a good-game structure at work, a game where the enjoyment is so great that the distinction between work and play is minimal.

My current belief is that we are not nearly focused enough on using know-how about game mechanics to debug the problems we face at home, and work and in the wider world.

Culture, as it turns out, is a game.

Jane McGonigal gets it right: Reality IS Broken. And Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh also gets it right in his book, DELIVERING HAPPINESS: we all want to experience a sense of control, a sense of progress, a sense of belonging, and a sense of higher purpose and meaning. Good games deliver substantial happiness. The 5 stages of culture as described in the book TRIBAL LEADERSHIP do appear to confirm this hypothesis.

 

The Relationship to Effective Agile Adoptions

Agile adoptions are typically implemented as a mandate. This is acceptable so long as leadership sets out the clear direction and stops short of mandating specific practices. My current hypothesis, which appears to be valid based on experience, is:

  • Mandates of practices in an Agile adoption amounts to a game without the essential opt-in feature
  • People have needs. The mandate quickly reduces the feelings of control, progress, and belonging that are basic human needs
  • Resentment and disengagement are the natural and predictable results;
  • Disengagement is death to any attempt at a rapid and lasting Agile adoption.

The solution? Check in on what people want, what people think and what people feel BEFORE embarking on the journey of Agile adoption in your company. Open Agile Adoption is one way to do that.

 

Resources

For a deeper dive into these concepts, you might consider taking a look at these resources:

Blog Post: How Games Deliver Happiness And Learning

Blog Post: Open Agile Adoption

Audio Book, absolutely free download: Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan and co-authors

***

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on

Winning the Productivity Game

Dave Logan is the author of TRIBAL LEADERSHIP. In this book Dave describes the triad, a structure that is essential for scaling Agile from teams to tribes.

In my book THE CULTURE GAME, I describe how to use triads to get viral spread of the sixteen team-learning practices described in that book.

Please join Dave Logan and myself (Dan Mezick) on the 1-hour FREE call entitled Winning The Productivity Game.

During this public learning event, you will learn:

  • How to raise your productivity at work, both individually… and in teams;
  • Why your meetings (and often work in general) can be soul-sucking death march from hell, and what to do about it;
  • What specific techniques you can use as a manager and/or someone who convenes meetings…to raise the level of engagement and productivity at work;
  • Where you can find specific resources and tools to help you install small changes (“culture hacks“) with big, positive effects for your teams and the wider organization.

Register now for this call to learn the specific steps you can take tomorrow to raise the level of productivity in your organization.

 

During this 1-hour call, you can help make work and meeting more engaging, productive and fun. I plan to disclose specific techniques to do this that are found in THE CULTURE GAME book.

You can click this link to learn more about the event, and sign up to be on the call! I hope to see you there ! Here is part of the description of the event found on the CultureSync registration page:

Play the game and love your work. Author and coach, Dan Mezick, will join Dave Logan for a rousing 60 minute romp through the games you can play every day to make work more productive, satisfying, and fun.

Dan says: 
Productivity at work is a game. If the core requirements for productivity at work are not present, you disengage and check out. If the core requirements are there, you automatically experience fun, satisfaction and potentially, a deeply engaged sense of well-being.

We’re sure he’ll share the 8 specific things he’s learned you must do if you are to win the game of engagement, happiness and productivity at work. You’ll walk away from the call with actionable techniques you can start using today to win the productivity game.

NOTE: This is a free online event from CultureSync, Dave Logan’s company providing education, tools and resources for leaders, managers and teams who are seeking an upgrade of their company culture.

REGISTER HERE:  Winning The Productivity Game

Posted on

Tribal Leadership and Scrum

In genuine and authentic Scrum, the three roles form a triad.

A triad is a super-small social structure with just 3 participants. These 3, aligned on values, commit to executing a very small strategy with intent to get results inside a very short time horizon.

Tribal Leadership is the book that introduces triads. It is a New York Times bestselling business book on business, leadership and culture. I’ve outlined this in an earlier post. The book is brilliant. The triad, is a 3-person social structure that is very small– and very robust. A well-formed triad is a powerhouse. Triads are capable of accomplishing absolutely tremendous results with just 3 participants, across very small time horizons.

If you know Scrum, this is sure to sound familiar….

My latest book, The Culture Game, describes in A-B-C terms exactly how to use triads to spread transformative learning across an entire enterprise. If Tribal Leadership is a cultural operating system, The Culture Game is an application. It provides a small strategy (a “microstrategy”) and leverages triads to spread it virally throughout the entire organization. I believe The Culture Game is the first of many such books that will be built upon the Tribal Leadership platform.

Triads are a key to the business agility problem. Genuine Scrum teams with the 3 roles of Product Owner, Scrum Master and Team exhibit a key aspect of Tribal Leadership’s triads: each role takes responsibility for maintaining the quality of the connection between the other two. This is the very picture of a healthy and well team.

In 2010, I met Dave Logan at Zappos. (Zappos Insights is one of my clients. Actually, one of my favorite clients. That is a truly great and amazing story for a detailed telling … at a later time.) Dave and I have many friends in common, and we became good friends ourselves.

In early 2012, I traveled to the Los Angeles offices of CultureSync, Dave’s management consultancy. I brought the 16 learning practices described in my book. We spent two days with the CultureSync team, doing work while using all the techniques in the book. The result was a delightful, laughing-out-loud kind of astonishment on the part of the CultureSync team. They loved it. My account of the details of the coaching experience at CultureSync are located here.

As a result of that meeting, we made serious headway in blending a very strong brew consisting of Scrum and Tribal Leadership. We kicked off a project composing elements of Tribal Leadership’s 5-stage culture model, the 3-person triad structure, and the 16 Tribal Learning practices described in The Culture Game. (The 16 practices are all derived from Scrum). I gathered these techniques over several years, by watching the very best Scrum teams I was coaching, and carefully noting exactly what the heck they were actually doing. From that, I developed a list…the sixteen things…

…I call them Tribal Learning practices. If you do them, you create automatic team-learning and a generate a genius team. All of these techniques are related, and conspire together to create team genius: in truth, a small learning organization. The Tribal Learning practices, derived from Scrum, are the ‘secret sauce’ in the recipe for creating a learning organization.

We can thank Scrum’s creators, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber,  for pointing the way.

Over a 2-day period Dave, the CultureSync team and I executed on brainstorming and planning around the re-mix: Tribal Scrum.  Incorporating essential aspects of both Tribal Leadership and Scrum, Tribal Scrum has the potential to transform organizations, one triad at a time. It’s all described in my book, The Culture Game, which you can purchase today.

Intrigued? The Tribal Learning practices described in my book provide the ingredients and the recipe for creating more learning, more fun, and a greater capacity to respond to change.

Tribal Scrum is a re-mix of practices distilled from Scrum and Tribal Leadership. Please join us as we embark on this adventure.

Join us in creating tools that managers and executives can use– right out of the box– to create effective learning tribes in organizations of all sizes throughout the world.

 

Background Links on Tribal Scrum:

Make Your Meeting Hyper-Productive and Fun article at CBSNEWS.COM

Tribal Leadership Book

The Culture Game Book

Tribal Leadership and The Culture Game blog post

Design Thinking: Composing the Tribal Learning Practices blog post

How Tribal Leadership and Scrum will change the world blog post

Posted on

Tribal Leadership and the Culture Game

The Culture Game a a tutorial and reference guide for every progressive, changing-making manager on the planet. The premise of the book is that managers do not have to ask permission, because they are already authorized to convene meetings, hire, fire, and deploy small budgets.

The Culture Game book is built in part on concepts found in the book TRIBAL LEADERSHIP, the work of Dave Logan and co-authors.

The book explains how the pace of change is mandating that organizations learn faster, so they can adapt. The book provides 16 practices, derived from Agile, which help make this learning happen. The beauty of the Culture Game approach is that it is not prescriptive. The book is a cookbook. To get results, you only need to do 3 or 4 of the practices to start. For example, you can choose to implement the practices Be Punctual, Facilitate Your Meetings and Structure Your Interactions in all your meetings. These 3 practices promise to substantially raise the level of satisfaction, learning and results in your meetings.

Part 3 of the book explains the power of the triad structure described by Dave Logan and co-authors in the book TRIBAL LEADERSHIP. A triad is a 3-person structure where:

1. Every person in the group shares common values;

2. Each person is committed with the others to execute a small strategy together that gets specific, intended results, and

3. Each person in the group takes responsibility for maintaining the quality of the connection between the other two people.

If you are a manager, and you know the Culture Game practices, then you already know the power of the practices to generate fun, satisfaction and learning in your department or group.

The next step is to teach others how to do it just like you did. In the book, I argue that triads are the secret sauce that can be used to scale agility from teams to tribes. The book embraces and extends the triad concept from TRIBAL LEADERSHIP. It provides A-B-C guidance on how to form a triad to socialize these techniques throughout your organization. Triads are a super-powerful way to scale agility from teams to tribes, groups of up to 150 people that exist informally in every organization.

The book TRIBAL LEADERSHIP describes 5 stages of culture, and then describes the triad structure as a vector for culture change. The book lays down a foundation. THE CULTURE GAME builds on this, supplying the small strategy (The 16 Tribal Learning practices) and A-B-C guidance on how to socialize these practices using triads. This is a bottom-up approach that effectively scales agility UP and OUT of software teams, and into the mainstream…scaling agile from teams, to tribes.

If TRIBAL LEADERSHIP is an operating system, THE CULTURE GAME is an application that runs on it. Triads are a brilliant idea; my book is the first ‘application’ to run on TRIBAL LEADERSHIP. I think it is fair to say that it is not the last. Triads are the real deal.

You can learn more about the TRIBAL LEADERSHIP book here and get a quick summary here.

TRIBAL LEADERSHIP co-author Dave Logan recently wrote about how he and I, and his entire team spent 2 days working together. We used Culture Game concepts to structure 2 days of work with Dave’s CultureSync team in Los Angeles. (CultureSync is Dave’s management consultancy.) The results were pretty good!!

You can read that article from Dave’s column at CBSNEWS.COM, here:

Make Your Meetings Hyper-Productive and Fun by Dave Logan (CBSNEWS)

You can learn more about the THE CULTURE GAME book, and pre-order it here.

 

Posted on

Trans-Agile and the Learning Organization

The organizations that LEARN FAST are the new winners in game of business. They have more fun and make much more money doing it … by learning faster that their competitors, and then eating their lunch.

Let me explain.

Recently, I went out to LA to work with my friend Dave Logan at the offices of CultureSync, Dave’s management consultancy. Dave is  the lead-author of the book TRIBAL LEADERSHIP. This book introduces the triad, a very robust 3-person structure for getting amazing amounts of work done. This book also enumerates a stage-development model of culture in organizations. The book is brilliant– and so is Dave. My book THE CULTURE GAME is based in part on Dave’s TRIBAL LEADERSHIP concepts.

We did work over 2 days using all the tools in the framework outlined in my book, THE CULTURE GAME. In this book I lay out the 16 specific practices that create nearly-automatic organizational learning. These practices are derived from agile, mostly from Scrum. These are the “trans-agile” practices. I call them Tribal Learning practices. If you commit to do them, your group learns fast, and almost automatically.

The Scrum framework is actually an amazing learning lab for teams. Teams literally “learn how to learn” when the framework is implemented in a genuine and authentic way… that is, in alignment with the spirit of Scrum, as described in the Scrum Guide.

My book is an enumeration of the practices I see the very best Scrum teams doing consistently inside my Agile coaching practice. Part 3 of THE CULTURE GAME details how use Dave’s triads to socialize the 16 trans-agile practices described in THE CULTURE GAME  book.

 

Playing the Culture Game at CultureSync

There were 5 of us present. We spent two days together. We ended up using all 16 of the practices described in my book, across those two days.

We got LOADS of work done.

The CultureSync team made these comments during the daily retrospectives:

“What just happened is amazing”

“I cannot believe how much we got done in one day!”

“It’s shocking how much fun this was. How much fun this IS!”

“Normally, after a full-day meeting, I’m glazed over. The day is over and I actually feel super-energized right now.”

“I’m in shock about how these simple practices completely change the tone and tempo of our meetings.”

“Some of these practices seem uncomfortable at first, and then it’s like: why weren’t we working this way years ago?”

I want you to notice that CultureSync has NOTHING to do with information technology and does not develop software.  CultureSync sells management consulting services, and training that supports leadership development.

Also, keep in mind that Dave Logan is the co-author of THE THREE LAWS OF PERFORMANCE and is tight with David Allen, the celebrated author of GETTING THINGS DONE.

The CultureSync folks are a tribe of over-achievers, much like Dave himself.

That made the feedback especially sweet !

 

The Coming Revolution in Work

It’s ten years since the Agile Manifesto. In my book, I explain how the high failure rates in software projects actually spawned a solution, and a revolution: agile, and Scrum.

In the book, I explain what Scrum is: a framework for creating shared knowledge, also known as team learning. Scrum itself creates small, team-sized learning organizations as described by Peter Senge and others. The habits of good Scrum teams are group learning practices. Being punctual, facilitating your meetings, opening the space, structuring your interactions … as described in the book, each of these (and the other 12) encourage and support absolutely massive levels of organizational learning.

The time has come to say it like it is: Scrum and related practices create a learning organization. We call it a Team. When that Team gets really good, it exhibits 16 specific habits I call Tribal Learning practices. When these practices are socialized using triads as described in TRIBAL LEADERSHIP, the results are truly amazing. Your organization gets smarter, adapts faster, has loads more fun, and makes loads more money, often at the direct expense of all your competitors.

The trans-agile revolution has arrived. Enterprise agile is here. It’s called the learning organization, powered by the Tribal Learning practices described in THE CULTURE GAME book.

Looking to ways for your organization to learn faster? Be more adaptive? Interested in how this works? THE CULTURE GAME books ships in February. You can learn more and pre-order the book, by following this link:

Learn more, and PRE-ORDER The Culture Game Book