In the computer industry, data and conscious thinking are praised, as opposed to an integrated awareness.[1] How is the work going? the task-tracking tools, the commits, and the build results provide data, but only conversations with the team can provide awareness. Awareness of mood and relationships and trends, of uncertainties and risks. Perhaps this is part of organizations’ fear of remote work: colocation provides opportunities to read the mood of the team. Data alone can’t provide that.
In sociological research like Brené Brown’s, she starts with awareness: interviews, a person’s story in context. Then she codes (in this context, “to code” is to categorize and label) the answers, and they become data. She aggregates that data to get a broader picture, and that leads to a broader awareness.
The key is: local awareness, to data, to aggregated data, to broader awareness.
On my last team, we were working on this. I wanted to track what was holding us back, and what was helping us move. Which tools in our technology stack cost us the most energy, and which improvements are paying off. To do this, we started posting in Slack whenever something frustrated us or helped us along, with custom emoticons as labels. For instance:
This turns our awareness of the current situation into data, which a program can aggregate later. At retro time, I turned the words next to the hot-air balloon (“lift,” because it helps us move the project up and forward) into a word cloud.[2] The words next to the kettlebell (“weight,” because it’s weighing down the balloon, holding us back) formed a separate word cloud. This gave us a visualization to trigger discussion.
The aggregation of the data produced a broader level of awareness in our retrospective. This contrasts with our remembered experience of the prior sprint. Our brains are lousy at aggregating these experiences; we remember the peak and the end. The most emotional moment, and the most recent feelings. The awareness -> data -> aggregation -> awareness translation gives us a less biased overview.
The honest recording of local awareness happens when the data is interpreted within the team, within the circle of trust, within context. There’s no incentive to game the system, except where that is appropriate and deliberate. For instance, the week after the first word cloud, Tanya posted in the channel:
She’s very deliberately inflating a word in the word cloud, corresponding to the level of pain she’s experiencing. (context: we were using Elasticsearch poorly, totally nothing wrong with the tech, it was us.) Her knowledge of how the data would be used allowed her to translate her local awareness into a useful representation.
Data alone is in conflict with a broad, compassionate awareness of the human+technological interactions in the team. But if the data starts with awareness, and is aggregated and interpreted with context, it can help us overcome other limitations and biases of our human brains. In this way, we can use both data and awareness, and perhaps gain wisdom.
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[1] “Computing: Yet Another Reality Construction,” by Rodney Burstall, inside Software Development and Reality Construction
[2] Thank you @hibikir1 for suggesting the first reasonable use of a word cloud in my experience