Agile Teams primarily operate from a ‘people-centric’ paradigm, hence, where humans exist there shall also coexist dissent and disagreement. Often, well structured and motivated teams are bound to enter into a zone of apparent ‘disarray’ because of the uncertainty principle of reality. Things often will not go as per plan. How do we ensure this disarray does not escalate to disruption? What should we know that will ensure matters do not spin out of control? For the Agile team, conflict management gets regulated and controlled to a significant degree. Let me amplify how:
Congruence of Outcomes
Agile facilitates the possibility of allowing team members to be in perfect congruence to the stated vision/mission of the project. Ensuring clear communication channels and propagating the cause on which the success criteria is leveraged creates an opportunity for each member to develop personal ownership towards the planned outcome. This creates a healthy psychological culture which ensures congruence between the perceived outcome and the stated one.
Shortening the “Storming” Phase
The ‘Storming’ phase (Bruce Tuckman Model of Team Building) of team evolution gets significantly shortened with the common vision. Storming occurs where there is a conflict between team members’ natural working styles, opinions or when authority is challenged. People have a natural style of doing their work; this differentiation may cause unforeseen behavioural fallouts and may result in frustration and heart burn. While such an occurrence is inevitable, Agile helps in mitigating the manifestation of conflict in such scenarios to a great degree.
Role and Task Ambiguity
Team members tend to jockey for position as their roles get clarified. A similar pattern may occur if the task hasn’t been defined clearly how the team will work. This results in members getting overwhelmed by their workload or uncomfortable with the leadership approach being administered. Agile, with its inherent people over task centricity, obviates such as uncongenial workspace situations.
Perceptual Variance
How are individual perceptions dealt with? How are stakeholders perceptions addressed? Is there room to accommodate human perceptual precepts? Agile provides an allowance to monitor and respond to the variance in human perception.
Felt Need of Client
The felt need of the client often gets obscured by the overwhelming presence of jargon, false assumptions and legal fine print. Agile, provides space for client needs to be freely expressed and taken due cognisance of.
Conflict of Beliefs and Values
People operate within different value systems and experiences that lead them to handle situations in varied ways. A robust Agile team collaborates and is responsive to change, hence devoid of anchored belief and value sets.
CONFLICT MITIGATION
It is best to predict and be responsive to conflict initiation and achieve conflict termination most quickly and efficiently possible. Being pre-emptive is the essence of sound Agile practices. It is not that we should avoid conflict when it is necessary, but endeavour to make the conflict in itself an unnecessary occurrence. Agile lends itself to a collaborative, responsive and collegial atmosphere for teams to operate in.
While we address the issue of obviating conflict, the occurrence of conflict within the various networks in the team cannot be accurately predicted. Hence, conflict mitigation needs to be achieved by planning and foresight. This can be achieved by Agile teams in the following manner:
SHARED VISION AND MISSION
Whether it is creating a brand, working on a design project, or building your organization, creating a shared vision and mission enables everyone on the team to understand the objectives and outcomes clearly. The vision can’t simply be imposed from above. Everyone on the team needs to be enrolled in it.
Create a Team Manifesto
The manifesto is a living document that describes the intentions, motives, and methods within which the team will work. The team works according to the manifesto envisaged. If any part of the manifesto isn’t implementable, the team examines the unworkable parts and modifies the manifest. The important thing is for the team to hold itself accountable to the manifest.
Primacy of Retrospectives
The primacy of feedback and retrospection needs no further elaboration.
Profit in Trust
Operating within the realms of tacit trust is the reason d’être of the Agile mindset. Without implicit trust and explicit collaboration, Agile shall remain an untenable goal.
CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Whatever may be the organisational structure, conflict flash points will occur and will need to be immediately resolved. Such conflict can occur without prior warning. In such cases, team members experiencing conflict, need to be sensitised to the following issues which merit attention:
Highlight Genesis of Conflict: What is the belief and value set of participants in the conflict? What is their perception of the issue being endured? Is there a communications breakdown? Is there a dissent arising out of differences in business priorities? The genesis of such behavioural components needs to be marked and highlighted.
Personality Equations: Only by addressing the psychological standpoint of the parties under dispute can one get to the core of why they are holding on to their position so passionately.
Zones of Agreement: Create zones of agreement where there is a possibility of views being communicated and expressed to help put the conflict in perspective.
Find Creative Avenues: Create avenues where the team and stakeholders can think of new solutions to their conflict through creative media. Standard brainstorming rules apply. Accept all perspectives and negate nothing. Write every idea down without bias. This can lead to a shared solution that has common acceptance and original in creation.
Negotiate for Agreement: Negotiate to find common ground if all other passive forms of persuasion get exhausted.
Enforce Authority: When nothing works, the authority needs to be enforced to arrive at a viable decision. This is necessary when the time is of essence or when reasonable consensus just cannot be reached. Robust Agile teams seldom will need the use of authority to get matters sorted out.
CONCLUSION
Agile facilitates the creation of a psychologically safe and growth enabled cultural environment where everyone feels safe to talk without being coerced, demeaned or rattled. A facilitator or coach who can promote a productive conversation while remaining neutral would be part of the conflict mitigation and termination strategy. Conflicts must be resolved quickly, effectively and fairly lest teams get into the inertia set by never-ending squabbles, low morale and sapping team cohesion and effectiveness. However, it is to be known that the existence of conflict is also a sign of a healthy Agile team. It means that issues continue to be brought to light, groupthink is absent and the team agrees to disagree to all sides of the issue if need be. When no one cares, apathy sets in. When the team takes the time to resolve emerging conflicts, they become proficient at it and can move on to taking on even more significant new challenges, and that is the essence of an effective and efficient Conflict Management Process in place.
