The myth of Psychological Safety and the contrasting views on motivation
Right at the start of this episode, we talk about the study from Goole that originated the idea that you had to establish Psychological Safety for teams to have a chance to succeed. Even if psychological safety certainly plays a role, Christian shares with us why we should be skeptical about the study that originated the myth. This study was conducted by Google, exclusively with Google teams. Christian shares other theories with us that go beyond the fuzzy definition of psychological safety, and can help us analyze our team, and their work to help them reach a high level of performance.
In this segment, we refer to Self-determination theory, which focuses on what drives our intrinsic motivation and can lead to a high level of performance in any task.
Creating “flow” the success ingredient every Scrum team needs
The idea of “flow” is something that is backed up by many studies and explained in detail in the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Psychological flow can emerge when the conditions are right. The good thing for Scrum Masters is that those contributing conditions are well defined and widely studied in reproducible studies.
In this segment, we talk about how we can apply the ideas from “flow” to the retrospectives that we run as Scrum Masters. This was a result of Christian’s own research work which led him and his co-founders to develop an application – Echometer – to help teams focus on the aspects that enable flow when creating their retrospective plans.
The myth of Mindset: an incomplete view of performance and success for Scrum teams
Another myth we tackle in this episode is the idea that “mindset” is a solution to the Agile adoption and team success problems. As we discuss in this episode, intrinsic motivation is a key ingredient for teams to succeed, however, we often get stuck in the mindset discussion, forgetting that often the mindset is missing because the conditions for intrinsic motivation are not met.
In this segment, we talk about Carol Dweck’s Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, and what we can take from that model to apply to our work, with the help of other aspects. Christian shares with us that Scrum Masters must also take into account Structure, and Task, not only mindset.
In this segment, we also talk about “nudging”, which is based on the work of behavioral psychologists.
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About Christian Heidemeyer
Christian is a psychologist by training and a retrospective tool developer for Scrum Masters and Scrum Teams. His tool Echometer takes advantage of the latest science-based findings of team motivation and performance to help Scrum Masters run impactful retrospectives.
You can link with Christian Heidemeyer on LinkedIn.
There are many myths and fables about what makes a great team. In this episode, Christian, who is a Psychologist by training shares what he has learned from his own experience as a Scrum Master as well as from his research into what makes great teams tick.
