VUCA Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Sónia Won: How to Overcome The Pressure in a Small Feature Team Serving Multiple Products

In this episode, Sónia shares her experience with a small feature team consisting of 3-4 members responsible for delivering 3 products, each with separate calendars. The team constantly faced pressure, and the knowledge of the products was concentrated in just 2 team members. This knowledge imbalance led to overwork and complaints from those 2 members. In retrospectives, the team decided to address the issue and brainstormed solutions. They chose not to assign any work to the 2 overloaded members, leading to the knowledge spreading across the team over a few sprints. Sónia highlights the importance of discussing such challenges in retrospectives and emphasizes that team-driven solutions are key to addressing knowledge transfer issues during team growth.

Featured Book of the Week: Transforming Nokia, by Risto Siilasmaa

In this segment, Sónia discusses her favorite book, “Transforming Nokia” by Siilasmaa. The book explores how to handle tragedy scenarios while maintaining inspiration and optimism. It shares radical stories of optimism and serves as a valuable lesson for large companies, emphasizing that the market dictates the direction. The book’s concepts are linked to VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity). Sónia highlights that Scrum’s essential aspect is the ability to swiftly adapt to new requirements, making it a crucial tool for coping with changing circumstances in the business world.

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About Sónia Won

Sónia is an experienced professional with 17 years in Software Engineering. She has held roles as a Software Engineer, Scrum Master, and Agile Coach for a decade. Currently, as a Product Owner, she values teamwork and recognizes the significance of prioritizing people in any endeavor.

The big lesson she’s learned so far: no matter how complex a subject can be, the most important thing is to take care of people. Because teams, companies, and communities are made of those!

You can link with Sónia Won on LinkedIn and connect with Sónia Won on Twitter.

SPECIAL XMAS BONUS: Human Business and Business Agility with Thomas Juli

Thomas’ perspective on business starts with the idea that businesses exist to generate value for people. The ones inside, as well as outside the business.

As he started the book, he realized that the digital age had transformed our ideas about what being human in that medium was all about. He set out to write about what it meant to be humn in the digital age. However, that was just the start of the book.

In that first part of the book, Thomas explores questions such as “am I a resource?”, a very common question we hear when we talk to teams.

This exploration leads to the realization that businesses have to generate value for customers, stakeholders, but also (and critically) for employees.

The needed transformation of business on the path to Business Agility

Continue reading SPECIAL XMAS BONUS: Human Business and Business Agility with Thomas Juli

BONUS: Agile Leadership Fitness, get your HR leader to listen to this episode! with Nick Horney

As he helped leaders, Dr. Nick Horney worked hard to understand what was going on in the business world in a way that could be explained to others, and to form a curriculum for leaders in worldwide organizations. He came up with the acronym VUCA, which stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity.

Nick wrote a book titled VUCA Masters: Developing Leadership Agility Fitness for the New World of Work, and created a curriculum to help leaders deal with complexity in a VUCA world, this curriculum is part of the VUCA Masters Academy.

In this episode, we dive into what VUCA means in practice and share insights that Scrum Masters can take and help the leaders in their organization.

About Nick Horney

Dr. Horney has written four books. The most recent is VUCA Masters: Developing Leadership Agility Fitness for the world of work, the topic of this episode.

Nick retired from the U.S. Navy (Special Operations) at the rank of Captain and has applied that experience to his work with high performance team agility. He serves as a coach for The Honor Foundation focusing on the successful transition of Navy SEALs to the business world.

Dr. Horney founded Agility Consulting in 2001 and has been coaching leadership agility and organizational agility for over 30 years.

You can link with Nick Horney on LinkedIn and connect with Nick Horney on Twitter.