GATEWAY TO AGILE
Happiness Event

THANK YOU

GERVAIS, ERIC, DAVID
Ø Gervais Johnson, MATRIX, Western Agile Lead,
Empower Agile Adoptions, Transitions and
Transformations, 16 Years IBM tenure / Agile
Thought Leader
Ø Eric Mittler, Wells Fargo, Manager for
international team supporting Wells Fargo
Internet Banking Services, evangelist for Speed
to Market
Ø David Bellamy, CEO of Happiness Lab, focused
on workplace happiness and well being of people
within hyper-performing organizations
Relevant Certifications:
PMP, ACP, CSM, CSP, CSPO, LeSS,
SAFe SPC4, ACC, CISP, ICAgile Coach

HAPPINESS =
PERFORMANCE
Agile Ecosystem Thread #1

Happiness
Science
Work
Shop
Debrief
Dark Agile
OUR
AGENDA

AGILE ECOSYSTEM
Happiness
Thread

HAPPINESS = HIGHER PERFORMANCE
Definition of Done
Definition of Fun
Jeff Sutherlands paper ‘Teams That Finish Early
Accelerate Faster’
Happier People are 12 % More
Productive
You Improve What You Measure

Why focus on
Happiness

“I want the best version of our employees to show
up every day”
everyone

Engaged or
Happy?

Success, leads to happiness, right?
We’ll be so happy when we’re done!
We send rewards, praise & bonuses at the end.
We take vacations after we finish.

What defines your happiness?

What happens when we’re happier?
43% greater productivity (Hay Group)
33% higher profitability (Gallup)
37% increase in sales (Shawn Achor - Harvard)
300% more innovative (HBR)
51% lower staff turnover (Gallup)
66% lower sick leave (Forbes)
125% less burnout (HBR)

…and it’s not just about work
“…Happy individuals are successful across
multiple life domains, including marriage,
friendship, income, work performance, and
health.”
- S. Lyubomirsky

So we’re measuring happiness

Understanding happiness and working to improve
it will help companies, teams and the individuals
within them
it’s win, win, win.

Transforming performance through happiness
www.HappinessLab.com
@happiness_guy

Eric Mittler
Tech Manager
MA Psychology UMN
The How of Happiness?

1
9
Assumption:
You want to succeed and
improve.
Right?

How do you feel?

If you are not taking that question seriously, you are likely
underperforming

How does your team feel?

Really?
Have you asked?

What are you
doing about it?

A lesson from
Cooperative Learning
Positive Psychology

What’s the secret to
increasing team
happiness?

Answer:
Experiment
& Iterate

WHAT IS HAPPINESS?
• Eudaimonia
word commonly translated as happiness or welfare; however, "human
flourishing" has been proposed as a more accurate translation. -
Wikipedia
• Joyful, Delighted, Smiling
• Challenged without being Stressed Out
• Feeling Good, Untroubled, Comfortable
• Empowered - A Manageable amount of Stress

Stress
BigSuperImportant
DeliveryDay!
Confidence
Consider People’s Feelings in the Process
29
Emotion

Emotion ★ Celebrating micro deliveries
★ Criticism is from people who care
★ Rapid corrective action promotes feelings of safety.
Victory!Celebration Celebration Celebration
Stress
Success
30

PRACTICAL SOLUTIONS
3
1
Experiment!!!
Please don’t use Waterfall to
adopt Agile.
Continuity. You need a team that
sticks together.
Attain an Agile Mindset
(Linda Rising -
http://lindarising.org)

EXPERIMENT:
STAND UP @ STAND UP
• Literally stand up (one leg?)
• Try alternative delivery methods (sing/
cartoon)
• Be Present, In Person (or on video)
• Say 4 things: 1) what you did, 2) what
you will be doing, 3) What blockers you
have, 4) Something cool you saw
someone else doing
3
2
Pull up! You’re gonna crash!
Why: Stand-ups move faster making team happier. People will smile more.
Problematic/confrontations are made eaiser

EXPERIMENT:
PASS THE BATON
• At major ceremonies (Iteration Planning or Retrospective), practice “passing
the baton”
• Cookie rotation
• When finished speaking, pick the next speaker by
looking that next person in the eye and say
“Vijay, so how do you feel?”
• Only the person with the Groucho Marx glasses
gets to speak.
3
3
Why: Making meetings fun. Make measuring affect a natural part of the process.

EXPERIMENT:
LEVEL UP!
• Pair on everything!
• Rotate pairs every stand up
• Pick stories — never assign them! It’s more fun to race to
pick a story than to have someone assign it to you. Just
stop using the word “assign” or “assignment”
• If you don’t know how to do it, you are in charge.
Only have novice people own Stories or Tasks that they
do not know how to do.
Then the expert, who does know, is put in charge of
making sure the novice succeeds.
Why
• Creates a supportive social environment.
• It’s OURS not MINE alleviates stress.
• The act of rotating/variety is fun.
• Having people compete to get to a story rather than a
PM assign a story is a more happy state.
3
4

EXPERIMENT:
HEAT MAPS IN RETRO
• Agile teams write retro comments
on red cards
• One observation per card
• Use the card color to indicate
how you feel
• Voilà insta-heat map
3
5
Why Coders are often shy to say how they feel.
Get a metric without much work & without being anonymous.

EXPERIMENT:
GAMES & BREAK TIME
• Encourage team to take an hour or
TWO to play
• Get a ping pong table
• Have a chess board out
• Dominion! by Rio Grande FTW
• Get a video game console
• Geek out
• Have a public leader board
3
6
Why: Playing games, doing puzzles & sports INCREASES happiness,
productivity, and the desire to be present.

EXPERIMENT:
STUPID NAMES
• Name your servers, projects, code
names something stupid
• Nick names (can be self picked) for
people
• Sum up your iteration or epic with a
stupid code name (can be done mid
iteration)
• Inside jokes the leadership team doesn’t
understand.
3
7
Why: Make some future teammate unexpectedly laugh.
Build a team culture. Make sure you are always respectful.

EXPERIMENT:
PRAISE & COMPLIMENTS
• In retrospective force grumpy people to assert 5 cool things
that happen are allowed to voice a criticism
• A “cool thing” can be anything, can be silly or even gallows
humor
• This will skew your heat map, but you can do math.
• Encourage an atmosphere of gratitude
• Ask why others cannot do that cool thing too
3
8
Why Praising others makes one feel good internally.
It is nearly impossible to both wish someone well and wish them ill at the same time.

EXPERIMENT:
NO DUE DATES OR COMMITMENTS
3
9
• Continuous Delivery Instead of Due Dates
• Commit to working hard = Happy
• Committing to completing a task on a due date = Stress
• Use math to predict feature completion
WHY
• Committing to task completion on a specific date is stressful and naturally
results committing to the least amount of work e.g. Slow to Market.
• Committing to work hard or harder than before, is empowering and happier

EXPERIMENT:
SAY PEOPLE’S NAMES
4
0
Why: Hearing your name engages you makes
you feel included and happier
• Encourage everyone to learn everyone
else name
• Practice the pronunciation of everyone’s
name
• Learn something about everyone on your
team

EXPERIMENT:
BREAK DOWN HIERARCHIES
4
1
Why: DevOps logic. Over time the team
will all be raised up.
Empowerment is a key to happiness
• Empower everyone
• Rotate leadership. Have novices lead
• Senior people do not lead!!!
• Senior people are in charge of ensuring
novices succeed or fail gracefully

EXPERIMENT:
TECHIE TOYS
• Your coders should have kick ass
laptops, two HD monitors and the
fastest network connection possible.
Certainly better than what they have at
home.
• Telepresence robotic flying drones
• WiFi enabled expresso machines
• you get the idea
4
2
Why: Techies love environments that…wait for it…have tech

EXPERIMENT:
INNOVATION SPIKES
4
3
Why This engages & motivates Techies. Team discovers new better ways to
work. Fosters happier teams.
• Have special stories in your
backlog to research new
tech
• Have special days when
you go off your iteration
stories to explore new tech
• Have moon shot projects
that you expect to fail

4
4
Practical Experimentation Themes
Note these themes in the suggested experiments
1. Being Physical/Kenetic vs stationary
2. Alternative & Alternating Communications
3. Being Present rather than Virtual
4. Adding Variety
5. Increasing joy in others & respect
6. Gamification

All this stuff is just “nice to have.”
Work is not supposed to be fun.
I’ll wait until management tells me
to be happy.
I don’t care about success.
This will never work.

4
6
Assumption:
You want to succeed
and improve.
Right?
Or are you just waiting to be told what to do?

4
7
How do you feel?
cool cats code

Questions
&
Answers
Discovery

POWER START
• P = Purpose
• O = Outcome
• W = WIIFM
• E = Energize and Engage
• R = Roles/Responsibilities

WORKSHOP TEAMS
Chief of Happiness
Chief of Customer
Facilitators
Facilitator: Answer Work Shop Instructions, Gets Help
Chief Agile Officer

WORKSHOP DETAILS
TEAM SCENARIO
The team is not performing
optimally, the Burn Down
Chart, Velocity, and other
management reporting is
showing poor performance in
all categories, thus causing
unhappiness within the team
and leadership. The team
morale is low and the last
retrospective illustrated
very low Team Health.
Workshop Summary:
Objectives to demonstrate how to determine individual and team happiness and to come up with
experiments to improve team health and specifically the happiness level
We will use the Retrospective format for team discussion and coming up with the 3 experiments
The team will present their results to the entire audience
Under performing team members
Half of the team members has
low motivation and morale
due to stress at work
One member has low
motivation and moral due to
issues at home
Changing and volatility of success
criteria
During the last 2 Sprints the
success criteria of 50% of the
Stories selected are changing
During the last 3 Sprints the
success criteria of 20% of the
Stories selected are insufficient
UNRELAISTIC DEMANDS (MICRO-
MANAGING)
Since the beginning the Business
executive has been demanding
more completion of Stories per
Sprint than what we have
indicated can be done
Over the last 2 Sprints the
Product Owner keeps wanting
to add Stories in the middle of
the Sprint and does not take No
for an answer
Product Owner is not present
during the Sprint Review

WORKSHOP DETAILS
Each team will DESIGN at least 3 EXPERIMENTS to address the low Team Health and
improve CONDITIONS OF TEAM HEALTH AND HAPPINESS. We are looking for Story
level details. The team will present the 3 Experiments to the audience where they will be
rated using the Happiness Lab
Team Presentation
Each team will present their 3 EXPERIMENTS to the audience.

WORKSHOP DEBRIEF
Experiences
Wow Moments
Feelings
Follow-up

UNDER THE HOOD OF HAPPINESS LAB
Feb 22, Wednesday
6 – 8 PM
601 Montgomery St
Suite 650

UNHAPPY TEAMS = DARK AGILE

DARK AGILE
Happiness Therapy

MORE HAPPINESS = MORE AGILE
Barriers to Agile
Adoption can be torn
down with happiness

AGILE ECOSYSTEM
Dark Agile is created
by improper alignment
and care of your Agile
Ecosystem AND
Unhappiness

DARK AGILE PATTERNS
Technocentrics
Self-Absorbed
Augmented Reality
Laissez-Faire Grand Unified Theory

TECHNOCENTRICS
Too much Focus on
Agile Practices and
Tools
Individual Collective
(Limited) Interior

SELF-ABSORBED
Too much Focus on
Agile Practices and
Tools + Agile Humanity
All Individual Interior

AUGMENTED REALITY
Little or No Focus on
Organization and
Culture & Environment
Individual Collective
(Selective) Interior

LAISSEZ-FAIRE
Insufficient Focus or
Alignment Across
Quadrants
Individual + Collective
Interior + Exterior
Minimalist

GRAND UNIFIED THEORY
Too Much Focus on
Each Quadrants, No
Synchronicity
Individual + Collective
Interior + Exterior
Extermist

GATEWAY TO AGILE
Roadmap and Interests Groups

ROADMAP

GRAND CHALLENGE
Team to organize and operate
grand challenge
Prize $TBD

EVENT COORDINATION
Team to help with
Meetup and
Events

SPONSOR MANAGEMENT
Team to help with
Sponsors

THANK YOU
Taste of Scrum at First Republic Bank Next