Zoolocracy

04 Dec 2016

On the second day of XP Days 2016 Benelux, I attended the Holacracy session by Martin van Dijken and Jeff Kok. They have shared their slides if you’re interested. In this session, they showed us how to evolve our scrum team by adding some core Holacracy concepts, and they did this by making us build a zoo!

Holacracy

I can’t recall a genuine introduction to Holacracy or something about it’s origin. We talked a bit about what Holacracy would bring to the table, being purpose, roles, strategies and evolutionary change. We elaborated a few minutes on purpose, which gives us an alternative to working for a boss.

Off to the exercise then. We were split up into a few teams and each team had to build a zoo in 4 sprints. The goal was to maximize the amount of visitors. Each sprint took about 15 minutes, started with a planning meeting and ended with a retro. After eacht sprint, the teams would get scored and see their ranking. The first sprint was a warm-up round and with each next sprint, one of the aforementioned concepts would be added.

Sprint 0: scrum and feedback

The first sprint was quite chaotic. All of the good practices I had learned in my agile years were looooooong gone. We were all playing the developer role by building the zoo and drawing/creating animals. We did no initial planning meeting and forgot to do a retrospective (self organised teams). At the end of the sprint, we had a pretty good score and were in 2nd place.

Sprint 1: purpose

In this sprint, the concept of purpose was installed. Our mission was to protect and preserve (endangered) animals and to give our visitors a marvelous experience.

We tried different things to align with this purpose, like creating an education center to learn about pollution and the impact on nature, but we didn’t receive extra points for this effort. Later, it was explained that purpose doesn’t always mean the same thing as business value…

At this point, we had also learned that it didn’t matter how beautiful our animals were or how well crafted our plantlife was. An ugly, tiny elephant scribble would get just as many points. So we decided to go for gold and started drawing ugly animals as fast as possible.

At the end of the sprint, I actually felt really sad. It was like we had all given up on craftsmanship for the purpose of getting a high score and winning the game. At that point, we all decided we would stop the rat race and write well crafted code again.

Sprint 2: roles

This sprint brought in roles for our team members. Some predefined roles were handed out, like a researcher, a marketeer, etc… This was the first time we weren’t all doing developer work. For me, the roles gave focus and made me feel more relax. There was less chaos in the team, everybody had their goal.

Also, we were back at making beautiful creations, I felt way better already! We created some nice animal drawings, origami birds and 3D trees and plants.

Sprint 3: strategies

Finally, we were given some strategies, for example “endangered animals are appreciated more than other animals”. For me, strategies kind of linked the purpose to the business value.

Takeaways

I see now how these Holacracy concepts can make a team better. It reminded me of the things you do when you form a new team or start a new project. Things like making a mission statement, a slogan, or agreeing upon a set of team values.

The thing that sticked however, was how sad I felt when we were in the rat race, and how nice it was to go back to craftsmanship afterwards. It made me realize once more why exactly I love this job and that software development should be about other things than just churning out code.