“How many of you have been on a team in a state of shared vision?” This is the question Jim McCarthy used to kick off last night’s Agile Boston presentation. “Now, stay standing if you thought that team was at least 2x as effective as a team without one… 5x more effective… 10x more effective.”  The majority of us stayed standing throughout.

Yes, that’s just what it is. So how do we create teams with this shared vision – those unstoppable, awe-inspiring teams that are so wonderful to be part of?

Jim and his wife Michelle have spent the last 15 years studying teams in their teamwork laboratory in search of an answer to this question. From this has evolved a set of commitments and protocols they call the Core Protocols.

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Thanks so much to all of the awesome people who attended Nate Oster & I’s workshop at Agile 2009.

We used games and ideas to look at how testers and programmers can really work together on agile projects in ways that makes sense on our teams. [Click Read More..... to view the slides]

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Want to know if your team is effective? Listen to them.

We can learn a lot about team effectiveness through research that’s been done on teams whose work can mean the difference between life and death. Namely, operating room teams and airline cockpit crews.

The airline industry, which gets such a bad rap, actually has a phenomenal safety record. An airline like United only loses a plane from an accident about once in every four million flights.

Hospitals, on the other hand, which we tend view as safe, are the cause of 44,000 – 98,000 preventable deaths in the US each year. Even at the low end, this tops the death rate from things we actually know to fear like breast cancer (~40,000), car accidents (~40,000) or, of course, airplane fatalities (~120).

So, clearly, the aviation industry is doing better in this respect, and the healthcare industry is now actively working to adopt some of their training, known as Crew Resource Management, or CRM for short.

What is it that they’ve learned? And, can it help us in software? Well, as I like to say, stop me if this sounds familiar…

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Last Tuesday, Andrew Stellman and Jenny Greene came to the Boston SPIN to talk about Beautiful Teams, the topic of a wonderful book they’ve just published. A book I believe Scott Berkun captured best when he said, "Stop complaining about your coworkers. Instead, get your team and your boss to read Beautiful Teams." And of course, once you hear Andrew & Jenny talk, or read their book, you just can’t help but think about the teams you’ve worked on… what makes the good ones great? What makes the awful ones so unbearable? Is there a recipe out there for creating those wonderful, beautiful teams that are so exhilarating to be a part of?

The best damn team I ever worked on was a startup. Right in the Internet hey day. It was exciting. It was fast paced. We worked 80+ hour work weeks, slept at the office, rarely had enough money for anything beyond the next couple of payrolls. But we were developing things no one had ever developed before and getting written up in magazines and had the ultimate brag factor over the cool things we were doing with audio and video. We had Microsoft begging us to tell them our secrets, AOL wanting to buy us (they eventually did). We took trips to the WinAmp and MTVi offices and went to RealNetworks parties hosted in museums. Man, we were HOT.

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