With great freedom comes great responsibility

Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash

No, this is not the Spider-Man quote. That one has to do with power. This one is about freedom 😁

Create an environment where people can flourish...

I strongly believe that we should create an environment where people are free to develop themselves, to choose how they work, free to be invested in what they do. When I started at the TV Apps teams of KPN iTV we (Nikki, the Product Owner and I as a Scrum Master) easily decided on how we wanted to work with our teams. We both strongly believe in creating an environment where people can flourish.

So, we decided to give the people a lot of freedom with a lot of responsibility. Those two - I believe - always go hand in hand. People can only have real freedom in their work when they at least carry a part of the responsibility. People need to feel the sense of what’s at stake. They need to become invested in their purpose and need to know that they individually or as a group can make a difference in achieving their purpose.

Activating all the brains in the room...

From the get-go we pushed a lot of the decisions back to the teams while at the same time creating a clear vision of where we wanted to go with the product and the team culture. Pushing back the decisions was done to activate all the brains in our teams to think along and help out! And creating a clear vision was done to ensure people knew what we expected of them and where we could use some help.

I for one never believe I know more than the group as a whole. So, why would I take the heavy burden upon me to make all the decisions alone? Push it back to the team. Let the people who feel the pain decide on how to handle it.

As a leader it’s very easy to create an environment of freedom if you also have created a save environment. We set out to create an environment where learning is the norm. Failing is almost mandatory because if you never fail how will you ever learn. We created a save environment by saying (almost preaching) things like; ‘we love experiments so yes go and try that’ and ‘Screw it, let’s do it! If it fails, we’ll learn something from it’ and ‘we trust your decision’. We asked a lot of questions too like ‘what do you think we should do? 

The team members bring their ideas...

To backup our words with action we started with lunch pitches. An awesome idea copy pasted from an other company. We bring the lunch and the team members bring their ideas. It was one of the changes we did because we wanted to inspire people to bring their best ideas and profit from all the minds that contributed. Yes, we did not start all ideas, but we did start some of the best ideas brought forward from our teams. Much better ideas than we could have thought up on our own. 

We created team hackathons. We thought let’s give them space to prove in 2 or 3 days how much potential value there is in their ideas. We created space in the planning so that they can have room to experiment with their awesome features. Not all ideas worked out but a lot of them were very valuable. The ones that weren’t… learned the teams lessons that we could not have predicted beforehand.

To confirm to our team members that we trust them...

We also made the sprint planning a Product Owner pitch of max. 10 minutes. Afterwards the teams created their own team planning after having heard their very clear sprint goal. This helped the teams to create their own sprint backlog and took away all the false pressure to fill their sprint to the max.  

These are only a few examples to confirm to our team members that we trust them and that the freedom and responsibility is real. It’s not fake. You can trust us to have your back. You decide your planning and what you feel is realistic in planning and we’ll back you up when push comes to shove. With the freedom and responsibility comes one rule; we always look back if what we did works for us. If not, we inspect and adapt and learn some more.

Credits to the teams...

This is the point where I have to give a lot of credits to the teams. They really went for it and they were not prone to hiding their mistakes and really loved experimenting. In the end the people that do the actual work are the real test if an idea works. If they weren’t eager to try new stuff our approach would probably not have worked. 

The result of giving freedom and responsibility is passionate people, awesome new features in our apps, faster releases, a team culture that feels like family and people that have a great sense of accomplishment by the work they do.

It works best hand in hand...

So, when you try to bring some change do it hand in hand with the people and activate all minds in the room (liberating structures’ can be a great toolbox to do so).

When you have the benefit for the organization in mind realize that the organization is made of people. Work with them. Like freedom and responsibility, it works best hand in hand.  

If you have questions or want to know how we created this save space. Let me know. We’d love to help. Don’t agree? Let me know. Let’s learn together.😁