Teams

In yesterday’s post I used the image of going on an adventure to overcome the perceived pressure of an empty page. I find that a special type of adventure, an expedition, is also a very good metaphor for the topic of project management, especially iterative, agile project management for software development.

Because a project is a team effort, the image of an expedition to unknown territory is really fitting. Like a project, you need a whole team of people for such an expedition.

When I have to make a difficult decision, I have these voices in my head. One voice that says I should pick this one option, another voice that says I should pick the other option. When I learned to listen more closely, I realized that there are even more voices that have an opinion about the situation. I believe most people experience a similar thing. Have you?

Friedemann Schulz von Thun developed a model that captures this experience, when he was teaching Psychology at the University of Hamburg, Germany, from 1975 to 2009. He called his model “The Inner Team”. I first learned about the Inner Team when I read his book Miteinander Reden 3, probably around the time when it was published in 1998 or 1999. This book was never translated to English, but I would roughly translate the title as “Talk to each other, part 3”.

When you hear the words “It’s not rocket science what we are trying to do here!”, you are hearing the words of a frustrated person. When I hear this sentence in a software project, I have found the person usually means this:

• “Why don’t the software developers just implement what the business asked them to do?”
• “Why do we need another meeting to talk about the requirements?”
• “Why is this taking so long?”

Talk to the software developers, they might tell you why: