Happiness

• People want to be happy
• Thomas Jefferson -
• Pursuits do seem to be what make us happy
• Mountain climbers seem unable to stop themselves - challenging peak after peak, seeking joy in pursuit of the next summit.
• Most cultures are not set up to reward or encourage that specific type of happiness.
• Book - Happier by Ben-Shahar
• 'we are not rewarded for enjoying the journey itself but for the successful completion of a journey.
• Society rewards results, not processes - arrivals not journeys
• The importance of happiness really hit me when I was setting up my first scrum
• I realized that I had to address the team's emotional state as well as its mental state.
• True greatness is deeply rooted in joy. - to be joyful is the first step to success.
• Empowering people would never work in their world view.
• Going to lay out how important happiness is to your bottom line, and how to capture, measure and apply it.

Happiness is Success

• Research is clear -happy people do better.
• Happiness leads to success in nearly every domain of our lives.
• Study after study shows that happiness preceded important outcomes and indicators of thriving.
• Even just a little bit of happiness leads to markedly better outcomes.
• Even a small gesture can have a great impact.
• What scrum is focused on is taking those small things and systematically building them up into a scaffolding for success.
• With my team - I want social aspect to move directly with performance.

Quantifying Happiness

• Toyota - Taiichi Ohno crusade to eliminate waste.
• That goal led him to the idea of continuous improvement
• Constantly examine processes to improve
• Just as work is broken down into manageable chunks and time needs to be broken down into manageable pieces -
• Improvement needs to be sliced into a step at a time.
• Sprint Retrospective.
• Sit down and think about what went right,
• What could have gone better.
• What can be made better in the next sprint.
• The retrospective meeting is the 'check' part of Demings
• Plan, do , check, act cycle
• At the end of each sprint each person asks these questions.
• On a scale of 1 to 5 : how do you feel about your role in the company
• On the same scale : how do you feel about the company as a whole.
• Why do you feel that way
• What one thing would make you happier in the next sprint.
• The method exposes what is important to each team member and what they think is most important for the company.
• We tripled productivity simply by asking what would make people happier.
• A drop in happiness preceded a drop in velocity or productivity by weeks.

Make Everything Visible

• What are the things that actually make people happy?
• They're the same things that make great teams
• Autonomy
• Mastery
• Purpose
• One element of scrum that's often a prelude to achieving those - transparency.
• The idea that there is no secret cabal, no hidden agendas, nothing behind the curtain
• Scrum - anyone can go to any meeting
• Everyone will know everything.
• I'm not interested in individual performance - team performance.
• Use transparency to focus on improving the team.
• In Scrum - everything is visible.
• 'if you can't trust the people you are hiring to be on board with what you're doing, you're hiring the wrong people, and you've set up a system that has failure built in.
• Every scrum team across the planet - has a scrum board
• There are three tasks status levels
• To Do
• Doing
• Done
• A team can self-organize to defeat problems that become obvious once everything is transparent

Deliver Happiness

• CEO - Tony Hsieh - Zappos : wrote a book about it 'Delivering Happiness'
• Based on creating 'wow' moments for customers.
• Another way that Zappos keeps people happy is by giving employees a chance to learn and grow.
• On teams, people want to grow - they want to get better at what they're doing and find what else they can get better at.
• The idea is that mastering work motivates people.
• That is what Zappos wants
• I want people that love coming to work. It’s a change in mind-set
• From working for a company to working with my company.
• Imagine a company that everyone thinks of as my company.
• Where every day is a chance to get better, to do something better, to learn something new.
• Scrum provides a structure for the whole organization to head toward a common goal.
• Its pillars are
• Transparency
• Teamwork
• Collaboration