Seven steps to prepare yourself and your team for living and working in the VUCA project environment
How to manage risk in the VUCA project environment?
VUCA is a risk management framework — but it’s more of a risk spotting and visualization framework — that can help you prepare for the change of your mindset and prepare you for the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity of today’s world where you and your project live.
From our experience, before you even get serious about risk management in the VUCA project environment, you should first prepare yourself and your team for living and working in the VUCA project environment.
So how to do it? How to prepare yourself and your team?
By doing those seven things
- Build cohesive teams through mutual trust
- Create a shared understanding of the task ahead
- Provide a clear intent
- Exercise disciplined initiative
- Use mission orders
- Accept prudent risk
- Take care of appropriate competencies
Sounds familiar, right? Yes, it is Mission Command.
Build cohesive teams through mutual trust
Team building requires hard work, patience, time, and interpersonal skill from leaders and team members alike. As a leader, you build teams through multilevel interpersonal relationships and trust.
You should start making those relationships as soon as possible and maintain them throughout the project and even retain them after your work is done and you are heading to the next big thing. The first impression rule is especially important if you are parachuted in as an agile coach or/and team leader in a hot-potato project by senior management.
The best way to build trust is to be trustworthy. To be a respectable and well-respected leader, you need the trust of your team. Leaders who can build this kind of relationship with their team will find it much easier to motivate and lead them through even the toughest times.
On a side note, remember that you live in a world where LinkedIn exists and conversations at the water dispenser still kind of exist by virtual means so the opinion about you will reach your team before you turn up at the first Zoom call.
Here are some extra points to consider
- Why is there so much attention to team building? The answer is straightforward, pretty much each activity in the project that you will carry out, you will carry it out with or within your team.
- Do not solve problems yourself, do not use vertical structures to solve problems, shorten communication and build horizontal structures. Translating commands down a few floors makes no sense.
- Find a common value for your team and individual members, it will give you an efficient tool of motivation.
- Discover the characters of your team members using the available tools and use this knowledge to be a better leader.
However, when building the integrity of the team, you must remember about a certain risk. The better, more integrated, and self-sufficient team you build; the less likely this team will be interested or even able to integrate with other corporate cultures or teams in the organization.
Wait, what? Too much integration is a threat?
Well… kind of… You build a team whose members work like a commando unit, they understand their tasks, they know who can do what in the team, how far can they go with your intent, and so on. In such a team the ability to cope with the outside world will be lower. They will become too focused on their internal culture and won’t be able to accept the external culture.
Now, to put it another way, when your team works like a commando unit there is not enough understanding of other cultural codes among them and there is little you can do now to change that without destroying what you have been creating for so long.
Well… actually… there are several ways, but this is a topic for another article or a series of them.
Create a shared understanding of the task ahead
Part of the leader’s challenge is also building a common situational awareness in front of the team. Young, often top-down and not naturally selected leaders are thrown into projects often without a clear understanding of the strategic goal.
They have to decide for themselves what information is relevant to the team, what business details they can convey, and what they should leave for themselves. Too much detail is often counterproductive, as is insufficient sharing of these details.
This is a difficult matter, but there is one thing that is necessary for both the leader and the team member
A thorough, detailed description of the end state of the product.
I can’t stress enough that the final state should be described very clearly, and well enough that the listener will know whether reaching the goal in a slightly different way will be acceptable.
So that is what makes me a Leader?
What makes a leader in the eyes of the team is this
I have a task, I know the goal, that’s why I’m in charge
so if you know the tasks, you know the goal then you are in charge, but if you can’t describe it in understandable, reliable for the team way maybe it is worth of reconsidering your role.
Providing a clear intent
The intent is a clear and concise expression of the purpose of the project and desired result. But it is something broader than the team’s knowledge of the goal, it is the context of the task, a broader perspective that should be understood by the leader, and the whole team, which guarantees correct understanding of the goal in VUCA conditions.
This is the most important work to be done by the leader to visualize very clearly the final state and the boundary conditions of his acceptance and to convey it so that the team understands.
At this point you did saw that box above, It is a certain high-level abstract drawing that will help me to describe what I want to pass on to you, and I hope that it will help pass it further.
So that work frame is here to set certain limits in which the team can move towards the goal, and it will help to understand and accept (or not) prudent risk.
So if this box describes anything how it does do it?
To go further, I need to better describe what the individual walls are. Simply put, these are the things you as the Leader owe to your team.
You owe your team a Leader Intent, which is
- The purpose
- Key tasks
- The end state
The purpose is not the same purpose as you find in the Understanding the task or Using mission orders sections. It is broader it helps you and your team to understand where the team as a whole and its work fits in the grand schema, the big picture.
The good rule of thumb is understanding what your bosses and your junior colleagues do, preferably two levels up and two levels down from your position, if that is possible. You should know what your work is supporting and what it is enabling.
The key Task is not super specific by nature, they are like EPIC tasks in Jira, they are high-level concepts of the desired end state.
The description of the end state is an art in itself and deserves a separate article, what is essential is that you should describe it consistently, and clearly and make sure it is understood by all team members correctly.
Next are the other three sides of our framework, and they are
- Constraints — you must / you shall (do something)
- Restraints — you must not / you shall not (do something)
- Limitations — those are know-knows, facts, for example, the available quantity of a given resource like man-hours
This creates our framework for further work with the team. Feel free to use it when talking to bosses and the team.
Exercising disciplined initiative
At the center of Agile is the right to express concepts and opinions. The exercise disciplined initiative describes when and how feedback should be presented. The disciplined initiative is an action taken by your team usually when they encounter a blocker, an action that is of course aimed at bypassing or removing a given block. Often it takes the form of an uncoordinated, chaotic, ego-driven, unmoderated brainstorming session, that goes nowhere or brings up unrelated conclusions.
Whaaat?! It’s not that bad! You cannot take away this, you wrote yourself that it is a core Agile thing!
Don’t get me wrong, each member should be able to exercise disciplined initiative on how to achieve the goal, and how to reach the end state outlined by the leader but the key is disciplined. Remember that, according to your boss, there is never any time, and the importance of the task is always the highest, so by not transferring this otherwise bad attitude, you can make sure not to generate any waste that your boss may point out. To emphasize this again, you should encourage your team to exercise this, but in a coherent, structured way.
Team members who exercise disciplined initiative create opportunities by taking action to develop the situation. The disciplined initiative is active in the absence of orders, when existing orders no longer fit the situation, or when unforeseen opportunities or threats arise aka your team hit a Kanban Block.
Your job as a leader is to describe some basic rules your team should follow, and some basic actions they should perform. Let team members go through the selection of an idea in the comfort of their heads before they propose anything.
If you settle on a written form like RFC of sorts you can easily make it, so it contains a certain structure, situation assessment, implementation timeframe, descriptive way of reaching the goal, and basic risk assessment.
Use mission orders
Leaders use mission orders to assign tasks, allocate resources, and issue broad guidance. What is important in this rule is the ‘use’ part. Use mission orders to delegate responsibility to subordinates, do not accumulate tasks, assign them so often so that you feel that they have enough and then delegate a little more.
Yes, but why?!
Because as your position in the organizational hierarchy increases, so does the scope of duties and responsibilities, and the time you can spend on work remains the same. Remember that your boss pays you for the ability to prioritize, not for your ability to hoard endless tasks in the backlog.
The mission order should have a set formal structure, known to everyone, and should contain everything that the team member must know to carry out his mission, depending on the project, its elements may be
- User story
- Who, What, Where, When, and Why?
- Description of the result and definitions of acceptance criteria
- Broader intent description
Remember that if you will put ‘How?’ in mission order it will mean you want to micro-manage your team through the task you are supposed to delegate to them — and sometimes, in certain, specific cases it is okay, but you generally want to have a situation when you delegate tasks not micromanage your team members.
Accept prudent risk
The leader needs to understand and accept that the solution worked out by the team will be different than what he would have done/worked out himself if he were a doer in the team, while as long as the final effect is within the frames build by Intent — Constraints — Restraints — Limitations the task has been ended successfully. Those imaginary frames create a sort of playground for your team; after all, you won’t micromanage them to your ideal resolution, right?
Are you still imagining that ‘fenced’ playground? Imagine where you would land your ideal resolution.
It is in the middle, right?
Right… Now imagine when the real resolution will land, generally, that is anywhere but the center 🙂.
Now draw a line between the center and that point, the distance between those is the prudent risk you need to accept or not if it is outside the framework.
Line on paper? Really?! How do I measure that risk?
By performing agile rituals. What do I mean by that? Agile was built as a system where great emphasis is placed on communicating not only user stories or reporting results, but also blockers. A good habit is asking for confirmation of understanding of the task, e.g. during a voice conversation you can ask for a quick summary of the task assigned to the team member. At the end ask the team as well if they have any technical, procedural, or administrative questions. This will allow you to make the first reality check if the team understood their tasks correctly.
Are there other things we can do to ensure mutual understanding?
Well… yes… talk some more! Like you can expect the person you handed over the task to consider its execution and come back to you with a ready-made plan that will be presented to you; this is another point where you can verify whether a team member is still within the framework you have set.
Once you know the plan, you can turn into an underwriter for a moment and quantify this risk, if in your opinion the plan goes way out and over the framework you have set; then it is time to revise the plan and/or the Intent — Constraints — Restraints — Limitations Framework before the team starts implementation of that plan.
Take care of appropriate competencies
Today’s world puts a lot of emphasis on knowledge and skills, especially knowledge and skills that can be used in an innovative outside-the-box approach to a problem, whether known or completely new one.
I will not write here about how to fuel the hunger for knowledge in your team or how to propagate the knowledge across organizations, but instead, I will focus on being a leader.
The key to taking care of leading competencies is to build them inside your team from day one like that trust you are building. After all, you will not always be present in a given situation, you need to know that someone will be able to replace you even for a moment, you will not always be competent enough to be a leader in a given situation, sometimes a subject matter expert will become a temporary leader, you must be sure that he knows and understands how to exercise disciplined initiative, how to delegate work or how to define intent.
Create leaders that create leaders, this way it will be easier for you to delegate tasks and not waste time calculating risk. And remember one becomes a leader when one has a task and knows the goal — “I have a task, I know the goal, that’s why I’m in charge”, but you also become a leader through your experience and competencies, your CV, and your track record. Have that in mind when you are about to be parachuted into a hot-potato project by higher management, the team does not have to prove its worth, it is you, the Leader that has to show them that you are the real deal.
Wrapping Up
Risks posed by life and work — yes, among others I have Ukraine since 2014 in mind, but not only that, it is enough to look at the numerous maps of current crises of various kinds to understand that the whole Earth is glowing more or less intensely red — in the world of extraordinary volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity mean you need to work out appropriate strategies and implement appropriate tactics within them. The Mission Command philosophy is only one of the possibilities, but it has been proven in critical conditions by both the military and business.