Presentation: Self-Selection for Resilience and Better Culture

I'm an Agile/DevOps coach and trainer and these days I'm interested in finding better ways to engage people in their work, their learning and co-creation. With my DevOps Culture, Self-selection and “Fear in the Workplace” games, I help organizations start their journey to a culture of experimentation, learning and high-performance.

I've tried facilitating self-selection at a couple of places and I've seen the results, not only for the participating teams but also for the organization at large. I've seen how individuals were getting more opportunities with self-selection and I wanted to share that experience with others.

I’ve also observed that a change, even a positive one, can trigger negative emotions in people. To reduce some of the anxieties around the event, I created a simulation game that can make a difference in preparing participants to their first self-selection event. In this session I will share the steps one can take to prepare and to run a successful self-selection event.

Self-selection is a facilitated process that allows people to choose what project they want to work on and which team they want to be a part of. Through this process, people are exercising autonomy!

As they form their new teams, they look for ways to master their skills, while keeping in mind the needs of the company. They also look for opportunities to become a part of a group with a  better team dynamic.

This process is very different from the way how most of the teams are being formed today. Traditionally it's up to the manager to pull the team together, whereas a self-selection gives power to people to select their team members.

It will be useful for all - from individual contributors to those in leadership roles.  From the individual contributors perspective, it's for educational experience, to get exposure to some of the alternative ways of building new teams. It's more actionable for managers and above; they have a power to influence an introduction of these kinds of processes as well as drive a mindset shift in their organizations.

I want them to be inspired by what's possible. Today they might be living with a choice that someone else had made for them. Whether it's a good choice or a bad choice, the people on the teams may have had very little say in it.  With self-selection, management can empower people to experiment with lots of different teams, to try out new skills. This would give people an opportunity to expand their skill set and learn more about the business, more about the latest technology etc.

This in itself can be a powerful motivator for improving employee retention and engagement. And keeping the best people employed with this company.

I want this persona to come back to their organization with this new knowledge and share it with others. Even if they can't put it in place right now, there is a big value in sharing that information with others in the company. And to me, it's like this drop that falls on a stone and makes a tiny dent. It's one of the drops after the others that eventually makes a difference.

I'm passionate about DevOps Culture and believe that there is a big power in recognizing that psychological safety goes hand-in-hand with a third way of DevOps. I'm interested in seeing that develop further.