Introduction

From an agile perspective, anything we can do to “set the space” for the team can be quite powerful. ORSC has a tool called Design the Team Alliance - DTA (and similarly Design Leadership Alliance - DLA or Design the Coaching Alliance - DCA).

Here I’m going to focus on the DTA, but the intent is the same across all of them. That is to…

Co-create a culture, ecosystem, or atmosphere in which the team agree to create and operate within.
Co-create a sense of shared responsibility within that space.
Co-establish a sense of intentionality and awareness.
Co-set expectations for everyone.

Space-setting at a team (system) level is something that is incredibly important in agile contexts. I want to explore it a bit more in the context of “new” teams…

Kicking off a New Team

Teams get instantiated quite often in agile contexts. Either an organization is—

Creating / spinning up a brand new team;
Adding new team members to an existing team;
Major reorganization of a set of teams.

First I want to amplify that adding a “single new member” to an existing team is essentially making it a new team. Therefore, going through an exercise of (re)establishing your DTA should be something that you as a coach see as a healthy, normal, and potentially frequent exercise with your teams.

Chartering

I’d like you to consider DTA’s as an activity within a larger framework focused on “chartering” your teams. I’ve often written about

Distributed Agile Teams—The Art of the Start - this is focused on distributed teams and a bit dated (2013), but much of it is still relevant here.
Chartering, Lift-off, Setting the Stage, From the Beginning - this one is more recent. Of particular note is the invitational or self-selection focus of Sandy Mamoli.
Building Agile Teams—A Primer for Organizational Leaders - this is a general purpose primer for building teams.

Finally, I consider DTA’s as part of the Begin with the End in Mind that Steven Covey spoke about in the 7-Habits of Highly Successful People. I don’t think we can ever “overdo” it.

DTA Questions

The questions we ask are the key to setting the DTA. You can set it for a team, group, partnership, etc. From an agile perspective, I’ll focus the language towards teams. Here are some examples of DTA-setting questions—

What is the culture, space, or ecosystem you want to create in the team. And, how would you know that you’ve achieved that? What would it “look like”?
How do you want the ecosystem to feel? Let’s find some words, for example (empowering, open, supportive, creative, etc.)
How do you want to behave together when the “going gets tough”? When there is conflict? What would be your conflict handling protocols?
What can your team (or system) count on from you?
What will each of you commit to for one another? What would that “look like”?

A Personal Example

Lately I’ve been setting DTA’s in my CAL-I classes. At the beginning of the first class, I’ll establish a short list of terms that define the space we wish to create. For example:

We wish for curiosity to be part of our ecosystem.

Then I’ll ask the group/class to explore that the term means to them? What would it look like to us? How would we know that we’re showing it? And I’ll capture some attributes that expand curiosity for our class.

I’ll do that for 3-4-5 terms. Exploring what each of them means to our system (the class).

I’ve found that this intentionality around opening the container (the class) with a DTA helps to establish our learning ecosystem. And, since each person weighs in on what it means to/for them, there is a Deep Democracy aspect.

Design Coaching Partnership (variant of DCA)

Agile coaches are often tasked with coaching leaders. This often takes three forms—

Coaching an individual leader (either by invitation/curiosity or by need based on your coaching goals and organizational observations);
Coaching a pair of leaders (again, either by invitation/curiosity or coaching goals);
Coaching a group of leaders (leadership team) usually by invitation.

In all of these cases, one of the first steps you as a coaching should take is establishing (designing) your coaching partnership with your client(s) or the system.

Coupled with this is defining, exploring, and understanding your client(s) agenda so that you can serve it and them.

You would do this at the beginning of your overall coaching relationship with them and then at the beginning of each coaching session. I know this sounds restrictive, but the entire notion of DTA’s is about establishing a working agreement and clarity in the system and relationship to your coaching. So, it’s important to begin well.

Possible DCP Questions

These would be for an individual coaching session and one based on invitation from the client(s)—

What would you like to work on today?
What outcomes are you looking for?
How would you know it when we had met those outcomes?
At the end of the session, did we meet the outcomes you were looking for?