Do you Ba?

Have you ever attended a backlog grooming session where participants appear detached, yawning around the table, the scrum master is sizing the stories and handing out the tasks, and hardly any questions are raised about the new user stories? How does this compare to the loud, agitated white board discussion, team members eagerly leaning in, volunteering their help, clarifying the objectives and acceptance criteria of the user stories presented? What's the word to describe the different feeling in these two rooms?

For a while now I've been looking for a way to describe this special spirit emanating from a high performing Agile scrum team and, thanks to Dean Leffingwell tip, I think I've finally found it.

Meet the "Ba"

In their research of organizational knowledge creation Ikujiro Nonaka and Ryoko Toyama define "Ba" as a shared context in motion, in which the context is constantly moving and the knowledge is shared, created and utilized. Through interactions with others and the environment, both the contexts of Ba and the participants grow. To participate in Ba means to get involved and transcend one’s own limited perspective.

In his blog (On “Ba” at a Scrum of Scrums) Dean Leffingwell builds on the original teachings and shows how Ba is essential to Agile software product development, as the energy that drives self-organizing teams. 

• Dynamic interaction of individuals and organization creates synthesis in the form of a self-organizing team.
• The fuel of Ba is its self-organizing nature - a shared context in which individuals can interact.
• Team members create new points of view and resolve contradictions through dialogue.
• New knowledge as a stream of meaning emerges.
• This emergent knowledge codifies into working software.
• Ba must be energized with its own intentions, vision, interest, or mission to be directed effectively.
• Leaders provide autonomy, creative chaos, redundancy, requisite variety, love, care, trust, and commitment.
• Creative chaos can be created by implementing demanding performance goals. The team is challenged to question every norm of development.
• Time pressures will drive extreme use of simultaneous engineering.
• Equal access to information at all levels is critical.

Now that we are more aware of it, what are the different options available to employees at all levels in their organization to help build and nurture Ba?