Safe to experiment
Agile teams, clear intent and psychological safety.
- Level
- Bitesize
- Learning time
- 2 hours
- Where
- Leading people
- Price
- £39
When you step up to a higher level, what you paid in the last 12 months for lower-level courses inside the bigger course comes off its price, in proportion to how much of each is inside it, whichever topic it's from. Courses at the same or a lower level don't give credit against each other. A Focus course or above always costs at least £15. Read the full terms
Certificate of Completion
Overview and Outcomes.
Overview
Teams only experiment well when direction is clear and it is safe to speak. Across three parts, the course begins with leading agile organisations through Bungay's three gaps, Moltke's mission command, Kniberg's alignment and autonomy grid and McChrystal's team of teams. It moves on to agile team design, with Skelton and Pais's Team Topologies, cognitive load, Conway's Law and Google's Project Aristotle, read with care. It finishes with trust and psychological safety: Amy Edmondson's hospital study, in which the better units reported more errors, her three moves for leaders, competence and character trust, and why safe never means soft.
What you'll develop
In this Bitesize, you will develop the ability to:
- Distinguish technical problems from adaptive challenges, and explain Bungay's three gaps and why the instinctive response to each makes it worse.
- Compare points on the spectrum of team stability, and explain why stable, cross-functional teams that own a service suit work that keeps changing.
- Explain Edmondson's definition of psychological safety and use the standards and safety matrix to place your team.
- Set intent and boundaries for a team, checking understanding through backbriefing, so that the people closest to the work can decide how.
- Use Team Topologies, cognitive load and the inverse Conway manoeuvre to design or review teams around the service you want users to experience.
- Interpret error, incident and complaint data with the lessons of Edmondson's hospital study in mind.
- Assess how shared context, empowered execution and trust across boundaries could help the teams you lead move faster while keeping public accountability.
- Recognise how psychological safety underpins stand-ups, reviews and retrospectives, and plan leadership behaviours and working agreements that build it.
The Modules.
2 hours of learning.
- 06Leading Agile Organisations: Intent, Autonomy and AlignmentAgile teams need more direction, not less, but of a different kind. This module draws on Heifetz's adaptive challenges, Bungay's three gaps and directed opportunism, Moltke's mission command, Kniberg's alignment and autonomy grid and Greenleaf's servant leadership to set out five parts of the redesigned leader's role. McChrystal's team of teams and Task Force 714 show how shared context gives speed at scale.40 min
- 07Agile Teams: Structure, Safety and Cognitive LoadThe team, not the individual, is the basic unit of agile working. This module covers bringing work to stable teams, Skelton and Pais's Team Topologies with its four team types and three interaction modes, cognitive load as a design constraint, Conway's Law and the inverse Conway manoeuvre, and Amy Edmondson's psychological safety. Google's Project Aristotle is the case, read with care about what the company itself reported.40 min
- 06Trust and Psychological SafetyTeams learn only when it is safe to speak. This module sets out Amy Edmondson's definition of psychological safety, the standards and safety matrix, and her hospital study in which the better units reported more errors. It distinguishes competence trust from character trust, drawing on Covey, describes Edmondson's three moves for leaders, and separates the evidence from the myths, including the idea that safe means soft.37 min