Safe space

In work-oriented groups like software teams, safe space:

• is essential for all learning (on all levels: group and tribe);
• is a property of a social space where it is safe to take interpersonal risk;
• is a social space that welcomes the best idea, regardless of the source;
• encourages high levels of interpersonal risk taking, such as ask for help and temperature reading; and
• creates a bias towards engaged, active, group-level experimentation with many possible solutions.

Agile practices that work at the team level do not scale to the level of enterprise for the simple reason that a genuine and authentic stable team operates in safe space. Creation of enterprise-wide safe space is a non-trivial problem to solve, making scaling agile tough.

Creating safe space for a team is easy; creating safe space inside an entire organization or enterprise is hard.

tribal learning to tip the entire culture towards more safety, freedom, learning, and amazing results..

tribal learning effectively scales agility results to the next level up from teams—the departmental level. At departmental level, managers have the greatest formal and informal authority and influence. This is the sweet spot where wider-scope cultural change is achievable and can happen quickly.

An open space is specifically designed to be open, and maintain a safe space.

Lots of information is associated with feelings of safety that create the conditions for tribal learning. Make the space safer by providing as much information as possible about your current plans and intentions. scrum points the way by mandating the stable team and the product owner to announce intentions explicitly.

Sources

• The Culture Game—Tools for the Agile Manager by Dan Meznick