Revolutionising Agile With Head-Stand-Ups

Revolutionising Agile With Head-Stand-Ups

So here’s a true story. I work with a normal sized team as per Agile/Scrum guidelines, about 8 people. We have our usual stand-ups every day, at about 10:30 in the morning. As a general rule, people have to join this meeting. Everyone speaks following the Scrum rules, just what is required: What I did, what I am going to do today and if I am blocked. And that’s it. Yet, our discussions diverge, others jump in to help whenever someone mentions why they are blocked, suggesting how it can be solved. It is helpful, it speeds us up in ways because it avoids need for a one-on-one meetings later, and team generally returns feeling the meeting was fruitful.

Yet, it results in our meetings getting extended, we have our stand-ups almost 20, at times 30 minutes long. This is something that has been on our mind for quite some time now, as a general rule, the stand-up should not be longer than 10 minutes, that is why we ‘stand up’, so we realise the time being spent physically, with a minor discomfort and that drives us to close the meeting sooner.

This is when I read about the “plank meetings”. Excited, I suggested to the team and everyone agreed agreed that this could help us reduce the time we spend in stand-up considerably, while giving everyone a healthy boost. We agreed to put it in practice. Now, for those who do not know what plank meetings are here are couple links explaining them. We decided we would start the next Monday, with the next sprint. But destiny seemed to have some different plans. During my yoga session on Sunday morning, it dawned on me that there could be something much more effective than this. It was the Shirshasana that gave me this idea! Shirshasana is an asana in yoga, where you stand on your head and keep the body and legs straight up, like a plank but upside down. This! This could be the thing we need to keep the timings in check.

Now Shirshasana, as a yoga form, has many, many benefits of its own. It is known to direct the blood flow to head and eyes, relieving stress, improving focus, and digestion. But the quality we are looking for most was that it makes us temporarily uncomfortable! Perfect! On the planned day, we started with this instead. There was just one simple rule:

  • No one speaks without first assuming Shirshasana form.

Now you see, there is no rule about when to speak, or who speaks. That is because on the first day we observed that entering this form and exiting from it is not easy, we needed help from others. Meaning it was intuitive that anyone who wanted to speak would have to wait for their turn and to get help from others to speak! This caused a revolution amongst us, we realised that this one change alone has brought us many benefits. Here are our observations:

  • First and foremost, meetings became short.
  • Meetings became fun.
  • Our habits changed to be more healthy. It is not advisable to consume food before performing Shirshasana, and hence we automatically started following better timings for breakfast.
  • Our team found that we were more interactive throughout the day. Somehow activity of helping each-other daily, and needing help from others was turning into a team-building exercise of sort. We may just have saved our company thousands of dollars.
  • More people around us took interest in this seemingly odd practice of standups and that created awareness about health and yoga across the organisation.

We as a team have never been better! Who needs stand-ups when ‘head-stand-ups’ are so rocking!

PS: Reading between the lines is an important skill, for others there are warnings in F12/console.

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