For the last year, I’ve led the web team at Trainline on a test and learn journey towards a new way of working called evolutionary management. Building on the foundations of agile, this management paradigm adds a new playbook of practices meant to promote self-management, wholeness, and evolutionary purpose.

Part one of this series describes my journey towards discovering this way of working, while part two details the self-management and wholeness practices we tested within Trainline’s web team.

In this concluding blog post, it feels appropriate to focus on practices to evoke evolutionary purpose, perhaps the least explored breakthrough of evolutionary management. I’ll particularly detail team morale measurement, the most important practice I’ve found to stimulate transformation within a team. I’ll also look to the future of evolutionary management and share advice to get started in your team.

Evolutionary Purpose Practices

The Purpose Wall

Experiment:

After one retrospective, I asked the team to reflect on a new question — What larger purpose do you see your work contributing towards? The team took 5 minutes to write their answers in silence on post-it notes and then shared their answers with the group. After the conversation, we stuck all the post-its up on the wall next to the team area and called it the purpose wall. Anytime a team member had a new reflection on what they were working for, they were invited to write it up and stick it to the wall.

Results:

What we wrote was sincere and surprising. Responses ran the gamut from the functional (“To sell more train tickets”) to the fanciful (“To be able to book a train ticket from London to home in Kuala Lumpur”) to the transcendent (“To reduce inequality in Europe by making train travel cheaper and easier”).

I found this a powerful exercise, but it needs to be updated regularly to be kept alive and relevant. While the purpose wall retains its dedicated space next to the team, some of the stickies have fallen off without replacement. I hope to hold a new conversation to fill the purpose wall again with the hopes and dreams of the new joiners.

One Week Sprints, No Estimation

Experiment:

While out-of-the-box Scrum prescribes two week sprints and story point estimation, we opted instead for one week sprints and no estimation. We hoped that forgoing estimation would reduce the time needed for effective sprint planning, allowing for more frequent rounds of learning while leaving plenty of time to focus on the work itself. We also held short retrospectives each week.

Results:

This weekly cadence allowed our team to adapt quickly to the changing demands of the company and marketplace. For instance, we were able to deliver Trainline’s first ever seat sale campaign on the web — a massive endeavour requiring significant cross-cluster concurrent development — with two weeks’ notice. The frequent retrospectives also accelerated the pace of process improvement, enabling us to operate less from predict and control and more from sense and respond.

Team Morale Measurement

Experiment:

Operating from sense and respond requires the ability to stay present not only to what the company and the marketplace needs but also to what the team needs. To better sense the team’s needs, we decided to measure team morale as rigorously as we measure conversion and sales.

Here is how it works. Every Friday morning, I sent out a survey to each team member asking how much they agree or disagree on a scale of 1–7 with the following statements:

1. I am enthusiastic about the work that I do for my team
2. I find the work that I do for my team of meaning and purpose
3. I am proud of the work that I do for my team
4. To me, the work that I do for my team is challenging
5. In my team, I feel bursting with energy
6. In my team, I quickly recover from setbacks
7. In my team, I can keep going for a long time

I borrowed this scale from Christiaan Verwijs’ excellent post on the topic and adapted it by simplifying the question set and keeping scores anonymous to help ensure honest responses.

Once all scores were in, I averaged them across the team, plotted them on a graph, and showed that week’s results at our team’s retrospective. If the scores were up, we celebrated what was working. If the scores were down significantly, this was often enough to spark an honest conversation about what was really going on.

Results:

Tracking team morale kept us honest and connected to purpose and to one another. Indeed, there are several difficult but important conversations which I believe wouldn’t have happened were the team not grappling with the graphic reality of the data in front of them.

For instance, after observing a big dip in the last week of March 2016, I asked the team what was up (or down, rather). After a tense silence, one developer spoke up, “I don’t think we really care about quality. We’re just merging in code and building up debt.” What followed was a remarkably honest discussion about why we weren’t acting like we cared, and it became clear that we had lost connection with purpose — both our individual purpose as developers and our shared purpose to serve our millions of customers. Out of this conversation, we made a commitment to a peer code review process which persists to this day.

Looking at a burndown chart would not have sparked this collective inquiry because velocity doesn’t capture how team members feel about the work. Team morale does. Our feelings about our work are the best sensor I know for getting at the deep quality the team is creating, which is to say the meaning the team is creating.

Evolve Your Team

The work of evolution is never done — it only stops when we stop experimenting. The web team continues to experiment and evolve after I’ve moved on to a new role as the product owner for data science, a testament to self-management in itself. I’m now focused on evolving the way that all teams interact with one another at Trainline, namely the way that the organisation operates as a whole.

If you are feeling some of the stress and anxiety of working in a team operating from Achievement-Orange, you may want to consider introducing some practices from Evolutionary-Teal.

If you do choose to venture into new ways of working, I’d suggest starting with measuring team morale. This practice brings focus to the team and not just the work. Turning attention inward to how the team really feels will create the desire and curiosity to take that first creative step forward, past which anything can happen.

Each team is unique. The only path is to experiment your way forward.

Enjoy your journey!

<< Part 1: Practicing Evolutionary Management at Trainline: The Journey to Evolutionary-Teal and Beyond…

< < Part 2: Practicing Evolutionary Management at Trainline: Experiments in Self-Management and Wholeness

About the author

Ian is a senior product owner at Trainline passionate about building great products, teams, and organisations. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, he has been working and learning proper English in London for the past seven years. Ian has an MSc in Decision Sciences from the London School of Economics and a BA in Cognitive Science from Yale University.