InfoQ Homepage Collaboration Content on InfoQ
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Approaches and Techniques to Break Down Silos: Learnings from QCon New York
At QCon New York 2023, Emily Webber presented Bridging Silos and Overcoming Collaboration Antipatterns in Multidisciplinary Organisations, where she showed a worrying trend in the industry of specialisation and silos at the expense of collaboration, shared responsibility, and valuable outcomes. She shared some approaches and techniques to break silos down to work together better.
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A Culture of Continuous Experimentation: Learnings from QCon New York
At QCon New York 2023, Sarah Aslanifar presented Building a Culture of Continuous Experimentation. She showed how fostering a culture of continuous experimentation and leveraging the principle of continuous learning can drive efficiency, eliminate waste, and improve product outcomes.
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Embracing Complexity by Asking Questions, Listening, and Building a Shared Understanding
When dealing with an environment that feels complex, people commonly look for ways to reduce variability and increase control for dealing with complexity. An alternative approach is to embrace complexity by acknowledging that it exists, asking questions and listening, and constructing a shared understanding based on different perspectives. This lets us improve how we adapt on an ongoing basis.
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Debugging Difficult Conversations as a Pathway to Happy and Productive Teams
Any time we talk to someone or to a group when there are high stakes and/or high emotions, difficult conversations can happen. If we ignore difficult conversations they typically don’t resolve themselves, in fact, they often get worse. Handling difficult conversations involves thinking about the logistics, having the proper mindset, and preparing yourselves.
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Curiosity and Self-Awareness are Must-Haves for Handling Conflict
When you're in a team, collaborating with others, it's crucial to embrace diverse opinions and dissent; you need to have good conflicts. Conflicts have bad reputations, but with curiosity you can harvest more positive outcomes and build trust and psychological safety. Self-awareness of your emotions and reactions can help prevent saying or doing something that you might regret later.
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How Open-Source Maintainers Can Deal with Toxic Behavior
Three toxic behaviors that open-source maintainers experience are entitlement, people venting their frustration, and outright attacks. Growing a thick skin and ignoring the behavior can lead to a negative spiral of angriness and sadness. Instead, we should call out the behavior and remind people that open source means collaboration and cooperation.
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What Engineers and Companies Can Do to Increase Social Impact
Engineers in the tech industry have the means for social impact through their network, skills, and experience. Companies can create impact by making business practices socially-minded. Inclusive training considers the circumstances and backgrounds of individuals, with minimum entry barriers to ensure broad participation, including ethnicity, gender, neurodiversity, and socio-economic background.
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Leading in Hybrid and Remote Environments: Skills to Develop and Tools That Can Help
Leading in hybrid and remote environments requires that managers develop new skills like coaching, facilitation, and being able to do difficult conversations remotely. With digital tools, we can include less dominant and more reflective people to get wider reflections from different brains and personalities. This can result in more diverse and inclusive working environments.
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Learnings from Applying Psychological Safety across Teams
Applying ideas from psychological safety can enable people to speak up in teams about what they don't know, don't understand, or mistakes they have made. Trust and creating safe spaces are essential, but more is needed. People need to feel that they will not be punished or embarrassed if they take interpersonal risks.
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How We Can Use Data to Improve System Quality
To understand how systems are being used, we can collect metrics and identify trends over time. The data and insights gained can be used to improve system quality by improving software design or testing patterns.
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The Myth of Product Mindset: It's What You Do, Not How You Think
Companies nowadays are looking for ways to cultivate a product mindset. While the idea of cultivating a “product mindset” allows us to focus primarily on ourselves, actually transforming our organizations often means changing our behavior to focus on our customers and how we work together to serve them.
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Motivating Employees and Making Work More Fun
Progressive workplaces focus on purpose and value, having networks of teams supported by leaders with distributed decision-making. Employees get freedom and trust, and access to information through radical transparency that enables them to experiment and adapt the organization. In such workplaces, people can develop their talents and work on tasks they like to do, and have more fun.
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Establishing Autonomy and Responsibility with Networks of Teams
Working in outdated ways causes people to quit their work. Pim de Morree suggests structuring organizations into networks of autonomous teams and creating meaningful work through a clear purpose and direction. According to him, we can work better, be more successful, and have more fun at the same time.
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Promoting Empathy and Inclusion in Technical Writing
Empathy is the first step in practicing sustainable, genuine inclusion. If persons or groups of people feel unwelcome because of the language being used in a community, its products, or documentation, then the words can be changed. Identifying divisive language can help to make changes to the words that we use.
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Trust-Driven Development: Accelerate Delivery and Increase Creativity
By building trust you can break silos, foster collaboration, increase focus, and enable people to come up with creative solutions for products and for improving their processes. The DevOps movement was created to break the silos in the organisations; trust can be built by organising pair programming across various functions and various teams.