Among the rituals that encompass the agile method, the one that stands out the most is the daily stand up meeting, or Stand UP or Daily meeting, the name may be the least important, since each team adopts it in its own way, but the principles behind this event are what make it so powerful.
You may have read that during this ritual it is important to talk about 3 things:
What we have done since the last meeting;
What we will do until the next meeting;
What were or are our impediments;
But what many teams forget is that agile methodologies appeal to the subjective, in order to encompass as much information as possible and deal with complex and extremely flexible environments. So Stand UP gets its name precisely because it requires a simple but powerful notion: that everyone should be standing up, and that the meeting should last only 15 minutes.
There is a reason behind this: we are still animals that came from an evolutionary chain that lasted millions of years, and our evolution owes a lot to our ancestors. Human history has been based on moments of around-the-clock conversation, where we talked about achievements, losses, victories, and defeats. We have assimilated over time that sitting means talking, so we feel lighter to linger on subjects, and we often have digressions.
However, studies show that when our body is standing, it releases hormones that cause us to have exactly the opposite posture, we are more assertive, our communication is more direct, we have fewer digressions, and we are more focused. Probably because during the ages of our evolution, to stand and talk meant to be hunting, we need to be alert otherwise we could die in a wrong attack, purely natural selection.
Nevertheless, we live in a world where we are bombarded by information, and this has already changed our behavior. Professors at universities are already discussing an extremely relevant fact: the observation that they only have the students' attention in the first 15 minutes of class, this puts a huge pressure on the teaching system, and makes us reflect on the fact that if the information is not passed in the first 15 minutes, it probably won't be in the rest of the message. Maybe this is why so much is said about starting the story with the Why, using the golden cycle... but this is another story.
I have witnessed and experienced environments where stand-ups were done in rooms with everyone sitting down, and took more than 30 minutes talking about the issues of the day. Some companies are so stuck in their old ways of working, that even when they adopt the agile methodology they seem to simply change the names of their meetings and hierarchy, turning the Stand Up into a Departmental Meeting 2.0. Don't fall into this mistake.
The excuse of some companies lies in the fact that "the team is too big", you can't do it in 15 minutes. That's why it is important to remember that in agile management we always believe in the power of small groups. If the team is too big to get through its activities in 15 minutes, it also means that the group is big enough to not be interested in a part of the work that is being done.
It is preferable to break into small teams, and if the company's resources only allow one agilist per team, let that agilist break the meetings into fewer teams, and participate in all of them. In the end the time the agilist spends will be the same, if not less, while the time the whole team spends in the meeting will also drop. This will also help keep the team motivated and in synergy. There is nothing worse than listening for half an hour to a topic that simply doesn't interest you. Starting the day like this is then a demotivation bomb for your team.
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