Agile Habits

I've recently begun reading Charles Duhigg's bestselling book about habits and right off the bat I'm seeing a lot of suggestions for changing habits that are fundamental to scrum. (And I have to admit I only started reading it because I attended a Meetup about agile and habits!) To sum up the book Duhigg discusses a concept called the habit loop. The habit loop is composed of a cue that triggers the habit, the simple or complex routine you perform, and the reward you get because of the habit.

Many features of this so far actually make me wonder if Sutherland knew about the research discussed in the book when he set about creating scrum. For instance, Duhigg notes that the process for changing habits requires deliberately evaluating the cues that trigger habits and then changing the routines that go with them. Sound familiar? It does to me via scrum's sprint retrospectives. At the end of every sprint you evaluate the habits you've intentionally or unintentionally institutionalized and work to change them over the course of the sprint.

Another aspect of scrum that works analogous to habit formation is belief. Scrum only works if every member of the team believes that it will work and has the discipline to follow it even if they don't want to. Habits require the same buy in and discipline. Say your team has a bad habit of committing their code changes before they've been reviewed. The best way to make this stick is to get everyone to believe this is in their best interest and start doing it.

But wait! There's one more thing they hold in common. When you're trying to make exercising a habit you should celebrate each small success: lifting one more rep or running longer or faster. Going back to our example, it's important to acknowledge and congratulate team members for properly reviewing code before commits. This represents the reward of the habit.

Overall, I look forward to finishing the rest of the book!