Vulnerability in OSS

All over the world – from America’s National Football League (NFL) to the National Basketball Association (NBA), from our own AFL to NRL – athletes and coaches are cultivating club cultures in which tales of personal hardship and woe are welcome, even desirable. All are clamouring to embrace the biggest buzzword in professional sport: vulnerability.
The most publicised incarnation of this shift was the “Triple H” sessions used at AFL winners Richmond last year, where once a fortnight a player stood and shared three personal stories about a Hero, Hardship and Highlight from their life
.”
Konrad Marshall
, GoodWeekend.

I’ve just done a quick rummage through the OSS and/or tech-related books in my bookshelves. Would you like to know what I noticed? None mention teams, teamwork or culture, let alone the V-word quoted above – vulnerability. Funny that.

I say funny, because each of the highest-performing teams I’ve worked with have also had great team culture. Conversely, the worst-performing teams I’ve worked with have seen ego overpower vulnerability and empathy. Does that resonate with your experiences too?

Professor Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School refers to psychological safety as, “a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.” Graeme Cowan states, “We become more open-minded, resilient, motivated, and persistent when we feel safe. Humor increases, as does solution-finding and divergent thinking — the cognitive process underlying creativity.”

Yet why is it that we don’t seem to rate team factors when it comes to OSS delivery? “Team bonding” in stylishly inverted commas can come across as a bit ridiculous, but informal culture building seems to be more valuable than any of the technical alignment workshops we tend to build into our project plans.

OSS are built by teams, for teams, clearly. They’re often built in politically charged situations. They’re also usually built in highly complex environments, where complexities abound in technology and process, but even more so within the people involved. Not only that, but they’re regularly built across divisional lines of business units or organisations over which (hopefully metaphorical) hand grenades can be easily thrown.

Underestimate psychological safety and vulnerability across the entire stakeholder group at your peril on OSS projects. We could benefit from looking outside the walls of OSS, to models used by sporting teams in particular, where team culture is invested in far more heavily because of the proven performance benefits they’ve delivered.

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