How to get people to take ownership in Scrum Meetings

From Scrum

How to get people to take ownership in Scrum meetings

I don't have the copy of the notes so can't remember everything we discussed but I tried to capture my recollections in my blog and they are copied here:

At the last meeting of the London Scrum User Group, a collection of interested people had an interesting discussion about how to get Scrum team members engaged and taking ownership of the process, especially at things like the Sprint Retrospective. The point that came up was an interest in why that feeling might have been there in the first place and this could obviously be any number of things. There is often the fear of speaking up as this could make you prone to blame, possible inhibitions in front of "seniors" or "technical experts" and so some people would rather defer to others.

There is also the factor of WIIFM (what's in it for me) i.e. what benefit do I get from taking responsibility? This could be because the change effect isn't running as deep as it could be and so they don't feel that this "self-organisation thing" is really happening and perhaps there are even conflicting messages coming from other parts of the organisation about whether it is OK to make suggestions take ownership. Most of the discussions came down to a feeling about a lack of safety or a comfortable environment in which people felt OK to speak up.

Then how to create a safe environment? This is arguably something that takes time and a lot of (repaid) trust but one quick way to move in that direction is to lead by example. Sophie, one of our group, mentioned how she had deliberatly put herself "out there" and made herself vulnerable in the hope that others would follow her lead. This is arguably a brave thing to do but undoubtedly a very effective way of establishing trust in a group.

If we are talking about an experienced (in a years under the belt kind of way) as a lot of us were, this is a slightly different problem but still in the same ball park as safety. Other team members don't want to say anything that might be negated or dismissed by "the expert" and likewise, he/she is very happy with this hero-like status. A quite common technique amongst the people present was to actually ban said person from writing any code for a sprint or two and, instead, encouraging them to mentor other members of the team to explicitly try and bring their confidence levels up.