30 Habits Of Dysfunctional Groups

Here are 30 things groups do to make collaborative conversations dysfunctional. These are also 30 things that don't happen when we use the Agile Canvas because the model is specifically designed to prevent these.

  1. Discussing and debating assumptions and opinions
  2. Allowing scope creep to prevent closure on anything
  3. Immediately discrediting and dismissing new ideas in their seedling stages
  4. Wasting time watching a few do work in front of many
  5. Getting updates that could be in a shared doc or email
  6. Creating agendas where items are subjects rather than questions
  7. Taking time to review what people received prior and failed to preview
  8. Allowing anyone to dominate or disappear
  9. Encouraging or allowing people to overcommit to anything
  10. Getting negative with or ignoring negative people
  11. Postponing possible action until we get missing resources or assurances
  12. Competing for the prize of being right or in control
  13. Assuming any one of us could be ultimately smarter than all of us
  14. Allowing things to get spoken without being recorded
  15. Having one person do the recording of others' contributions
  16. Using emails rather than shared docs to organize any kind of collaboration
  17. Treating confident opinions as facts
  18. Allowing people to assign tasks to others
  19. Trying to reach consensus without first establishing shared operating principles
  20. Allowing or encouraging the whole group to do anything that a subgroup could do
  21. Assuming that quality of decisions and quantity of people involved are correlated
  22. Defining realistic and unrealistic on our emotions, assumptions and beliefs
  23. Trying to create a plan that we don't have to change
  24. Excluding our networks as sources of new resources and support
  25. Allowing the same people to silo into the same assignments all the time
  26. Defining objectives in fuzzy, vague or ambiguous terms
  27. Doing planning from a belief that planning can create a knowable future
  28. Allowing people to take on tasks without conversation about estimated time requirements
  29. Hoping we interact with trust without taking time to explicitly build trust
  30. Spending more time talking about what we do know than what we don't