... after a team has self-organized and has begun to work effectively, and made improvements, they feel good about their performance and progress. At this point, complacency can set in. Once a team plateaus, it begins to deteriorate.

✥       ✥       ✥ 

Teams can get to a state where they are happy and things are going well. However, this allows dysfunctions to persist. Whether or not they recognize it, the team is in a rut, problems are not fixed, and performance begins to decline. It is like they are surrounded by a bubble that insulates them from unpleasant but true information.

There are several symptoms of a Happy Bubble:

• Significant improvement (e.g. in velocity), followed by a long period where no improvement is made.
• The only improvements made are small and superficial.
• Retrospectives become superficial, as nobody brings up substantial areas for improvement. Or retrospectives might not be held at all.
• Recognizing that there are problems, but always blaming problems on the outside world.
• Making excuses. For example, if velocity isn’t up to par, blaming it on one-time exceptional events. And there is always some one-time event.
• Excess focus on the team over the work itself. You are in the happy bubble when the team is more important than the work.
• The team exudes Team Pride (Coplien and Harrison), but doesn’t couple it with work to self-improve
• They take their empowerment and decision making to an extreme and no-one is allowed or able to question them, or they are simply not questioning or self-aware that they are in this state.

One of the biggest challenges is that bubbles are transparent — it is very hard for a team to see the happy bubble that surrounds them. It is best observed from outside.

Forces

When a team works hard and has improved, they may adopt several attitudes that impair their ability to introspect and continue to improve. These include:

• Feeling entitled not to improve further: “We deserve to coast because we’ve worked hard.”
• Through their hard work, they have developed a strong team spirit. They don’t want to do things to disrupt it.
• Similarly, they may fear making things worse through changing: “we are doing things that work now — why risk changing?”

The team has trouble improving as they are reflecting back on their own work so in essence, have their blinders on. The team is blind to its own shortcomings. This can result in events such as the Retrospective not helping to improve the team so you can be on the surface running perfect text book Scrum but not making progress.

A team often cannot see how they can improve. Over time, it gets harder and harder to improve. All the low-hanging fruit has been harvested. So it’s just easier to stay where you are.

One thing that contributes to this is that virtually all teams are locally-optimizing. However, local optimizations are limited in their effect. The team needs to understand global optimization and reach for them.

They don’t feel they need to; they don’t think they have a problem.

Changing takes overt effort. Teams just want to get on with the next Sprint.

If things don’t go well, it is easy to just blame it on one-time external events or conditions that presumably won’t happen this time.

People don’t like to bring bad news, even to themselves.

If a team is better than anybody, then they may not feel that they need to improve.

Several otherwise positive patterns can contribute to the problem. Team Pride fosters motivation, but can lead to complacency and blindness to one’s shortcomings. Even Self-Selecting Team can contribute to this blindness.

When the rut gets deep enough, it is difficult to break out of it. (When the well-worn path gets deep enough . . . )

On the other hand, every team has the capacity to improve. They just may not see it.

Therefore:

Jolt the team into awareness of their situation (pop the happy bubble): force the team to confront their happy-bubble-ness by showing them important deficiencies. Then together with the team, make actions to improve. Create a culture in the team of relentless, continuous self-examination and improvement.

Who is in the best position to pop the happy bubble?

Internally it will almost always be the Wise Fool or the ScrumMaster, someone who is on the Scrum team and who is willing and able to bring up difficult issues. This person must be able to see the issues, raise the issues and instigate change. The person must have the respect and trust of the Scrum team. The ScrumMaster is in a unique position to see the Happy Bubble because of his/her perspective of the whole team.

An external bubble-popper is inferior to someone within the team, but may be necessary if the entire team is unaware of the Happy Bubble. The best role is probably the Scrum coach. This role is unique in that it is both objective and neutral and can see the whole picture. This provides a mirror to the team so they can understand the implications of their plateauing behavior. They provide a questioning role. However, if they are too strong and give solutions the can break the team’s self-organization — they should use Socratic questioning to avoid this.

Someone in a leadership role might disrupt the Scrum team with a wake-up call if the progress the team is making is not providing enough value.

This is a pattern of repair — the best situation is to avoid getting in the Happy Bubble in the first place. For example, the ScrumMaster might intervene to help the team’s explore its execution of the Scrum process, and the team can use Retrospectives as an opportunity to dig deeper and find opportunities for improvement. But once the team enters a Happy Bubble, more incisive, drastic actions may be needed. The ScrumMaster may wish to intervene by confronting or challenging the team on specific points of performance, quality, efficiency, or effectiveness.

It is important that the drastic actions do not merely solve a superficial problem, but rather cause some significant change in the way the team works. For example, a superficial fix to the problem of consistently missing sprint commitments might be to “work harder.” Instead, what is needed is a fundamental change to how the team works.

How do you detect a problem? Relentlessly measure. In particular, measure the team’s velocity. If it is stagnant, you have a problem. Note that it is crucial that you have hard data to back up claims of the team’s performance. The fact that the team is in a Happy Bubble means that they may be skeptical that they even have a problem. Confront them with data so they can’t argue it away.
Inject new blood into the team to disrupt the teams thinking patterns, someone to question the current status. Of course, one has to be careful, because there are many important advantages to Stable Teams. We don’t want to break the team.

Jolt the team out of their complacency with some hard questions. They should call attention to the behavior and make it known that a Scrum team is about inspecting and adaptation and continuous improvement and transparency.

Have some objective measures for success and to track progress.  Happiness could be a subset, but the measures should be balanced so the team is both happy and delivers value (see Happiness Metric).

The ScrumMaster shocks the team out of their happy bubble and explains that the current results are not acceptable. It must be that WE are not performing well enough, and what will WE do about it?

Challenge the team with the problem and ask how they will resolve it. Admitting they have a problem in the first place is the key.

For example:

• “Hold a crisis”. Show the team that if they continue in their current trajectory, disaster awaits. Of course, it must be real: it cannot be a Chicken Little (“The sky is falling!”) crisis.
• Show the impacts to jolt them out of their happy place. E.g. “we keep missing our commitment, what should we do about it?”
• If the team is in groupthink, explain to them what groupthink is so they can identify the problem when they realize it.

Think of iterations as improvement cycles rather than repeating the same things over and over. A good ScrumMaster will help coach a team who enters this state and question how they will improve and challenge them to think of ways to get better using Retrospectives and improvement strategies such as “5 Whys.”

What if the ScrumMaster is part of the problem? If it is only the ScrumMaster the team can take care of it internally. However, because the ScrumMaster has the broader process view, if the ScrumMaster is in the Happy Bubble, it is very likely the whole team is also in the Happy Bubble. In this case, the Product Owner may have to take drastic measures. This should be done only rarely, when the Happy Bubble is causing serious disruption, and other measures have failed.

Related patterns include ScrumMaster in the capacities of managing the definition of Done, of guiding the team, of helping the team reflect and in general coaching the team. Scrum sometimes views the ScrumMaster as an ersatz manager, except a ScrumMaster carries none of the notion of control intrinsic to the manager role.

If a team has a Wise Fool [Coplien & Harrison], that person will bring up issues that tend to pop happy bubbles.

Scrumming the Scrum: Popping the Happy Bubble raises awareness of problems that might be addressed by using this pattern. Conversely, Scrumming the Scrum (and Retrospectives) help prevent happy bubbles in the first place.

Recommitment Meeting can be used by the team after the Happy Bubble is popped to commit the team back to an upward trajectory.

✥       ✥       ✥ 

The hoped-for result is that the team becomes aware of their deficiencies, recommits to improve, and takes steps to improve. The most basic result is awareness, and that may be the most important.

The ideal result is that the team learns why they got in the Happy Bubble in the first place (for example, they allowed their retrospectives to become superficial), and takes steps to prevent the formation of future Happy Bubbles.

Some people might not enjoy being jolted out of their happy bubble. They may perceive it as unreasonable pressure to perform at an unwarranted level. In extreme cases, people might leave the team. An effect of this pressure may be a sudden disruption that removes the euphoric feeling that the team has been under, resulting in a lack of motivation, depression and potentially harming the team dynamics with people leaving the organization as a result.

It may be preferable to counteract these happy bubble trends early, before they take hold so the violent disruption does not create unintended consequences.

The most possible positive long-term consequence of repeatedly popping the happy bubble is that the team gains an appreciation for its ability to reflect and improve. This is a rightful source of Team Pride.

Pictures from: Twitchan, Bubbly, August 11 2009, http://twitchan.deviantart.com/art/Bubbly-132972638, and from: https://hdwallsbox.com/bubble-wrap-wallpaper-104249/, n.d.