Before you start working on big goals, start by understanding your team's situation. It’s good to bring your team together at a retro-like meeting. That meeting will help you understand what your team sees and what you don’t. Maybe it’s a workload, maybe it’s an organization of work, or maybe it’s a new project that just popped out and looks promising.

There is a difference between problems and situation that Seth Godin explains perfectly here. We want to understand our situation to improve your and your team decisions.

Situation map is a tool. We use that tool to define the current state of things in a team for example:

• we don’t have some competency in our team
• we could deliver more value to the project if xyz
• we have technical debt
• the team has no mission and doesn’t work on direction
• client is giving us too much work
• client gives no business context to us
• we can’t define a roadmap or communicate what we are working on
• and many others

Those things can describe current problems from a relationship with the client, tech, or team perspective. When you distill them the first time, they are usually complex or complicated. You can’t solve them with one decision but rather a series of decisions and observations from different sides.

Why is it important to understand the situation?

• It’s a great tool for making everybody's voice heard. As a leader, even if you don’t agree with some topic, you should describe what other team members see or feel. Good Team Leaders will listen to those voices and attempt to discover underlying system dynamics.
• It frees our minds and lets us see problems that are granulated and separated from each other. This allows us to make better decisions about what to focus on next to grow the team or our relationship with our clients.
• It allows team members to see what problems or challenges does a leader or other team members discovered to build the same worldview on our team. It builds trust that there is no “covered” things and those are things we need to tackle as a team.
• Often, we forget about problems, and they boomerang in x months. That creates a frustration that if we attempted to solve the problem faster, we would not be hit again.
• It allows an opening for feedback from other teams and helping to understand team context for people from outside.
• It allows you to prioritize and reflect when a mission/quest of a team should change based on things you recognize within a team.

How do we work with situations?

• It’s good to start just talking about problems, challenges, and opportunities within your team, not creating pressure to get it right at the first meeting. We shouldn’t expect that talking about problems will magically solve them. Understanding problems makes us able to take a first step.
• You should treat them as a team backlog for organizational debt. You should refine it periodically.
• It’s tempting to look for solutions for problems (everybody knows the best how to solve the issue he/she sees). It’s important to prevent people from talking about solutions, you do it next when you tackle the problem.
• When working with situation you can ask yourself/team questions:
  1. What is important for us in a given situation?
  2. If I got up the next day and that problem was solved magically overnight, how would our teamwork look like?
  3. How does this problem manifest itself?
  4. What will happen if we don’t solve this problem?
  5. What are the constraints that we work with or generate that problem?
• Use 5 whys to drill down the problem

Some materials

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https://appunite.slack.com/archives/C039HTNK26B/p1672743463469149?thread_ts=1672668010.498289&cid=C039HTNK26B