The Drucker Exercise
A method from The Agile Samurai for lining up what a team expects of each other. Everyone writes down both their own view and what they expect of others, and shares it.
Does any of this sound familiar?
- You formed a team, but nobody knows what the others are good and bad at
- "Surely they will handle that much" stays unspoken
- Every time someone new joins, building the relationships takes a while
- You can talk about it one on one, but there is no place to share it with the whole team
The actual screen
Two things to write down
First write about yourself, then what you expect of the others. With both in place, the gap between how you see yourself and what the team expects becomes visible.
Your own view
Write your strengths, your weaknesses and what you value. Sharing what you are not good at, up front, is the point of this method.
What you expect of others
Write what you expect of each teammate. Once everyone has written theirs, each person sees what was written about them.
When to run it
Unlike a daily check-in or a per-sprint retrospective, this one is for a turning point every few months.
It suits the start of a team, a change in membership, or the turn of a quarter.
How it goes
The host creates a session
The facilitator — often the scrum master — starts a Drucker Exercise and gets a URL to share.
Share the URL with the team
Guests join without an account. They open the URL and pick a name and an icon.
Start once everyone is in
The host checks that everyone has arrived, then starts. The state is synced to every screen in real time.