How involved should I get in my teams’ planning?

If you have a graph and you have time along the X axis, and then you have uncertainty, it's literally a cone over time. And it goes down; your uncertainty decreases as you know more. And it's not a smooth line. Life isn't smooth, there's bumps and troughs. And so I framed that concept. I've sort of expanded on that as well, as how you approach planning, if you inverse that coin, and how you approach risk.

So if you invert it for planning, the less certain you are, you don't plan in that much detail, so the planning horizon. Where you know more, you're planning details, so that's your daily plans, that's your sprint plans. And that's actually where your team should operate autonomously. Where you've got to help them is getting to that vision where it's a little bit more uncertain and you're collaborating with them along the way.

And then you collaborate with each other. ‘Okay, how do we get more certainty? What does the data show us?’ Or, ‘How much runway do we have left? How safe are we to operate in this situation?’ And you put metrics behind that. And actually most of the time, you're just helping them frame that, and then they can make that decision themselves. Or you're giving them information that maybe in their world, in their silo, they don't see. But actually if you give them the information they need, they can make those decisions as well.