Personal Thoughts
Robert Galen
We've Moved
We've Moved
Walking Their Talk, Sustainability, Inspiration
Robert Galen
Sustainability

I saw this wonderfully courageous and informative post by Sabine Canditt the other day where she wrote about Sustainable Scrum. 

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sustainable-scrum-responsible-choice-sabine-canditt-x0gef

After just completing a The Week program facilitated by the amazing Ann-Marie Kong, it touched my heart.

That said, I wanted to highlight one comment reaction/interaction between Sabine and Erich Bühler 

Erich said—

Thank you for bringing this approach into the world! Scrum does provide an iterative approach for teams to create value, but its scope is limited to the product level and struggles with dynamics across the whole organization for several reasons.
Without updating the underlying business and financial model at a strategic level, Scrum alone cannot transform organization-wide sustainability.

Sustainability
Short-takes, Inspiration
Robert Galen
Sandy’s Take
Sandy’s Take
Short-takes, Personal Thoughts
Robert Galen
The Human Aspects of Agile Coaching
The Human Aspects of Agile Coaching
Coaching, ACGW, Personal Thoughts
Robert Galen
Keys to Building your Coaching Relationships

I talk a lot about the first step in coaching any client (individual, system, team, etc.) is to build a relationship, gain empathy and understanding, and then gain an idea of where/how to help initially. So, do NOT start to coach until you’ve done some relationship-building. 

But what does a coaching relationship, or a professional relationship in general, look like? What are aspects of that? Here are a few things that come to my mind—

  • Making + taking the time.

  • Explaining what you do—what is Agile Coaching.

  • Building some empathy; walking in their shoes; understanding where they are coming from.

  • Meeting them where they are.

  • Listening; reflective listening; building metaphors together.

  • Connecting with their language, not yours.

Keys to Building your Coaching Relationships

Anjali Leon

,

Agile is...

,

I saw the following quote on LinkedIn the other day from Anjali Leon. It’s the answer to the question—What is Agile? 

What is Agile? A question that conjures up a variety of responses.

Over the last few years of helping my clients embrace this 'way' to arrive at better outcomes, I have landed on this definition (so far).

'Agile is a philosophy and strategy for navigating complexity and change that values outcome orientation, cross-functional collaboration, customer-centricity, worker well-being, and adaptation through experimentation'

Here is how I think of some of these terms...

  • Philosophy - a theory or attitude held by a person or organization that acts as a guiding principle for behavior.

  • Strategy - a way forward or long-range plan of doing something or dealing with something.

  • Navigate - deal effectively with a situation.

  • Complexity - something that has many parts and is difficult to understand and find answers to.

What do you think? Does it resonate? And, how do you answer the question - What is Agile?

Quick Reactions

First of all, I want to applaud Anjali for her courage. I’ve learned the hard way that anytime you “go on record” publicly with a definition of any sort, you can’t make all of the people happy with it.

;-)

Second, I really like the definition. As someone in the comments mentioned, the only missing component from my perspective is the team (so I added worker well-being in-line).

Finally, I think exercises like this are incredibly healthy for us as agile coaches, leaders, and change agents. We ought to be “continuously noodling” on the mindset and principle aspects of agility to keep us focused and sharp.

Thank you, Anjali for the noodling prompt!

Stay agile my friends,

Bob.