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

pivoting anew

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You’ve Got a Friend

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You’ve Got a Friend

Carol King is one of my favorite artists from the 1970s and 80s and You’ve Got a Friend is one of my favorite songs of hers. So, it sounded like a good theme for this post. 

This article is inspired by all of the layoffs I see in the technology community—particularly the agilists who are finding many companies not valuing their contributions. There are also quite a few thought leaders in the community using this as an opportunity to (1) foretell the end of agile ways of working or (2) to explain how their new-fangled agile approach (Agile 2, SAFe, Elon, Flow, whatever) will deliver us from all the chaos.

I know quite a few of you are caught up in these challenging times, so I thought I’d share the following story and some related advice.

My story

It was the year 2000. I’d moved to North Carolina 4 years earlier and just joined Lucent (Bell Labs) as a Director of Software, leading a large team. I felt like I’d just won the lottery to find the job of my dreams. Then the telecommunications bubble burst in 2001.

Layoffs were rampant across the industry, tens of thousands of jobs were lost, and our entire optical networking facility of ~300 folks here in Raleigh, NC was let go. To say that I was devastated is an understatement. To add insult, I was selected to be on the leadership “closing crew” who helped everyone pack, leave, and turn the lights off in the building.