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

Continuous Learning

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The Art and Craft of Journey Mapping with MindMaps

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The Art and Craft of Journey Mapping with MindMaps

I wanted to take a few minutes to share an exercise or activity that I’ve been—

  1. Doing myself for a number of years;

  2. Asking my coaching clients to do as part of our coaching;

  3. Dovetailing into my CAL and LEA leadership classes to help attendees triangulate on their leadership journeys.

It’s the same technique in all of these cases. What’s neat about it is that the journey map is whatever you want it to be.

The essence of the approach is to build a mindmap that represents your personal & professional journey. In my case, since I do mostly agile coaching with my clients, it emerges as an “agile” journey map. But it could literally represent any journey that you are undertaking.

First idea: Past, Present, and Future

The first idea is to segment your mindmap with some vertical lines that represent your past (left-side), present (middle), and future (right-side).

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What Type of Agile Coach are You?

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What Type of Agile Coach are You?

Michael de le Maza offered the following metaphor for agile coaches and coaching on LinkedIn the other day

Pebble agile coaches vs. Diamond agile coaches.

Pebbles are well rounded. Diamonds have facets.

If you go to a restaurant and they have Chinese food and Italian food what would you think? What if they had Opus One and Two-Buck Chuck?

You wouldn't like that restaurant, right?

And yet many agile coaches pride themselves on being well-rounded. They coach Scrum and Kanban teams. They coach executives and individual contributors. They coach flow and culture. They coach marketing teams and software development teams.

These are pebble agile coaches. They are well-rounded.

Diamond agile coaches have facets. They specialize in one or two areas.

Think about the great agile coaches you know.

Are they pebbles or diamonds?

What do you want to be?

Here’s my LinkedIn reply:

Michael, it almost sounds like I have two choices as an agile coach:

Become (or stay) a pebble and say yes to everything. Stay average, stay mediocre, stay "pebbly". That being well-rounded is, in some fashion, bad or not good.
or...
Become a diamond. Shine in a few areas. Be excellent in a few things. Say no to things when I don't have the excellence or brilliance to meet the need.

I wonder if there is a sort of middle ground if you will and not polar or binary opposites? For example, can I become a cabochon? Can I be well-rounded AND shiny/with rounded facets?

I guess I don't view well-roundedness as a coach as being something less attractive. Saying 'yes' to everything, probably not a good idea. But, at least for me, I'm aspiring to be a well-rounded, shiny, cabochon of a coach ;-)

More details…

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The 3-R’s of Agile Coaching

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The 3-R’s of Agile Coaching

I was reflecting on the craft of agile coaching the other day. As I often do, I was thinking of areas that are important in my coaching competency or my focus.

Sometimes, when I’m reflecting like this, I get way too much information to consider. But this time, something simple and clear came out of my reflection and I thought I’d share it with you. It’s a metaphor I’ll refer to at the 3-R’s of Agile Coaching and my focus on them has been increasing the quality of my coaching. Let’s explore each ‘R’ in turn.

Relationship

I’m continuing to discover that relationship is the center of everything in my coaching. And when I say relationship in this sense, I mean—

  • Relationship with myself;

  • Relationship with my individual clients;

  • Relationship with my client system(s).

I most actively see it nowadays in the intentionality I have in entering spaces and the meta-skills I bring into play. But I also am more intentional in creating, fostering, and building my ongoing relationships with my clients. This ‘R’ reminder me that the key is being more intentional in how I’m “showing up”.

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Community of Purpose?

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Community of Purpose?

I’ve been sharing snippets from my forthcoming agile coaching book, entitled – Extraordinarily Badass Agile Coaching in my monthly newsletters. One of those was from the chapter on Coaching Communities of Practice. I received the following comment from John Voris on that

I liked reading the chapter about CoP that you put out there. But I think you have another article or blog post in you about making your—

“Community of Practice”

into a

“Community of Purpose”

I’ll bet you have some thoughts on that distinction as well.

To say that John’s comment resonated with me is an understatement. I nearly fell out of my chair. I was like…YES!

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Agile Inspiration from the Strangest of Places

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Agile Inspiration from the Strangest of Places

I subscribe to a newsletter about living overseas. I’ve subscribed for ~10 years, dreaming that one day I might, just might retire to a sunny (and reasonably priced) haven.

https://letters.liveandinvestoverseas.com/archive/9z2z5dvut72rjq21ee6nff1a8duib0ppjelhs9vh33o_rp22sh2s8i66oj2c1hm6ob7cdh2bs

The newsletter is written by Kathleen Peddichord. In the May 26th newsletter, Kathleen shared 10 lessons learned from moving around overseas. As I reviewed them, the synergy with agile principles and our mindset really struck me. So much in fact, that I decided to share them with you…

1. Patience... the kind of patience you learn doing time...

This is something that many (most) change agents really struggle with. Why? Because we typically want things to change…right…now. Or we want things to follow our way of solutioning and problem-solving. Instead of being more patient and allowing things to unfold.

By staying present and in the moment, you’ll have the patience to see how things might unfold. And be prepared to be surprised and amazed.

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The ART of the Personal Experiment

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The ART of the Personal Experiment

I had an epiphany the other morning. It was while I was thinking of aspects of an agile mindset and self-care and then it hit me.

Why don’t I do more explicit, planned, intentional personal experiments in my agile journey? Sure, I often “try things”. But it’s more ad hoc and scattershot, not connecting to any personal development strategy or plan.

I talk about running experiments all of the time in my agile coaching, both at an individual client, team, and organizational level. So, why am I not practicing what I preach more by taking a walk on the wild side and experimenting more myself?

Well, I should. And that’s where this post is going…

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AgendaShift – A week with Mike Burrows

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AgendaShift – A week with Mike Burrows

I just spent 4-days of my week (week of February 22nd) with Mike Burrows. The class was a Deep Dive into Mike’s AgendaShift thinking. I say thinking because I’m not exactly sure what to call everything he shared.

It could be part—

  • Agile mindset or principled approach;

  • Approach to organizational change;

  • Continuous change framework;

  • Toolbox of collaboration tools;

  • Engagement Model;

  • Focus on Clean Language throughout;

  • Forms, list, canvases, etc.;

  • OKR/Outcome-based model.

I took the class virtually across 4-days in 4-hour chunks. In my eagerness to attend a class sooner than later, I signed up for a class starting at 4:30am EST. Not my best decision ever.

I’ve only heard Mike speak a few times at conference events and in overviews of his thinking and materials. So, the Deep Dive was a welcome immersion into his approaches to learning, his thoughts, and stories. I was also curious as to how his approaches could benefit me in my agile coaching practice and with my clients’ interests in change.

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The Power of Personal Reflection

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The Power of Personal Reflection

I think one of my superpowers is that I’m highly reflective. I’m continuously thinking about past major (and minor) events in my life. Think of it as nearly continuously running retrospectives as a means of checking myself, reviewing my actions, making real-time adjustments, and learning from my success and mistakes.

I guess a big part of it might be my personality type. I’m an introvert and a quiet learner. I love to read, learn, reflect, and learn some more.

As a leader, this often surfaces as changing my mind. For example, anyone who’s ever worked with me understands that I might take a very firm position (decision) on something given the situation and the expectations that I need to decide right away—making a snap decision. And I can do that.

But as an introvert, I prefer thinking carefully about all sides before weighing in. If I’ve made a snap-decision, then I get to “thinking” about it more deeply and I often see other perspectives as I “sleep on it”. Perhaps 50-60% of the time I’ll come in the next day and unapologetically take the opposite (usually other sides) perspective. This usually frustrates some folks, but hey, then give me a little time in for the first place.

But I digress. Here I want to explore the notion of the value of reflecting. Not necessarily scheduling a periodic retrospective, but more so incorporating active reflection as a part of your daily routine. I’ve found the very act of reflection to be incredibly helpful to me in “figuring out” what’s been happening to me in my personal and professional journey.

Consider it an act of increasing your self-awareness. Let’s explore some examples…

2019 & Beyond – Sharpening the Saw

2019 & Beyond – Sharpening the Saw

Every year I try to spend time on my own training. I usually start thinking about two things the year before:

  1. What are some knowledge gaps that I have that I’d like to fill, and

  2. What are upcoming trends that will cause me to become obsolete if I don’t get ahead of them?

Then I review the available courses, events, and actions and I’ll try to come up with 2-3 things that I’ll focus on for personal improvement.

I’ve posted a couple of "Sharpening the Saw" posts in previous years. Usually in March, but this one is a bit late.  I hope this becomes an annual post to remind me (and perhaps you) to plot a journey of continuous learning. And making it public also helps motivate me to actually DO what I say I want to do…

This year, I’ve planned on the following:

  • Agile Coach Camp in Raleigh

  • Evolving Scrum Alliance CAL-I content

  • Co-presenting, more & more...

  • Starting down the ORSC coaching path 

Coach Camp