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.
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.
One of the coaches in my ORSC residential session this past weekend, Jennifer Davis, mentioned in a very casual way that—you are the company your keep around you. It inspired me to think about WHO I want to keep around me.
Hey everyone! Look around. Who’s in your professional life? Who’s in your personal life? Who do you engage, listen to, model?
I’ve been practicing “agile stuff” since about 1996—so for ~24 years. For ~20 of those years, I’ve been actively coaching agile notions at the team, group, organization, and company levels. In 2012 I received my CEC with the Scrum Alliance as an indication of how invested, serious, and (hopefully) skilled I was in the craft and practice of agile coaching.
In other words, I’m a relatively long-time agile coach who’s seen and experienced quite a bit over that time.
I participated in the Scrum Alliance – Guides Open Space sessions on Friday, October 23rd. I was in one session where we explored the CTC & CEC coaching tracks. The focus of the session was on formalized mentoring & training, but we didn’t explore that. Instead, the discussion ambled around the lack of clarity of what it meant to be an “agile coach”.
As I was listening and engaging in the discussion, I was scribbling down notes and ideas around the topic. I created a flow if you will of things that I’d develop or require if I were creating my own vision for developing agile coaches. And I worked on it after I left the session and into the evening.
The session was cathartic for me in a way. And I took the perspective of—
Simon Powers wrote an article entitled—The 9 most important skills for an Enterprise Coach. I’m still digesting the article and evaluating whether I agree with his nine skills. Not that they’re not relevant. But are they really in the top-nine of the skills required of an enterprise-level agile coach? To be honest, some of them I’m struggling with and that may result in a future post ;-)
But one of them really grabbed my attention, shook me, and caused me to think. Here it is—
The other day in my Moose Herd someone called me a Hippie Agilist.
As someone who grew up in the late ’60s and early ’70s, I resonated with the description. But as I thought about it, I don’t know what they were saying. Nor do I know whether it’s a “good” or “bad” description of me. And I didn’t ask them what they meant by it.
So, I’m going to ask my readers, Y’All, to please answer the following questions via comments—
What is a Hippie Agilist?
Do I strike you as one of those?
And if so, why?
Let’s see how this goes…
Stay agile my friends,
Bob.
BTW and for the record, I have owned peace signs and tie-dyed clothing.
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…
In my last post, I talked about the importance of diversity when building agile teams. But diversity in and of itself, won’t get the job done. In fact, in many ways’ inclusion is the activation counterpart of diversity. So, I wanted to explore inclusion a bit more in our agile contexts.
As many of you know, I’m in the middle of a coaching certification program called ORSC (Organization Relationship Systems Coaching). In ORSC they teach about Meta-Skills, which are essentially an aspect of your mindset in how you enter systems (organizations, groups, teams).
One of the meta-skills is something called Deep Democracy. In simple terms, it means that all voices matter, and all voices need to / deserve to be heard. And as an ORSC coach, one of my prime directives is to facilitate so that all of the voices come out of the system.
And you might think this only relates to people who are present. But it doesn’t.
For example, we’re having a team meeting about making a decision about a feature’s dynamics. And Sue is out sick. We might want to ask the team, what do you think Sue’s reaction to this would be? We might also ask the team, what do you think the customer’s reaction to this feature will be? In this example, we’re going so far as to try and be inclusive of the “missing voices” in the system.
We were having a discussion in my Moose Herd the other day about aspects of diversity in constructing your agile organizations and teams. And there were three key themes that came out of the discussions that I’d like to share.
I mentioned the work of the team is the value proposition. Leaders need to serve the teams and that includes how they recruit, hire, and onboard folks into the culture.
The true magic of agile teams is NOT in the organizational structure, or the leadership experience level, or in the detail of your project plans, or whether they’re practicing Scrum or Kanban.
Instead, it’s pulling together an empowered, cross-functional team that—
Has a focused mission or goal;
Have matured their agile mindset;
Have intentionally formed and established itself as a team;
Has a diversity of skills & experience to deliver on their mission;
Is strongly connected to the customer;
Has the organizational trust to meet their commitments.
Then create the cultural ecosystem where they are supported, trusted, challenged, mentored, and encouraged to succeed.
If you get the balance right between leadership and team accountability, then magic can happen.
This is something that’s been running around my brain for quite a while now. The notion of resilience.
What is it?
Why is it important?
And, how do we build muscle around it?
I think the genesis point for me is when my friend Mary Thorn shared her intent to do a keynote focused on the term Grit or Gritty, at the 2020 Spring AgileDev conference. If you know Mary, she is incredibly gritty. Mary is smart and experienced. But her ability to preserver over diversity and around resistance is what makes her a phenomenal coach.
Here I want to explore it as the term resilience and see where things go…
There were two definitions that came from a dictionary search—
1. The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
2. The ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.
I also discovered this definition from the American Psychological Association—
Psychologists define resilience as the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress—such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors.
I liken resilience as an extension of our fight or flight reactions. It’s how we recover, how we respond, and how we grow.
I want to use this tweet from Ryan Ripley as an example. But I’m not trying to make an example of him, Prokanban.org, or Daniel Vicanti. I was just inspired when I saw it…
What Ryan is referring to here is the Code of Conduct on the Prokanban.org website. I want to applaud them for have one, posting it, and being transparent about it. All of that is GOOD.
Just saying it, doesn’t make it so.
It’s a very, very, very early beginning, but just that, only a beginning. Now comes the really hard work.
That is, for example—
Understanding the nature, depth, and breadth of sexual harassment;
Training organizational members about it and giving them the skills and the opportunity to detect it. Then encouraging them and empowering them.
Then ultimately taking action on conduct violations. Making the action transparent and immediate.
It’s like saying—I’m not a racist or we won’t tolerate racism. These simplistic platitudes undermine the depth, breadth, complexity, and nuance associated with something as complex as racism.
Yes, I applaud Prokanban.org and all others, for example (Agile Alliance, Scrum Alliance, Scaled Agile, etc.) for taking stands on codes of ethics and codes of conduct.
BUT I hope they all know that this is simply a baby-step, a beginning, in a very long journey of vigilance, hard work, and commitment. And I’m looking forward to all of them (us, and me) to do the “heavy-lifting” as well…
Stay agile my friends,
Bob.
This article was inspired by this quote I saw when Judge Ruth Bader-Ginsburg passed away…
This quote is from Judge Jeffrey Sutton and shared by Christopher K. Scalia—
During one of my last visits with Justice Scalia, I saw striking evidence of the Scalia-Ginsburg relationship. As I got up to leave his chambers, he pointed to two dozen roses on his table and noted that he needed to take them down to “Ruth” for her birthday. “Wow,” I said, “I doubt I have given a total of twenty-four roses to my wife in thirty years of marriage.” “You ought to try it sometime,” he retorted. Unwilling to give him the last word, I pushed back: “So what good have all these roses done for you? Name one five-four case of any significance where you got Justice Ginsburg’s vote.”
“Some things,” he answered, “are more important than votes.”
RIP your honor.
