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
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Practicing Gratitude

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Do you have a gratitude ritual that you’ve developed in your professional and personal lives? 

If not, then I’d encourage you to consider one. And if you do, then please consider commenting on this post and sharing what you’re doing.

I’ve been trying to couple my gratitude focus to my morning journaling. Sometimes I’ll write down my thoughts in my journal. Other times, I’ll just let some of the prompts in my journal inspire my thinking and reflection. But my ritual surrounds my mindfulness, reflection, and daily journaling activities.

Journal Prompts

I thought I’d share some of my gratitude-centric journaling prompts—

What was the best part of your day yesterday?

What are you looking forward to today?

What is the one thing you can do to make tomorrow even better?

What are three things you are grateful for right now? How do they bring joy to your life?

Who are three people you are grateful for right now? How do they bring joy to your life?

What is one ritual you currently use to practice gratitude?

What is one ritual that you will add to your practice?

Wrapping Up

There’s nothing magical about being grateful. It won’t solve the climate crisis or improve D&I across corporate America. But I’ve found that centering on being grateful on a day-to-day basis has made me a better agile coach and an even better person.

PS: I want to thank Saralyn Hodgkin and her Practice Your Leadership newsletter for inspiring me to write this.

Stay agile my friends,

Bob.

Additional articles with more ideas for gratitude rituals…

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An Oasis in the Wilderness - Gustavo Razzetti

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An Oasis in the Wilderness - Gustavo Razzetti

There are only a handful of folks in the agile community that I regularly listen to. If I see something, an article, post, or video from them, I immediately take note and read it. Nine times out of ten, it’s something that motivates, teaches, and inspires me to become better. A sampling of those people that come to mind include:

Lyssa Adkins, John Cutler, Judy Rees, Dan Mezick, Roman Pichler, Dave Snowden, Linda Rising, Jurgen Appello, Joshua Kerievsky, and Mike Burrows.

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Agile Coaching Theatre

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Agile Coaching Theatre

In this article, Tanya Snook talks about the notion of UX Theatre. Essentially, if I read it right, this is when an organization is going through the motions of UX research, study, analysis, etc. but with no real goal to change.

Here’s a quote from the article as several snippets—

There is a strange phenomenon in the world of user experience design.

It happens when designers are asked to pretend to do the work of design and aren’t actually permitted to do the work of design. It happens when we are asked to conduct research that never gets used. When we deliver findings that get shelved because they don’t align with executive or shareholder expectations. When we’re asked to facilitate workshops in which staff pretend to be users because it’s cheaper and faster than doing research with actual users. Or when we only get to review the design when the product is about to hit the street, and it’s much too late for any actual design improvements.

This frustrating reality is an open secret within the user experience industry and one we have long accepted as a normal consequence of working in a field that balances creativity and research.

We call this UX Theatre.

…

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Dynamics Impacting Agile Teams, part-2

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Dynamics Impacting Agile Teams, part-2

Continued from Part-1…

1. T-Shaped nature of the team? (1)

Perhaps the best way to think of T-shaped-ness is the flexibility of everyone on the team to the overall work. Do people focus only on a narrow/deep skill area (I-shaped) or do they try and occasionally flex to help in areas where they’re less skilled, but willing to learn, pitch in, and help (T-shaped)? One of the easiest ways I’ve found to determine this is measuring the times you hear: “that’s not my job, or I’m waiting for Blarg to finish their part” within the team.

2. Visualization of work and tooling (1 and 3-)

How well does the team visualize their work? This includes the word itself (product backlogs, sprint backlogs) and artifacts around the work (DoD, charters, roles & responsibilities, etc.). I’ve always thought that the higher the maturity and performance of the team, the less they rely on tools and the more they rely on visualization and collaboration around the visuals. Related to this is the notion that the visuals are kept up-to-date in real-time or always reflect the current reality.

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Dynamics Impacting Agile Teams, part-1

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Dynamics Impacting Agile Teams, part-1

We were talking in the Moose Herd the other morning and Cory Bryan brought up the topic of factors that influenced agile team maturity, performance, and health. We immediately discussed the obvious factor of team size. Chatting about how team cohesion and maturity could offset any negative aspects of the team is larger.

Team distribution also came up, that is remote vs. onsite and geographic distribution. Again, we leaned into the idea that a more seasoned team could probably deliver “in spite of” the challenges of being distributed.

It was a really good topic to explore. And, as we explored it, I brainstormed in my journal and jotted down as many factors that I could think of that directly impact the formation, growth, dynamics, and ultimate success of any agile team.

I also tried to evaluate as to whether each factor was:

  1. Entirely within the team’s control

  2. Entirely an organizational factor

  3. Or something in between, 3- meaning towards Org and 3+ meaning towards the team.

I think this twist nuanced the list a bit. Anyway, I thought I’d share these thoughts with you…

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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 Books by Women

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Agile Books by Women

It recently struck me that I wasn’t that aware of agile books authored by women in our agile community. Sure, I was aware of a few, but I became curious about the number of female authors and the topics they explored.

As I began to search, I realized there were very few resources/lists on the topic. There was one list, written by Julia Dellnitz, that I found. It provided some European voices that I hadn’t been exposed to – https://www.smidig.de/agile-books-by-female-authors/ and a few others, but it was really the only one.

So, I became inspired to pull together this list and to see just how many women authors I could find in our space. Thank you for that inspiration, Julia!

I also found this link on Women in “Product” to follow – https://www.productplan.com/learn/women-in-product-to-follow/, that includes two of the authors on my list.

And finally, I found this on the Business Agility Institute site – Women in Agile and the Confidence Code – https://businessagility.institute/learn/women-in-agile-and-the-confidence-code/330

What I found in my search was a wonderful list of incredibly talented women who’ve written on a wide variety of topics. Now, I know that I’ve probably missed many wonderful authors. So, please feel free to send me a message or add a comment so that I can be more inclusive on my list.

But that being said, I do think it’s a deep and rich list that’s worthy of your consideration. And I want you to join me in CELEBRATING these wonderful women and their contributions to our agile community.

Stay agile my friends,

Bob.

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Internal Agile Coach as an Employee

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This idea came out of another Moose Herd discussion. 

The situation where (sometimes) an agile coach can get lost in their role and forget to be themselves. To move from being:

Coach Bob, who has to “show up” as an agile coach every minute of every encounter of every day;

To simply…

Bob, who coaches, but who also is an employee, colleague,equal partner, and human being. 

There’s potentially a huge difference between the two. For example, the latter allows me to:

  • Vent if I need to, or complain to my boss;

  • To get overly excited about an idea;

  • Not have to say…Yes, and… all of the time;

  • Not having to look for deeper meaning or revealing the system;

  • To passionately disagree with someone;

  • My emotions to surface, to get defensive, overreact;

  • To have a bad day; to have a great day;

  • To not want to coach now, today, this week;

  • Be real, be genuine, be ME.

Wrapping Up

The key idea here is for agile coaches to not get too “wrapped up” in their role to the point where they are always the coach or always coaching. To allow ourselves to occasionally step out of that role and become us. To not be afraid to express ourselves, to ask for help or a break, to not always have to be “coaching clients”.

Let that run around your mind as a coach and see if it resonates. Reflect on times when you’ve been coaching when you actually shouldn’t be coaching. And think about giving yourself permission to stop doing that.

But there I go again, always coaching…

Stay agile my friends,

Bob.

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Coaching Stances Applied

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Coaching Stances Applied

Agile Coach and provocateur Michael de la Maza posted the following on LinkedIn

Scene: Final round of interviews for an Agile Coaching position. Down to the final three candidates. Everyone is tense, but pretending not to be.

(curtain rises)

Client: We have a problem with people arguing. What would you do about that?

Agile Coach 1 (with swagger): I would step in immediately to prevent further damage.

Agile Coach 2 (confidently): I would ask the people who are arguing what they want to get out of the argument.

Agile Idiot (cluelessly): What is the problem with people arguing?

(curtain falls)

[Based on the life and work of Steven Davis.]

As of October 14th, 2021 the post had received 42 comments.

For example, Steve Peacock answered this way in dissecting the scenario—

Another "it depends" situation.

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Self-Organization is a Nuanced Balancing Act

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Self-Organization is a Nuanced Balancing Act

I was reading a post by my friend and colleague Mike Hall the other day. It was entitled—Teams Should Choose Their Agile Approach!

I read it based on the title alone and found it insightful and well-intentioned. But that being said, I’m not sure that I agree with the absoluteness of it or the extremeness of it. Not that Mike used extreme language, but the intent of the approach was extreme, at least to me.

It seemed like Mike was saying that—

Under all conceivable circumstances, conditions, and contexts—teams should be fully autonomous in defining their agile operational dynamics.

And it made me think of a client story from quite a few years ago.

I met with this client. He was an organizational leader, general manager, of a large engineering group. To put it into Scrum terms, his organization was made up of ~100 Scrum and Kanban teams. They had been using both frameworks for about 18 months and he called me out of utter desperation.