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.
Johanna Rothman shared this article and it made me think a bit. Her writing often does that to me ;-) It made me think about two things:
Identifying who my support system is and,
The notion of asking for and giving help.
Upon personal reflection, I realized a couple of uncomfortable truths about myself.
I was talking to a fellow agile coach the other day who’s leading her own coaching practice. She’d completed several engagements partnering with two experienced agile coaches and there had been some “rocky exchanges” along the way.
One of the things she said to me that the coaches have given her some really hard feedback of late. Sort of like a firehose of feedback. And that while she appreciated all of it, it was really hard to digest it all. And all of it seemed to be constructive/negative in nature. So, lots to think about and she seemed overwhelmed by it.
I asked her to – look for the truth in it.
And she said something interesting. She said that – it was ALL true.
And I thought for a moment and responded.
No, it’s not all true!
It’s only true from the perspective of the coach’s giving you the feedback. Certainly 100% of what they told you can’t all be true. Nor do you want to take action on all of it.
There have been some troubling trends I’ve seen in the last 10 years of my agile journey. I’d like to share some of them in order to bring them into the light of day.
To be fully transparent, this post was inspired by one that Melissa Perri made here. While the format isn’t the same, it inspired me to look backward in order to look forward.
The lists are in no particular order. That being said, if something made it on the list, I think it’s important!
I have a good friend, Ryan Ripley, who is an excellent Scrum trainer with Scrum.org (PST). I just attended a workshop with him and it contained lots of Liberating Structures or LS.
And when I say lots, I mean LOTS!
And he was clearly excited about them and about stringing structures together. In our debriefs, it was almost as if LS was a pattern language for teaching. In other words, how to teach specific, complex topics and how to communicate to a diverse group of students.
Now I’m not an expert on LS, but it seemed as if Liberating Structures was his new favorite technique when it came to teaching.
But was that good?
The next time you’re looking to engage an agile coach, there’s an additional set of questions I want you to explore with them—
Do you (they) have a coach?
How often do you (they) meet?
What are you (they) currently working on in your journey?
What was the last crucial conversation you (they) had with your coach like?
Reflecting on your being coached journey, how coachable are you? What are the keys to your being coachable?
What I’m asking you to explore is their personal coaching journey. I feel that most agile coaches are comfortable coaching. But the counterpoint, being coached and being coachable, are often a different question. I guess it’s the age-old challenge of telling being easy and receiving being much harder.
I delivered a lightning keynote at the StarEast conference in May 2019. If you’re unfamiliar, this format is a 5-minute pitch on any topic you like.
I intentionally went into it without a predetermined talk our slides. I wanted to see what might inspire me before or during the conference. Unfortunately, I waited until the day before the keynote to decide what I would talk about. But I’m sort of glad I did.
Mary Thorn and I shared 3 – ½ day workshops at the conference. And during those sessions, and in the hallways, I noticed a trend.
I was listening carefully to people’s questions, the discussions, the stories, and the challenges. And one pattern emerged that caught my attention. The language was very much around –
My daughter Rhiannon is a social worker. And I’ve learned from her that my definition of diversity is much shallower than hers. She has a broad, deep, and nuanced view of it and I’m learning to appreciate hers and broaden my own.
It’s just part of my ongoing efforts to challenge myself and learn.
That being said, it made me think differently the other day when I was reading the Agile Manifesto again. And it dawned on me that –
There are 17 signatories to the Manifesto
All 17 were men
All seemed to be at or approaching middle age at the time (probably well beyond by now)
All were white
All were software developers with the possible exception of Brian Marick (was he the token tester ;-)
More than a few years ago, I visited a client in Greensboro, NC. I did a little consulting there, but it really wasn’t a longer-term gig.
What stood out to me, after all of these years, is that folks could bring their dogs into work. And everyone seemed to do just that.
There were dogs roaming free in the halls.
There were dog play areas.
There were dogs at their owner’s desks.
And those that didn’t have dogs were playing with others dogs.
And yes, there was the occasional “doggie accident” ;-)
It was a wonderful environment. Instead of feeling like an office space, it felt like a home that I was visiting. A comfortable home where the family loved their pets.
I spent over 10 years working at a company in Connecticut called Micrognosis. I wrote about an aspect of my experience there in this post.
During my tenure at Micrognosis we delivered many, many products and projects. We made millions of dollars on our technologies and our customers were fairly happy with our efforts. All of this happened in the span from 1986 – 1996. If you asked me today whether anyone, and I mean anyone, really cares about the efforts we made (products, effort, blood-sweat-tears, etc.), I’d say no.
One of the hidden factors in all of our legacies, and I know technologists don’t want to hear this, is that what we’re working on really doesn’t matter in the long term. No matter what you’re working on!
For example, Netflix or Google or Spotify of today really won’t matter (technically) 20 years from now. Sure, they’ll be historical notes about them on Wikipedia, but the products themselves won’t matter.
Hi everyone,
I just wanted to share some great news. I’ve just completed the 3’rd Edition of my Scrum Product Owner book.
It’s been a true labor of love that’s taken far longer to finish then I’d originally expected. (sounds like software products, right?) But, to quote a common agile phrase…I am now…
DONE.
Stick a fork in it, Baby!
E-copies (PDF, EPUB, and MOBI) are all available immediately on LeanPub. What’s nice about connecting via LeanPub is that I plan on continuing to evolve content & ideas in the PDF, so it will be a way to “stay in touch” with any future developments of the books’ themes.
Also not that I’ve published several short PDF, blog link books that make it easy to explore my blog posts on 3-specific topics:
Agile Coaching
Agile Leadership
Product Ownership
More information on ALL of the LeanPub copies can be found here: https://leanpub.com/bookstore?search=Robert%20Galen
You can find the paper version here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/098850264X/
And the Kindle version here: https://www.amazon.com/Scrum-Product-Ownership-Navigating-Forest-ebook/dp/B07PBGN5NW/
And here’s a link to my Amazon author page: https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/entity/author/B00287V534/
I’d like to make the following offer for ALL Edition 1 and Edition 2 book owners. If you’ve previously purchased a paper or e-copy of my two previous editions, I’ll give you a free e-copy of the 3’rd Edition. All you have to do is drop me a note and I’ll forward you a coupon for LeanPub to get your copy.
It’s been a long time in coming, but I’m incredibly pleased with the results. I hope you pick up a copy of the new book and hope even more so that it provides value to you.
And if you do read it, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. It means so much to me to gain feedback.
Stay agile my friends,
Bob.
