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
Personal Thoughts, Short-takes
Robert Galen
Privilege Awareness

I recently replied to a LinkedIn post by David Pereira. It was a wonderful post, and I applaud David’s boldness and courage in sharing it. 

Here’s a post comment from Stefan Wolpers—

While I agree fully with your personal stance regarding professionalism, David Pereira, some people will shy away, given the current economic climate. Some of the previously aggravated people may seek an opportunity to settle scores.

And here’s my comment—

I love the clarity (No BS) here. Clarity for David and clarity for those who want to work with and who don't want to work with him.
That said, David has the unique privilege that allows him to adopt this clarity. Many don't.

This post is not about David per se. Instead, he inspired me to write it.

Privilege Awareness

Diversity

Diversity & Inclusion – A Financial Decision?

I tossed whether to respond to this post or not because I know Perry Riggs and know how incredibly thoughtful and well-intentioned he is. But I kept coming back to wanting to respond, so here I am…

Perry shared this great post entitled—The Financial Imperative of Diversity & Inclusion.

It’s well written and makes a very good point. However, it inspired me to make another point. A “Yes, and…” to Perry’s, if you will.

Why don’t we simply consider Diversity & Inclusion to be—

  • A moral imperative?

  • The right and proper thing to do?

  • Long overdue?

  • A societal obligation?

  • Just plain, normal?

Regardless of the financial implications…

That’s how I see it.

Stay agile my friends,

Bob.

We need more women in agile coaching!

This post is directly related to my post yesterday about The Privilege of my Agile Coaching.

At the end of 2020, many things are running around my brain. Among them are—

  • Diversity and Inclusion

  • Women in Agile

  • State of Agile Coaching

As I was sitting with my third cup of coffee the other morning, I became curious. (not an uncommon thing ;-)

More specifically, curious about the number of women who are Scrum Alliance CEC’s (Certified Enterprise Coaches and CTC’s (Certified Team Coaches). So, I went to the Scrum Alliance website and I counted them. 

I found that—

  • Of 125 total CEC’s, 17 were women (14%)

  • Of 174 total CTC’s, 28 were women (16%)

Keep in mind that it’s quite common for CEC’s to also have the CTC. So, there is some overlap in the numbers.

With that being said, are you surprised by the numbers? I was!  

It’s not clear to me what a “good number” would be. But these seem off in some way. I was expecting (hoping for) them to be higher. I’ve collaborated with such talented women in the agile community over the years, that it just seemed to me as if ~50% or more of the coaches should be women.

And since this is a snapshot, and I don’t have access to historical data, I don’t know if these are trending better or worse over time. I certainly hope better. 

I also wondered if I applied any other diversity lenses to the coaching community what might those percentages be? Would they be equally disappointing?

The Real Point

But the real point in my writing this is to focus on what can we (me, every CTC, CEC, the Scrum Alliance board, and every member of the Scrum Alliance) do to actively increase the diversity in our coaching ranks?

I’d really like this post to generate some energy, ideas, and momentum in this space. So, do you have any of those? And what can you personally do to make a difference?

That’s something I’m deeply thinking about as I enter 2021. Look for me to take more targeted action in this space in 2021…

Stay agile my coaching friends,

Bob.

 

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The Privilege of my Agile Coaching

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The Privilege of my Agile Coaching

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—

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Mad Scientist Inclusion

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Mad Scientist Inclusion

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.

All voices matter!

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.

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Mad Scientist Diversity

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Mad Scientist Diversity

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.

Teams are where the magic happens

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.