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

Colleague Reactions

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What Happened to Agile Coaching?

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What Happened to Agile Coaching?

Todd Charron posted a rather Big Question on Linked in February 2023. And it’s supported by this blog with more details. 

I thought I’d share a snippet from Todd’s post to whet your appetite—

But I don’t see these kinds of coaches as often as I used to

Now I see--

  • “You’re going to have bring in more coaches”

  • “You have to follow the process exactly”

  • “If only we had management support / buy-in”

  • “Which certification should I get next?”

  • “I’m studying to be a life coach…”

The last one, in particular, annoys me

It’s like a bunch of life coaches discovered Agile

And since they can’t get hired as life coaches, they figured they’d get businesses to pay them for “Agile Coaching”

These coaches are doing the activities they want to do instead of focusing on the mission

And the mission is:

Helping the client solve their problems

Instead, what we get is:

Coaches pretending to help businesses while they convince people to quit their jobs

I’ve seen this more times than I’d like to admit

This isn’t the only coaching anti-pattern

Among the 38 comments by March 1st, I also wanted to share these two from Sam Perera—

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Two More Leadership Ideas

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Two More Leadership Ideas

Trauma-Informed Leadership

Kima Tozay recently wrote an article entitled 6 Reasons to Practice Trauma Informed Leadership in Your Workplace.

Here are three snippets from the article—

What is trauma-informed leadership?

According to David Tweedy, a Clinical Psychologist and Healthcare Executive, “Trauma-informed Leadership is a way of understating or appreciating there is an emotional world of experiences rumbling around beneath the surface.” He affirms that “when emotional responses are triggered in the workplace, each person responds according to the extent of their emotional scars, traumas and emotional strengths.”…

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Two Leadership Ideas

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Two Leadership Ideas

Congruence

Heidi Araya recently published an article entitled Dear Executive: Incongruence Comes with a Cost.

Here are two snippets from the beginning of the article—

Another example of incongruence would be that management tells teams to work in a specific way (“agile” for example), but do not model this themselves. For example, teams must be transparent and report their metrics upwards, but leadership is not transparent with their decisions or metrics. A common one is managers saying they want people to “work more as a team,” but promoting individual metrics for productivity instead or assigning individuals to projects. 

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Courageous Authenticity

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I think it’s hard to walk your talk publicly. But especially challenging in the world of agile coaching. I recently saw this post by Lucia Baldelli and thought I’d share it because it struck me as a wonderfully courageous act on her part.

I found the comments interesting as well.

I don’t think I’ll add anything else, as I think her—

  • Courage,

  • Role model,

  • And, Authenticity…

Speaks for itself!

If you care to check out some of my own ideas on coaching ethics, you can read more here.

Stay agile my friends, AND thank you, Lucia!

Bob.

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It’s Super Easy to Nit-Pick

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It’s Super Easy to Nit-Pick

I read this LinkedIn post by Cliff Berg the other day, and it made me sad and a bit angry.

But not on the level you might think.

You see, I don’t care about Agile 2 or whether it’s better or worse than the original agile (Agile 1, Agile Manifesto, methods begun in the late 1990s and early 2000s, etc.). I don’t care to try to compare features, duel on definitions, complain about the past, or build my reputation by nit-picking something to death.

Sad

What makes me really sad is the apparent lack of respect that Cliff has for the past efforts and ideas of those whose thoughts he is building on.

What came to mind is that quote by Isaac Newton that says—

“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants”.

I don’t see Cliff respecting or acknowledging those that have come before him. The people, the ideas, the methods, and the intentions. The original manifesto and movement created a tidal wave of changed thinking regarding how we build software. I think it, and they deserve more than he’s giving them.

I’ve copied his original post in-line below, and I’ve highlighted the positive acknowledgments he made to the original work—

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Change Fatigue

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Change Fatigue

This is an interesting thread on LinkedIn from Chris Murman where he posited how to measure change fatigue?

I think it’s a good baseline for a short post. The essence of his post was how to measure it. I wonder if specifically measuring change fatigue is important or simply fatigue in general.

Here are some ideas to measure plan, old fatigue—

  • Lack of extending patience & grace

  • Not extending API (Assuming Positive Intent)

  • Low overall group energy levels

  • Silence, disengagement, or checking out

  • Persistently off cameras

  • Low curiosity

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Agile is...

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I saw the following quote on LinkedIn the other day from Anjali Leon. It’s the answer to the question—What is Agile? 

What is Agile? A question that conjures up a variety of responses.

Over the last few years of helping my clients embrace this 'way' to arrive at better outcomes, I have landed on this definition (so far).

'Agile is a philosophy and strategy for navigating complexity and change that values outcome orientation, cross-functional collaboration, customer-centricity, worker well-being, and adaptation through experimentation'

Here is how I think of some of these terms...

  • Philosophy - a theory or attitude held by a person or organization that acts as a guiding principle for behavior.

  • Strategy - a way forward or long-range plan of doing something or dealing with something.

  • Navigate - deal effectively with a situation.

  • Complexity - something that has many parts and is difficult to understand and find answers to.

What do you think? Does it resonate? And, how do you answer the question - What is Agile?

Quick Reactions

First of all, I want to applaud Anjali for her courage. I’ve learned the hard way that anytime you “go on record” publicly with a definition of any sort, you can’t make all of the people happy with it.

;-)

Second, I really like the definition. As someone in the comments mentioned, the only missing component from my perspective is the team (so I added worker well-being in-line).

Finally, I think exercises like this are incredibly healthy for us as agile coaches, leaders, and change agents. We ought to be “continuously noodling” on the mindset and principle aspects of agility to keep us focused and sharp.

Thank you, Anjali for the noodling prompt!

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.

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Spending Your Own Life’s Energy

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Oluf Nissen posted the following on LinkedIn:

I think I've figured out why I have a certain distaste for both consulting companies and American-style capitalism. Both are essentially about not spending your own life energy to get a "return", but benefiting from others' life energy being spent continuously for your "return" or reusing life energy spent by someone else in the past. It's sort of the ultimate inequity. And both are essentially lazy. And don't get me wrong, I love lazy. Just not this kind. Expressing this distaste has limited my career options in the past. So, this is quite risky for me to put out there. 

And I thought I’d share it as a thought experiment for everyone.

I’ve been mulling it over ever since I read the post. It’s made me think of:

  • Where am I spending my life’s energy?

  • Am I getting the returns I expected from those investments?

  • Am I using/reusing others’ life energy without care, awareness, intention, or appreciation?

  • Do I need to increase, decrease, or renew any of the above?

I think these thoughts align with a post I did a while back about bullets. You might want to read that one as well.

Wrapping Up

Where are you spending your life’s energy and are you being lazy with others’ energy?

Stay agile (and energetic) my friends,

Bob.