My friend and colleague Mike Hall wrote an insightful article entitled—Starting an Agile Transformation with Understanding, not that long ago. It contains the following quote quite early in the article. It touched me deeply with its truth and I thought I’d share it—
Agile Coaches operating as true change agents will spend the first few months building relationships and understanding how your business works. They will lead with empathy and seek to understand. They will dig for the historical perspective of why things are the way they are, in a non-judgmental way. They will observe, ask questions, interview, and establish a “mental context” prior to making any change recommendations. Don’t short change this crucial time period – it is absolutely required for the upcoming Agile recommendations to be meaningful!
The three things that stood out to me from the quote and in reading the article were: Relationship, Empathy, and Understanding.
In that, as coaches, we should…
First, strive to build a relationship with our clients. But also realizing that this often takes time and patience.
Second, we need to build our empathy. A good way of doing this is by walking quietly in the shoes of your clients.
And finally, that our goal needs to be understanding. And that understanding begins within ourselves and then extends to our client’s personal, business, and organizational contexts.
Again, realizing that we need to quietly and patiently take the time.
Wrapping Up
But as Mike discusses, we often are driven to “rush in” and diagnose things, recommend things, and implement things, without truly understanding what we’re talking about.
Now there might be many driving forces for this including our egos, the length of our contract, the expectations of our clients, and the temperature of the opportunity. But none of them truly justify a lack of understanding.
As agile coaches, we have a responsibility to understand before we begin advising or recommending, or telling. So, stop, pause, listen, observe, breathe, and then…understand.
Stay agile my friends!
Bob.