I’ve known Mary Thorn for around 10-years. We’ve grown up together coaching and teaching agile to a wide variety of organizations and teams. Mary calls me her mentor, so I guess I am. But I’ve probably learned more from Mary than she’s ever learned from me.
We’re friends, colleagues, and incredibly like-minded when it comes to agile strategies, tactics, tools, and techniques. So, on the surface, you would think we’d be in permanent, lock-step alignment.
Sure, we have our disagreements. For example, one of the big ones relates to SAFe—
I’m a recovering SPC and Mary is a hardened SPC.
She loves the framework and I tolerate it.
She leverages it in her coaching and company contexts, and I normally don’t.
In a word, Mary is SAFe, and I’m not that SAFe.
But they are quite few and far between. And, we often have a bit of fun with our differences. So, we’re aligned, right? Well, we are and we’re aren’t.
Let me share a quick story…