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failing forward

Them & Us in Failure

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Them & Us in Failure

This is inspired by a conversation I had at our Vaco Agile coach’s guild.  

We had a discussion around it being ok to fail is NOT simply leaders giving us space/safety to fail. It’s also about our internal willingness to fail.

For example, as I’m a strong and driven Type A, my personality isn’t that comfortable with failure. So, even if the ecosystem is “failure friendly” or encouraging…

  • Am I? and if not, why not?

  • Are other members of my team? And if not, why not?

  • Are members of my group or tribe? And if not, why not?

And if we’re not internally failure friendly, how do we get there? How do I/we move the needle?

Wrapping Up

This was a real short take post, but I hope it starts you thinking about your safety and failure friendly ecosystem.

While, yes, your leaders play a really SIGNIFICANT role in it. It’s not solely about them. It’s also about US and our WE walking our own talk?

How might we test it? Perhaps checking for –

  • When was the last time someone on your team failed…and shared it?

  • And, when was the last time you failed…and shared it?

Anyway, food for thought. Stay agile my friends,

Bob.

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Fail NOW as a Strategy

Fail NOW as a Strategy

I was at a conference not that long ago speaking and sharing on various agile topics. As often happens, a young man stopped me to ask a few questions after one of my presentations. We struck up a nice conversation that eventually slipped out into the hotel corridors.

We started talking about sprint dynamics within Scrum teams and I happened to mention that I usually coach teams towards declaring their sprints a success…or (pause for meaningful effect) …a failure. That we do this as part of the teams’ Sprint Review, with the Product Owner being the final determinant based on whether the team achieved their Sprint Goal(s).