Viewing entries tagged
failure

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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Just a little…Forgiveness

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Just a little…Forgiveness

I was attending the STPCon conference in Washington, DC last week (week of September 25). As always, there were quite a lot of old friends there. Folks I usually only meet on the conference circuit.

The conference committee tried a Lightning Talk format for the first time. They invited 7-8 speakers on stage to give 5-minute, focused talks. Dot Graham gave one that is still sticking with me.

She focused on creating (fostering, inviting, inspiring, allowing) a mistake culture. One where everyone focused on two aspects of their mistakes:

  • Learning from them, and
  • Forgiving themselves for them.

I’ve heard the learning part many times before. But this is the first time that I’ve heard “forgiveness” mentioned as part of creating a learning culture and it struck me.

In a team environment mistakes always happen. Sometimes they’re small things. And other time, they’re large ones which have an impact on the entire team.

I have a saying that I often share in my coaching and teaching. I amplify that agile teams (all teams really) succeed and fail as a team. That is, we don’t throw anyone under the bus, but we deal with everything from the solidarity of a WHOLE TEAM perspective.

I now want to add other attributes to that description:

  • We reflect as a team;
  • We learn as a team;
  • We make mistakes as a team;
  • And we forgive ourselves as a team.

I love the Norm Kerth sentiments regarding the Prime Directive for retrospectives where he sets the stage for the “intentions” of all attendees.

Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.

I think this sentiment helps us in our view towards mistakes and our forgiving each other (including ourselves) for making those mistakes.

I know that I for one can be really hard on myself when confronting the things I’ve done wrong.

As Dot reminded me, I want to encourage all of you in your agile journeys to be kind and forgiving of one another. Remember, they are ONLY mistakes and we all make them!

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).