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Agile Leadership

Indications of Agile Done Well

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Indications of Agile Done Well

Our local agile ALN group has an annual tradition of doing lightning talks on the last meeting (November) of the year. The group coordinator kindly asked me if I wanted to participate and, since I was in town, I enthusiastically agreed.

But then the hard part began. I would have 5-minutes to talk about anything I wanted to. But only 5-minutes. 

I struggled to figure out what to focus on until the day of the meeting. The pressure was building. And yes, I had a gazillion ideas that I could share, but nothing had risen to the top. Around 2 pm something came to me.

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The Failure Bow

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The Failure Bow

Within the agile community, I’ve seen quite a few examples of folks doing a, how do I say it, Failure Bow. To be frank, I didn’t know what it was all about. Sure, I get the gist of it. But where does it come from? And what are folks trying to represent by doing it? I never quite knew the backstory. 

I also discovered that there were also several forms of it. There was the in-person failure bow. For example, a speaker making a mistake in front of their audience would do it.

But I recently received some email from Scrum Alliance folks that had mistakes in them. The senders then did virtual failure bows via follow-up emails. I’ve even seen folks do it via #failurebow in the twitter (and other) streams.

It made me want to explore it a bit deeper. So, I did.

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Remember, you are choosing how you show up…

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Remember, you are choosing how you show up…

I was teaching a class the other day and folks were very distracted. Even though the class had been scheduled for months and everyone seemed committed to it, the following happened: 

  • People were running in and out of class to attend meetings

  • Many were checking email on their laptops and phones

  • Several leaders, who were scheduled to attend, totally bailed out

  • Several “emergencies” came up that needed immediate attention

Believe it or not, this often happens during my classes. And I’m not that bothered by it. Meaning, I try to ignore the interruptions and focus my attention to those who ARE present. And who do want to add more skills and thinking to their practice of agile leadership.

That being said, I’m not writing this article to complain. But instead to make a very clear point…

It’s a CHOICE!

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Agile Coaching Hypothetical

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Agile Coaching Hypothetical

My colleague and friend, Daniel Mezick, posed the following hypothetical on LinkedIn in September 2019 –  

You are an independent Agile coach, visiting a potential client with 1500 employees. It's obvious that the intelligent, well-meaning executive that is interviewing you does not really understand that employee engagement is essential to success in transformation. His org wants to "roll out" imposed Agile practices. They plan to use this big, huge framework. They already decided.

With all the training and everything else, it's looking like about 200K coming your way over the next 8 months if you get this account. But you are 100% sure it's the wrong approach. And if you say so, you figure there is a 60% chance your concerns will be lost in translation. And you know you have no more than 45 minutes with this executive. So, you sit there, intently listening to his story, and pondering what it means to "do the right thing." There are 25 minutes left at this meeting. And you know some other consulting firms who are good at marketing will also be interviewed as service providers for this engagement. You realize it's now or never. And you are not too happy about this... 

Link to the post - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/danielmezick_you-are-an-independent-agile-coach-visiting-activity-6577891855055241216-oU7Y

As of September 16th, the post had received +20k views, 158 reactions, and 116 comments. Which is astounding to me.

Clearly, it’s created a buzz and generated reactions, which is probably why Dan posed it in the first place. I’m thinking he wanted to post a hypothetical that was open to interpretation and representative of a common agile coaching dilemma.

I wanted to weigh-in. Not as a way of directly responding to the scenario. And not, to the more than 100 comments. But more so, just from my heart. You see, I think the answer is quite simple.

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Empathy for Agile Leaders

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Empathy for Agile Leaders

I sometimes think that I’m the only agile coach who supports “management” and “leaders” in agile contexts. And I’ve written quite a few pieces with that perspective. For example –  

http://rgalen.com/agile-training-news/2014/11/23/agile-coaches-trainers-have-you-walked-in-the-shoes-of-technical-management

So, I was surprised and delighted when I read this piece from Jason Little – Why Executives Don’t Go to Agile Conferences.

Based on the title, I thought Jason would join a long list of agile thought leaders who take a few swipes at executives. But when I got into it, I realized that he showed far more understanding and empathy than I could have imagined. Here are two quotes from the article…

It astonishes me to see so much information about bad leadership, and how executives don’t care because they can’t spare a day at an Agile conference to explore how to run more effective retrospectives. I don’t think many pundits have a clue how much stress these people have on them, and that executives are people too. Sure, some may behave in a more forward way, which is usually perceived as command-and-control, but from my experience, it’s not the case. They’re just busy.

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Riina on Transformational Leadership

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Riina on Transformational Leadership

Riina Hellström is the CEO of a Finnish company focused on Agile HR. She often writes about topics related to that area and I really like here style. 

She is a no nonsense, straight-shooter who you can tell has lots of experience collaborating with leadership teams.

Not that long ago, she wrote a piece in a LinkedIn comment about how she approaches agile transformations. I thought I’d share it with you…

  1. Grill the CEO or Unit head before you start teaching them Agile. Tell her/him that she/he is 100% responsible for making agile work.

  2. Train the Leadership team in Agile for 2 days - make them go through a mind-blowing transformation backlog building exercise together. It must hurt. Grill them all - tell them nothing’s going to happen if none of you actually take an item off that backlog and finish it. Very few of these people have been very action oriented lately. It is a stretch to them to actually see that shit gets done.

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Listen to ME!

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Listen to ME!

We were sharing stories in a recent CAL class. One of the students talked about the dynamics of release engineering related to gaining customer feedback. I shared a recent post from Jason Fried where he mentioned the importance of releasing a product to get feedback. Making the point that customers are the only arbiter whether you were on track or not in your MVP development path.

Here’s the link -

https://uxplanet.org/10-things-i-learned-from-jason-fried-about-building-products-5b6694ff02aa

The young man brought up his frustration with the phenomenon of organizations often listening more to outsiders rather then listening to their own teams or internal experts. Either in person or as names being dropped in conversation.

I sometimes liken this to bandwagon syndrome and I shared on that here –

http://rgalen.com/agile-training-news/2014/4/13/bandwagons-the-good-and-the-bad

I fully resonated with his comment. Being an outside consultant, I often hear “insiders” say something like:

I’ve been giving my leadership team that feedback for several (days, months, even years) and they’ve never really listened to me. You (consultant Bob) come in and say it once and suddenly everyone takes it seriously. 

Do you know how frustrating that is?

Actually, I do. And I’m incredibly empathetic to the point.

I remember when I was at iContact as their agile transformation coach, I had everyone’s ear for the first year or so. And my recommendations were easier to make and have them stick. But as time passed and everyone got used to my voice, stories, and style, they started to tune me out a bit.

So, this phenomenon happens to us all.

I started to bring in other thought leaders, either hired or invited, to mix the ideas (and voices) up a bit. And this seemed to work beautifully to break through the ice and renew some of my influence.

Wrapping up

While this can be a bit frustrating to folks on the inside, I think this is a natural occurrence in all organizations. Folks get accustomed to our voices and we need to augment them with book / article references, outside perspectives, and other ideas.

I think it’s simply the way it is. And you know…

It doesn’t matter where or who the idea comes from as long as the organization gains a flow of ideas, tries and experiments with new things, and continues to learn & evolve.

It’s all good.

Stay agile my friends,

Bob.

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Building an Agile Coaching Team (redux)

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Building an Agile Coaching Team (redux)

Awhile ago, I’d written a blog post about the lack of an agile engagement having a cohesive coaching team. But later it dawned on me that I’ve never shared what an agile coaching team might look like.

Given that inspiration, I spent some time developing the first version of this post in which I discussed aspects of creating (finding, forming, and building) a great team of coaches for a larger-scale, agile transformation initiative.

Since then, I’ve updated my experience and renewed my focus on this important topic. I’ve also developed some additional posts that support the ideas. So, I thought I’d share an update with everyone.

Here’s a link to the original post. And let’s explore it again, below:

Are they followers?

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Checking for Safety

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Checking for Safety

Safety is a hot topic in agile contexts today. Continuously begging the question – 

Is it safe?

With a nod to the film Marathon Man. Safety is incredibly relevant to the level of true agile performance at a team level.

In the following post, Joshua Kerievsky mentioned a technique originated by Norm Kerth that explores ways to “check for” safety.

https://medium.com/@JoshuaKerievsky/norm-kerths-safety-poll-bcccd5be6e44

While this may be a relatively short post, it’s an important one. And this is NOT simply focused on safety at a team level. It’s also applicable for all levels of the organization.

I also really like that Josh gives a nod to Norm. A true pioneer in this space!

Norm wrote the book Project Retrospectives, which is a foundation for nearly all of the agile retrospective advice (books, articles, etc.) that followed it. I don’t think he gets enough credit for this important work.

Anyway, please read the post and renew your focus on safety awareness within your teams.

Stay agile my friends,

Bob.

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Revisiting Agile Teams

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Revisiting Agile Teams

Revisiting Agile TeamsThis post is inspired by this article by Derek Huether - https://medium.com/@derekhuether/stable-teams-should-be-non-negotiable-59af0972f77

His is the sort of the position I used to have. However, I’ve been rethinking my position over the last few years. Not that I’m moving away from honoring the team. I’ll always do that. 

But I’ve started to think that a little adversity isn’t necessarily bad for a team.

I want to use this post as an update to my writings about agile teams. The following post best captures my thoughts – http://rgalen.com/agile-training-news/2018/3/5/stop-norming-performing

Back to Derek’s point

Derek makes 3 key points in the article:

  1. Teams that stay together are more productive.             (more stories)

  2. Teams that stay together are more predictable.             (higher throughput)

  3. Teams that say together are more responsive.               (less time in process)

And he supports those conclusions with data from Larry Maccherone while he was with Rally/CA and reviewing data collected through their tooling. Another key point Derek makes is against the frequent reorganizations that run rampant in many companies. That they undermine all three aspects.

I’m not going to challenge the data or Derek’s key point. Let’s assume that everything is right. That we want to focus on team productivity. However, I think there are things to consider equally (and perhaps even more importantly) than productivity.

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