I was wrong

As I reflect on my 40+ career, with over half of it in leadership roles, I think about things that I did that made me different and potentially more effective than most leaders. 

One thing that stood out is related to my reflective nature.

If you’ve ever worked with or for me, you’ll know that it’s quite common for me to have a strong initial reaction or opinion to something. Imagine that.

Then, upon ongoing reflection…

I’ll come in the next day and say—

You know, I thought about your idea more

And you know what, I was wrong. I want to support your approach (idea, strategy).

The notion that I’m not stuck on my ideas I think opens up the creative process for folks. It creates safety and the knowledge that (over time) I can be open-minded 😉

I experienced that this level of vulnerability, my willingness to admit I was wrong, opened up my culture.

The key message here is for leaders. When was the last time you said to your teams, your peers, your boss, or yourself—

I was wrong, you have my full support, let’s do it your way?

Stay agile, my friends,

Bob.

BTW: It’s not always easy to say it, so I need to practice in the mirror each morning.

Agile Coaching CoP Partnership Program

AGILE COACHING COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE OR CENTERS OF EXCELLENCE

PARTNERSHIP PROGRAM

Agile Coaching in the world of Business Agility can be a uniquely challenging space. One of those challenge areas is with your Agile Coaching Communities of Practice. A group encompassing your Agile Coach and Scrum Master teams that encourages their ongoing collaboration, learning, and growth. It can be a centerpiece of your overall impact and value proposition or another boring group meeting.

Bob Galen is the author of Extraordinarily Badass Agile Coaching. He’s an accomplished coach with a long history of coaching from the team to the boardroom. His personal goal is to disrupt, challenge, and raise the professionalism and craft of Agile Coaching everywhere. And there is no better place to do it than within your Communities of Practice!

Bob can help with—

• Setting up and kicking off your CoP.

• Re-energizing your CoP or CoE (LACE) by bringing fresh ideas in.

• Group and 1:1 mentoring, modeling, and coaching.

• Providing masterclass-level training for your CoP team members.

• Visiting periodically to keep the momentum going.

• Assisting you in leveraging the Comparative Agility, Agile Coaching PI in your learning journeys.

• Speaking at and participating in company-wide events.

If you need help with your Agile Coaching group practices, contact Bob to explore how he can help you and your coaches become more Badass in delivering real Value.

Great Teams Don’t Grow on Trees

Heath Nichols wrote a wonderful post entitled—Great Teams Don’t Grow on Trees.  

It reminded me of the importance of investing in your agile teams, trusting and empowering them, and the need to never take them for granted. In other words, it’s about the team, Stupid!

I’ve written a couple of posts surrounding the topic as well—

• https://rgalen.com/agile-training-news/2015/3/30/building-agile-teams-a-primer-for-organizational-leaders

• https://rgalen.com/agile-training-news/2016/5/22/its-about-the-agile-team-stupid

• https://rgalen.com/agile-training-news/2017/2/12/elastic-teams

• https://rgalen.com/agile-training-news/2020/11/2/motivating-agile-teams

I hope you take the time to read Heath’s article and perhaps follow up with mine. That being said, never forget to appreciate the value of your teams!

Stay agile my friends,

Bob.

And here are additional resources on this topic—

• https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/building-leading-great-teams-research

• https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rethinking-self-organization-michelle-holliday/

• https://www.amazon.com/Age-Thrivability-Perspectives-Practices-Better/dp/0995275904/

Descaling Manifesto

To be honest, I’ve been aware of and admiring Peter Merel and his work for quite some time—perhaps more than 10 years. That said, I haven’t been a consistent follower, and as I re-reviewed the Descaling Manifesto, he proposes within the XSCALE Alliance, I realized the great work he’s been doing in the agile community. Purposeful and vital work that strikes at the heart of a truly agile mindset and better ways of leading, organizing, and working.

My purpose in writing this post is to acquaint you with Peter, the alliance, and the manifesto. It also encourages you to do a deep dive into everything on the Alliance site looking for new ideas, tactics, and approaches to your scaling challenges. Perhaps in a word, leaning into descaling.

I plan on doing that myself, so look for a more detailed future update sharing my thoughts.

And a Conference!

Finally, I was excited to see Peter planning a virtual conference from October 25th – 27th. I plan on attending to reinvigorate myself, and I hope to see you there too. You can find more info here –

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/petermerel_home-activity-7095253127490121729-Z9Tc

Here’s to descaling. Stay agile, my friends,

Bob.

Oh, and by the way, I just signed the Manifesto. Better late than never I always say…

Where has all the innovation gone?

The title is an homage to Pete Seegers – Where have all the flowers gone?

The other day, I was in a Moose Herd chat (mid-June 2023), and the conversation revolved around innovation. And it dawned on me that I haven’t been hearing innovation stuff as much as I used to.

For example, I’d say from ~2008 – 2015; there was lots and lots of discussion coming out of the agile community around things like –

• Google 20% time

• Refactoring

• Innovation days

• Innovation sprints

• Active refactoring

• Pair programming, general pairing

• Mob programming; general mobbing

• Hackathons

• Design sprints

• Paper prototyping

• Storyboarding

Just to name a few practices around team-based innovation. But to be honest, I’m hearing less and less of this now, both from the organizations/teams I’m coaching or interacting with and from community thought leaders.

So, my question is—

Have these activities and practices slipped away and been forgotten?

Or

Are they such common practices that, nobody talks about them anymore, they just are?

To that end, my colleague and friend Leon Sabarsky and I have created a short survey to collect information about the State of Innovation in Agile Ways of Working.

We’d very much appreciate hearing about your experiences.

Stay agile my friends,

Bob.

On a related note, I wrote this in 2013…

https://rgalen.com/agile-training-news/2013/10/1/google-20-timesadly-its-gone

Something else…

https://rgalen.com/agile-training-news/2016/11/10/innovation-management-vs-team-responsibility

Valued People Create Value

I saw this exchange on LinkedIn between David Pereira and Michael Küsters.  

Here’s a snippet of what David said—

❌ Customers don’t care which agile framework you use
❌ Customers don’t mind how you work
❌ Customers couldn’t care less about your state of the art product delivery

✅ Customers only care about how you make their lives better—no more, no less

Are we sometimes or maybe too often missing the mark?

And Michael commented—

❌ Customers don’t care if you burn out your employees
❌ Customers don’t care if you don't listen to your employees
❌ Customers don’t care if you underpay your employees
❌ Customers don’t care if you fire your employees to keep more profit for yourself

The customer isn't everything. That's a dysfunction already.

✅ Customers will care if you treat people like people, with dignity and respect - because the service they'll get from such people is going to be different than the service provided by drones.

Later on in the comment trail, someone mentioned that you can do both—

Care about value creation and how you treat your people.

And I agree. But that statement puts the two on equal footing. However, that part I disagree with and want to prioritize one over the other.

I believe people should come first and how you treat your people drives the value that you create for your customers.

I realized that’s not what David was saying. But I wanted to lean into Michael’s perspective and amplify it a wee bit more.

Stay agile my friends,

Bob.

BTW: it’s worthwhile to read David’s entire post AND all of the comments.