I’ve written a lot about product ownership, product backlogs, and user stories over the years. But the other day it struck me that I hadn’t shared something that has worked well for me for many years.
It’s an idea that is coupled to two notions—product backlog refinement and the 3-Amigos metaphor for story evolution.
I noticed in several companies I’ve worked for that teams struggled with getting the stories effectively delivered. There seemed to be, for lack of a better phrase, a lack of ownership in story delivery. That is, stories often missed the mark in functionality, quality, integration, etc. And when we discussed this in our retrospectives, there was a lot of finger-pointing and blaming, but no real solution ideas.
I believe I tried this first at a company called ChannelAdvisor around 2007-2008. So, you can see why I’m surprised that I haven’t thought to share it until now.
Many of you know that I often like to begin an article with a musical connection if I can.
The band Queensryche is a fairly well known heavy metal band who had a song Resistance. It’s not my favorite song of theirs, that’s probably Best I Can, but it’s a good one. And it was running through my mind as this topic rose up in my thinking.
But moving on…
I was hosting a Coaching Clinic at the Agile Online Summit this week (late October 2020). In our Monday and Tuesday clinics, about ten people were looking for help in overcoming resistance within their agile contexts. Leadership resistance and team-level resistance were neck-in-neck as being problem areas.
As I was facilitating the coaching sessions, it made me think about resistance. And I remembered an old (mature, but still relevant) article written by Dale Emory on resistance entitled—Resistance as a Resource. It was published in 2001, so about 20 years ago. Dale also used to share on this topic at conferences.
I’d read it several times over the years, but I read through it again. And as I did so, it resonated more with me now than it ever had before.
I’ve always been a huge Pink Floyd fan. And Dark Side of the Moon is one of my top 100 favorite albums of all time. And Time is one of my favorite songs on it.
Here’s a snippet from the lyrics that I think serve as a fine entry for this post.
So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.
But I digress…
I’m mature, experienced, or old enough to remember a time when software development was treated as a time-based activity.
You were measured by—
How fast you typed
How many lines of code you wrote (per hour, per day, per project)
How many hours you worked (typing as fast as you could)
How much time you spend (not typing) in meetings, writing documents, etc.
How quickly you could hack-together a design
How many bugs you produced
How many times you had to rework your code
How many breaks (bathroom, lunch, etc.) you took and for how long
I believe the thought at the time was—the more time you spend working, the more value you delivered to the company, the more you earned your pay. The optimization goal in this case was on time and production.
Sounds like a really good model, doesn’t it? And I’m not joking with the above. This was real!
I often hear of Communities of Practice as it relates to—
Product Ownership;
Scrum Mastery;
UX & Design;
DevOps;
Architecture;
Agile & Lean;
And Coaching
In agile contexts. But I rarely, if ever, hear of a Community of Practice as it relates to agile leadership. I wonder why?
I actually think the notion makes the most sense at the leadership level because there’s so much transformational work for leaders to take on around—
Finding the Vision and WHY behind their agile transformational efforts;
Establishing clarity around roles & responsibilities;
Creating more trust & empowerment across the organization;
Creating a more strategic focus;
Coaching their teams;
Actively culture-shaping in day-to-day behaviors;
Establishing effective metrics;
Learning, growing, and developing as effective agile servant leaders.
Shifting that must happen at the leadership level for an effective and successful agile transformation to unfold. And the best strategy for this is not each individual leader going it alone. The best approach is to form a team of leaders who are going to be receiving training and coaching together. In other words, forming a learning and collaborating cohort who helps each other in their journey. A group of accountability partners, if you will.
Let’s explore one idea around that next.
I was talking with a colleague of mine the other day about their experience beginning an agile transformation at a financial firm. Their executive team asked to be informed about agility and they gave him a 3-hour limit to their availability.
They considered this THE opportunity to get all of the leadership in’s and outs about agile so that they could lead the effort effectively.
To be honest, I’ve heard this all before. In fact, I’ve heard these sorts of things for ~20 years from senior leaders, stakeholder’s, and executives—
I need you to fill me in on everything there is to know about Lean, Agile, Scrum, etc. and I only have about an hour.
We’re locked and loaded on an Agile Transformation. Can you give me the executive overview? The executive team and I can only give you two hours.
The most we can give you for agile leadership training is 4-hours. And that’s a lot considering our priorities, so let’s just make the best of it.
If you follow my writing much, you’ve noticed that I often challenge traditional leaders to lean in to their own personal transformation when it comes to agile. At times, I think I’ve been quite hard on them.
I do this from a perspective of deep respect, and personal experience & empathy, and with the hope of inspiring emergent agile leaders.
CAL class discussion
In my last CAL class, we had a detailed discussion on trust. In that class, it was private, so composed entirely of leaders from a singular organization.
I was emphasizing the need for agile leaders to extend trust (freely give, stretch or reach out, give till it hurts) to their team members as they embarked on a new agile transformation. Another way I tried to express it was for them to—
If you’re a basketball fan and know who Allen Iverson is, then you’ll probably remember his infamous rant about “practice”. While he can never be questioned for the effort he put forth in games, he didn’t have a fondness for practice.
Now that doesn’t have much to do with coaching. Yet, I like the reference.
In this article, I did want to explore the notion of practice related to becoming a better coach. Both a professional coach and an agile coach.
A Sidebar
Not that long ago, I had a young woman sit down with me at a coaching clinic at the Scrum Alliance Gathering. She was a Millennial looking for career advice and she was very direct.
Bob, I want to achieve your level of expertise in the agile coaching community and I want to do it in a year. Please tell me how to do that.
Sadly, I don’t think my answer helped her nor was it well received. It was simply that…you can’t. And I wasn’t speaking from a position of ego. But from the position that it’s taken me ~20 years to acquire whatever skills I have in my journey. And I didn’t think that can easily be encapsulated and subsumed overnight or within a year.
We were in my Agile Moose Herd coaching circle and the question came up about a coaching firm that had come into an organization and said something like…
We want to focus on the future and don’t really want to look backward. It’s all about what’s in front of us. So, everyone, please let’s talk about agile going forward and not about what did (or did not) work in the past.
And the question was—
Was that a fair way to enter an organization as a coach? Basically, to place history off-limits to the discussions?
This made me/us consider the idea of entering an organization (group, tribe, company, system) as a coach or change agent and explore the first few steps you should be taking upon entry?
Here I capture where the discussions landed on an—agile coaching entry strategy with a client embarking on an agile transformation—
