Compassion—the Power of Vulnerability

Posted on 2011/09/28 by Olaf

I’ve learned a lot about myself in the conversations at AgileCoachCamp US. I talked with Michael Sahota, Dave Sharrock, Siraj Sirajuddin, Pascal Pinck and others about various topics, a prominent being the influence maps that Siraj had multiple sessions on during the camp. Today, Gerry Kirk posted a TED talk by Brene Brown that gave me further insights into the source of my happiness:

Connection

Brene talks about the personal ability to feel connected. She identifies shame as the fear of disconnection, not being worthy of connection. In order for connection to really happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen. She found in her research there are two groups of people:

one with a sense of worthiness, feeling worthy of love and belonging, and
one struggling for love and belonging.

Courage

What do these people who feel worthiness have in common? She found they’re whole-hearted, they have a sense of courage, the courage to be imperfect. They share the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others.

These people have connection because of authenticity, and they fully embrace vulnerability. They share a willingness to invest in a relationship without knowing if it will work out.

Vulnerability

To me, her talk boils down to: people who realise that vulnerability is important, who say, “I’m enough”, surrender and walk into it, will be happier. Because:

You can’t selectively numb emotions. If you numb your vulnerability, you numb joy, gratitude and happiness too.

Real Options

To me, this connects with Real Options. Allow uncertainty back into your life—accept you have real options, and that these have value. Stop being certain, start having open conversations. To do that, you need to be vulnerable.

Kanban Considered Harmful? turned into Quality of Life

Posted on 2011/09/27 by Olaf

The AgileCoachCamp US in Columbus, Ohio, was in many ways an enlightening and awesome event. Pascal Pinck invited me to come, meeting him and talking to him was one of the highlights of the weekend. This won’t be my last post about ACCUS…

Session Title

Kanban Considered Harmful?

I had a few conversations at the SoCal Kanban/Lean Software meetup in LA (see my slides here) about situations where teams had failed to introduced Scrum, not succeeding in building working software every few weeks. Then someone came along and suggested Kanban, as this would not require iterations… I see an evil pattern there: Teams (and organisations) think they are agile once they introduced a framework (Scrum) or tool (Kanban). This is wrong. Both are meant for a single purpose: to challenge the status quo. To support continuous improvement of the way we work. So if you “succeed” in doing Scrum (Backlog, Burndown, potentially shippable etc.) but don’t continue to improve from there, you miss the point. If you “succeed” in putting a Kanban board on your wall, assign WIP limits that feel comfortable and never start improving, you miss the point.

I love Kanban, as it is used as a gentle tool to introduce change and lead to a continuous agile/lean transformation of the workplace and value network. As it leads to building the right things better, instead of the wrong things righter. I love Scrum, if after the initial (revolutionary) step you continually improve. If you don’t do that, you’re getting it wrong, and unfortunately Kanban is not only easier to introduce, is also easier to misuse in this sense.

Given the situation at the CoachCamp with so many experienced lean and agile coaches, I proposed a session with the provocative title “Kanban considered harmful?” It worked in luring the right people into the session, and the outcome that emerged totally astonished me…

Agile Adoption in the Large

We started discussing an excuse (my interpretation) for such a development:

Scrum or Kanban is (really) introduced in a small setting of a big organisation and works as beacon (better software faster), so that
Senior Management decides to roll out Agile in the big organisation (to save money), so that
Teams and Managers do Agile without actually seeing the point, so that
they don’t get it right.

I think that’s a poor excuse, as we (as agile practitioners) should tell senior management that this strategy is a sure setup for failure. Yet, senior managers expect a financial benefit from a change. So, we started to talk about

Managing Management Expectations

The Quality of Life Model

Read the picture like this:

Senior Management expects to earn/save/protect money (arrow to the top). They expect a certain benefit. Should we tell them to expect less benefit? No! Benefits are multi-dimensional and interdependent:
(read clockwise from the money arrow) Once we inspire our staff with a clear and compelling purpose,
the will be better motivated,
which lets us tap into the creative power of all our employees.
This should lead to the creation of better products,
better processes (if we give people the autonomy to define the best suitable process)
leading to more customer satisfaction and
more marketshare.
and then, only then, we get more money, leading to a better Quality of Life for all.

There’s a lot of thinking to be done on this, it is boldly simplified in places, but I think this is a good starting point for a discussion.

And I was delighted that the outcome of my session was not harmful

Awesome Coaches of the Week

Posted on 2011/06/24 by Olaf

Starting with Richard Lawrence in April, I’ve since then written one blog post per week about peers and friends that I value greatly as being awesome coaches. The name of the series is Awesome Coaches of the Week and it’s on the blog of the awesome company I work for: agile42. The first person who spots the striking coincidence between the two sites gets a beer the next time I meet hir.

Yves asked yesterday how he could get a mail every time I published one of these posts, and that triggered an idea I’d had a while ago: to create a digest page which I’ll regularly update with new posts so you can bookmark it. And subscribe to changes…

This also gives me a space to explain why I do this. You’ve probably heard that people don’t care what you do but why you do it? (If not, watch Simon Sinek’s amazing TED talk on the topic!)

Over the last nearly two years, I’ve been selfishly taking positive energy from the community I joined and this is my way of returning it. (I think it was a balanced thing before, because it’s not the only thing I do, but it sounds better that way.) So many people have inspired me, been role models, lead me, criticised and hugged me in the most awesome way. Most of these are agile coaches, so to start a blog series about these people, making their awesomeness public, seemed a natural thing to do. So far I got good feedback, so I think I’ll continue… I’ve reached ten today, which is another good reason for this summary.

Invitation

You’re all invited to suggest awesome coaches for this series. Or, better, write a guest post about someone you think is awesome! The format is simple: find three awesome aspects of that person and write a few sentences on each. Add a few pictures if you want, or a video, and you’re done… Use the comments to volunteer, contact me on Twitter, or drop me an email.

The Cast (In Order Of Appearance)

Richard Lawrence

Paolo “Nusco” Perrotta

Mike Sutton

Marc Bless

Ken Power

Liz Keogh

Jens Hoffmann

Marc @Scrumphony Löffler

Yves Hanoulle

J. B. @JBRains Rainsberger

Sebastian Schürmann

Michael Sahota

Andreas Leidig

Chris Matts

Bob Sarni

Martin Kearns

Brad Swanson

Stephen Parry

Dave Sharrock

One More Thing…

There are quite a few people I know who are awesome, but not coaches. There is a place for them as well…

AgileCoachCamp Norway – Day 2

Posted on 2011/01/21 by Olaf

Last weekend I went to the AgileCoachCamp Norway 2011 (#accn) which I organised with Sergey Dmitriev, Geir Amsjø and a few others… We made it happen. It was amazing. I wrote about the first day of the unconference here.

AgileCoachCamp Norway

Open Space—Continued…

The morning started after a short night’s sleep with an awesome breakfast—are all Norwegian hotels that good? Or is the Agile community just lucky in choosing the best ones? Anyway, we started with the last round of sessions. Before lunch, there were two slots…

Our Awesome OpenSpace Agenda

Coaching Organisations

Ken Power—whom I already had had the pleasure of delving into the topic of Coaching Coaches with the day before—raised the stakes and we tackled the interesting questions of how to make an organisation agile. How do we ensure an Agile transition is successful? What can we do to support that? We quickly agreed that management buy-in and support is a must. But how do we get that? How can we get managers to learn that the old style of management, forged a century ago by Taylor, Ford and others, is not suitable any more for the conceptual age of the 21st century? Step by step, was my lesson learned. We can’t go in there and say, “well, you built up this great company here for the last 30 years and now I’ll tell you what you did wrong all the time”… But we can, occasionally, ask good questions and get them thinking.

A story from my own experience: I was discussing tool functions for resource management with a department head. He said he wanted to see what his people were doing, and what my advice was on planning techniques and reports. I asked, “what is your goal, what are you aiming at?” And he answered, “I want that every one is working to full capacity.” Upon which I said, “ok, let me rephrase that in my own words. You lead a service organisation with quite a few customers. What you’re telling me, is that when one of your customers calls with problem, you want to make sure that none of your staff is free to solve her problem?” Upon which he looked at me, astonished. Then we started to talk and found out together what the true goal was.

The session was a lively discussion which Ken Power facilitated in that very calm and assuring way he has. Additionally, he took notes, so that I expect him to post the sessions results in more detail than I currently can, from memory.

StrategicPlay—Take-away from the event

This was my second session with Lego, and the second time I did an OpenSpace session with this topic (I had done it at XP2010 in Trondheim, see the post on Day 1). As in the first session, we warmed up by building bridges:

Bridge with an Interesting Path

As you can see, the outcome was quite diverse… As I asked the builders to bring their own view of the community at the conference and a personal bit into it.

The second exercise—designed to give hesitant participants confidence in their building skills—was the ever-so-lovable turtle, which this time we changed into our ideal peer coach. This turtle parade is the outcome:

Turtle Parade of Ideal Peer Coaches

The actual exercise then was, as promised: “Build what you take away from this conference.” I liked this model a lot, which depicts the stair path the builder is progressing on and shows that after continuous improvement on a round on the stairs you get to the same place as before, but have reached a new level.

Take-Away Stairs

As promised, I’ll cover the science and mechanics behind StrategicPlay in a later post, until then, watch this prezi for an overview.

Closing and Feedback

After these two sessions, the Open Space was closed and we had an amazing feedback session with lots of reported learning and some good improvement suggestions. We all were quite sure that this first AgileCoachCamp Norway has not been the last one! See how happy our facilitator smiles:

The Agile Coach Facilitating

After an amazing lunch, people started to leave. I was requested to run another Lego session, which started after a short break and will be covered in another post (have to save a few pictures). Our flight was not due until late afternoon, so we could take our time to continue a few discussions until we left and went home.

What a weekend! Count me in again for the next one!

AgileCoachCamp Norway 2011 – Day 1

Posted on 2011/01/18 by Olaf

Just arrived home from the AgileCoachCamp Norway 2011 (#accn). Full of inspirations, connections, ideas… I think there is no better way to spend a weekend than an AgileCoachCamp. That’s why Sergey Dmitriev and I started working on the idea of a Norwegian CoachCamp after the XP2010 conference in Trondheim. A few friends and colleagues joined us, and over a few months… We made it happen. It was amazing.

AgileCoachCamp Norway

Introductions

The only flight from Berlin was late at night, so I arrived on Friday night a bit after midnight… Missing introductions, and a surprise visit by UncleBob. Ivana Gancheva suggested an introduction expanding on the superpowers in the positioning papers we had for registration:

What have you done to gain and further develop your superpower since you were born?
What are you planning to do about it during this camp?
How can we help you to accomplishing your goal?

As I was too late to take part in this, I’ll share my answers here. The superpower I put into the position paper reads: “I can lure or seduce people to do the things they really want to do.” Some weeks later, having thought and talked about this a lot, I rephrase my superpower as follows:

“I am the TeamhEARo. I can listen to the things people don’t say. I can make them do things they don’t yet know they want to do.” This obviously carries the danger with it of manipulating people, which I obviously do not want to do, so my answers are:

Listen. Listen. Try to keep my mouth shut, wait, and continue to listen.
Make an educated guess…
Give me honest feedback when I don’t. (A special thanks goes to Jon Jagger for very honestly doing that without me actually having asked for it!)

To things were funny right from the beginning: Although I hadn’t met most of the participants before, most of them knew me! That’s one of the amazing things Twitter does for me… And although I hadn’t had a chance to give my “introduction”, I got honest feedback in the very first session:

Coaching Dojo

We started the Saturday with an Agile Coaching Dojo. We gathered in groups of five. The “seeker” posed a problem she wanted help with. Two coaches had 12 min time to gain insight into the problem and assist the seeker in finding a solution, or a path to a possible solution. Two (in our group three) “observers” took notes during that time. In a short reflection the seeker and coaches expressed their learning in the exercise, followed by feedback from the observers… Then the roles rotate and the next seeker starts the next round, until everyone has been the seeker and everyone played every role.

As I was quite energetic that morning plus we had this time constraint (and wanted to produce a result…), we totally sucked in the first round. I was one of the coaches… We did an extensive reflection and decided to just try again, turning back time by 20 minutes and beginning with the seeker stating his problem. The second try was much better:-) Due to our extended reflection and our slight change of the rules we only managed to do four rounds. But we had decided to go for quality instead of quantity—and I can safely say I’ve seldom learned that much in such a short amount of time.

Open Space

After lunch we started the Open Space. Sergey facilitated single-handedly in a way I truely admired. The first session was hosted by Ivana, on the topic “Collaboration vs. Zero-Sum Game”. The central question was, how do we induce a change in mindset, so that clients and suppliers can collaborate based on trust, instead of trying to cheat one another. How do we create a win-win situation instead of a zero-sum game? A lot of people contributed intensely on the subject. Ken Power took notes (and was so nice to share them), so that Ivana and I will soon create a seperate post on that topic.

Tired, yet happy coaches closing the Open Space

Retrospectives

Next was a session on Restrospective techniques, hosted by (if I remember correctly) Nils Haugen @nchaugen. Interesting, continuously relevant topic. From discussing different types of retrospectives and their respective frequency we arrived at talking in depth about sprint and release cycle lengths and the benefits of frequent or continuous integration. (So we basically switched from Retro techniques to Retro topics…) To be honest, I don’t see a point in that discussion – we know continuous integration is good. Ideal lengths of sprints and release cycles are highly context dependent, and not at all times the issue needing your most attention. The simple rule is: the shorter,the better. Few things in Agile are more important than getting better feedback faster.

StrategicPlay

I had proposed a session for the last slot of the OS on Sunday: Model with Lego your personal take-away from the conference using a method I use called StrategicPlay (the exercise is desribed in my XP2010 post).

New Year's Challenges might be tricky...

Due to high demand (I only had Lego for 10 with me) I did another one on the first day, where I gave more background on the cognitive science background of the method. We modelled that morning’s Coaching Dojo exercise’s design, which was insightful and good fun! There even was a third Lego session after the Open Space, after lunch on Sunday. Will cover what we did, how and why that works and lots of pictures in another post.

Coaching Coaches

Coaches recharging their Batteries

In a session hosted by Ken Power – whom I had met in Trondheim and came to truely admire and appreciate this weekend – we dived into the topic of Coaching Coaches. How to establish Communities of practice inside a bigger enterprise, and how to establish a Coaching Circle, are the topics that still stick in my mind. A Coaching Circle is like a glade in the wood for the super-powered Agile coach. Meeting other coaches, taking our capes off and shutting down our coaching habits, we can open up and be our true selves in a safe environment and re-charge our batteries.

I’ve been part of a Coaching Circle during the last months, and without realising at first I came to value it dearly. Topic for yet another post, later…

Lean Procrastination

Later. That’s a word really busying my mind lately. My friend Marc Bless and I’ve been working over the last weeks on a concept we call Lean Procrastination. I won’t cover it here to not deviate from the conference: it’s great fun with a serious core which we’re digging for. I proposed my third session on LeanProcrastination for the late night slot, rather with the idea of reserving my own time for it than with the expectation of attracting much attention… But, wonders of Open Space: whoever comes are the right people, and they were a lot. So I printed a few copies of what I’d written so far and we got into good discussions… Which cleared my view on some details and gave me the honest feeling that we need to fully redesign our workshop concept. Stay tuned for more… Later.

Dojos, Katas and Funny Games

There was a lot going on in the space of coding: Katas, dojos, kata/dojo site design… As always, I opted out of those topics due to higher prioritisation of people-centric ones… But I’m resolved to change that. I hearby promise that on the next (un)conference with a coding session, I’m in. However embarrassing that may turn out to be. Emily Bache, Johannes Brodwall and Jon Jagger impressed and inspired me greatly with their enthusiasm!

At night, after dinner, Ivana and I hosted a session on Funny Games and started by playing Bibbedi-Bibbedi-Bob. That’s a very funny game to get a group from bored to laughing-out-loud within less 10 minutes. We learned it at the AgileCoachCamp Germany and at XP2010 from the amazing fun monger Mike Sutton. We had a lot of fun with this and other games, which made for a nice transition to the ensuing session on Lean Procrastination, which I have already told you about. Earlier:-)

This is my first go at Day 1 of the amazing AgileCoachCamp Norway. I will update it with pictures, and there will be more… So stay tuned and take care!