The first attempt at learning is the hardest.

Failure happens.

Failure is one of those seminal experiences we have as professionals.  People will often forget their victories, but failure stings forever.  What makes failure more painful is the way we are shunned by our fellows when we fall short.  It is as if our failure is a kind of contagion which might contaminate others.  It explains why we are so afraid of failure the personal, professional, and social costs seem too high.  I disagree that failure is shameful or contamination.  It is a test and how you respond to disappointment is just as important as your approach to success.  

Failure is quite common in the technology business. A missing curly bracket will prevent code from compiling, and hidden memory leaks can hinder the general operation.  Finally, bugs show themselves during demonstrations with investors and stakeholders.  The time pressures and details developers must sort through create a perfect recipe for humility.  

As a coach or scrum master, what do you do when confronted with failure.  First, a coach should acknowledge each failure as a learning opportunity.  Mistakes and failures are necessary when learning new skills.  Software development changes so radically that a developer needs to relearn their profession every eighteen months.  It makes failure the first attempt at learning.  I remember crashing an e-commerce website because I arrogantly thought the upgrade would go smoothly.  I was mistaken.  The cloud service was also not willing to restore a backup.  The site was down for four days, and I had to find a new job when the site came back up.  I new always backup software before doing an upgrade because I never want to fail like that again.  

Next, failure exposes problems within processes and systems.  The book “The Goal” introduced the theory of constraints, which states systems are only as good as their least efficient part.  Failure is a constraint that the remainder of the system must accommodate if it is going to improve.  Failure is necessary if we are going to understand how to improve the process.  The exposure of failure can point out things that can be corrected or accommodated.  

Finally, failure can create a positive feedback loop.  Angela Duckworth pioneered something called “grit theory.” People and teams that are successful have a passion for what they do, the ability to persevere, and a willingness to overcome failure.  Often teams with ‘grit’ respond to loss with a deep desire to show others they can prove people who doubted them wrong.  It is the ambition to say, “Just you wait!” to those who witnessed that failure.  A good coach channels that energy into process improvement, personal growth, and attention to detail.  

Failure is not an end but a beginning.  First, you have an opportunity to learn.  Next, failure exposes ways to improve processes and procedures using the theory of constraints.  Finally, overcoming failure makes teams develop ‘grit,’ allowing them to channel their energies into success.  Each time I have failed, I feel awful, but I have learned something new and overcome it in the aftermath.  My professional and personal life continues to test me, but I am better prepared for those tests thanks to my experiences.  

Until next time. 

Listen to Individuals and Interactions

Arguments about process and
 tools make us look like these guys

When you are coaching agile, you spend plenty of time in a place Lewis Caroll calls “the shadow.”  The ideal of agile is in tension with the realities of working in a contemporary business.  It is challenging work that forces you to confront your shortcomings.  A coach is faced with doubt daily.  It is also a life filled with insecurity because coaches get fired when things go poorly.  I have spent over twenty years in technology, and eleven of them in the agile world participating in the agile reformation.  Today, I want to look at the agile manifesto and discuss something.

When we discuss the history of the agile manifesto, it has this glamourous sheen.  A bunch of smart people got together to brainstorm, ski, and have a few drinks.  When it was over, we had a guiding document that promised to change the business world.  It was optimistic and promised a better way.  Since that snowy and booze-soaked retreat, the agile community has splintered into several factions around taking agile principles and scaling them up to fortune 500 organizations.  

In addition to scaling frameworks, the agile world has plenty of different software tools to take agility, including Azure Dev Ops, Jira, and Rally.  A manager forbade me from coaching a team because I did not have the proper experience with the correct software.  These fractures in the agile community feel similar to the fractures in the development community, where people bicker like the character tweedle dee and tweedle dum.  

It is natural for people to have biases and strong opinions about their careers.  Passion is necessary if you want to be good at anything.  Unfortunately, these passions create prejudices that act as a toxin in the agile community.  People with Jira experience should not look down on those with Azure Dev Ops experience and so on.  When I am involved in these situations, I go back to the agile manifesto and gather some inspiration.  

Lately, the value of “Individuals and Interactions over processes and tools” has been significant.  Agile did not begin with any software in mind, and vendors attempted to automate the process.  A good coach or scrum master can manage a project with post-it notes, a few whiteboards, and an active email account.  Everything else is extra smoke and mirrors. 

Coaches should ask questions about why work is done and how it is generating value to the firm.  If we get involved in an unproductive discussion about processes and software, we are going to fail.  Each coach, regardless of their background and training, should have some basic skills.  A coach should know how source control works because when a developer talks about branching and merging, they can have an intelligent discussion.  Coaches should understand how to write user stories and show others how to write stories.  A coach needs to listen to others and know what they say and what they mean when they say it.  Finally, a coach needs to be a servant leader pulling their team toward success.  All the other skills are sprinkles on top of a tasty ice-cream sundae.  

As a member of the Agile reformation, we need to listen to “Individuals” and pay attention to “interactions.”  Otherwise, all of our passion for processes and tools will undermine the excellent work we have done for the last twenty years. 

Until next time.

Two Leadership Themes

My leadership will keep on sailing.

I spend plenty of time with other professional people.  We often discuss many subjects, and we often talk about our family lives, careers, and what motivates us.  Occasionally, we talk about deeper topics, but the main topic of our conversations is leadership.  How does a person lead a group of people?  What does a leader do when faced with incompetence or insubordination?  Today, I want to discuss my feelings on leadership.  

The main focus of my career is helping others avoid the mistakes I have made in my career.  I want people to avoid the hardship and disappointment I have encountered during my adventures working as a software developer and project manager.  Failure is the best educator someone can experience in a career.  I want to share the hard-earned wisdom of failure with others so they can avoid the roadblocks and setbacks I have encountered.

Along the way, I have discovered two main themes which have guided my leadership.  The first is servant leadership.  I was exposed to this as a teenager with the help of Marine Corps JROTC.  I discovered leadership is lonely.  It required being a servant for the people you lead.  It also forced me to put my needs on hold while things got done.  I gravitated to leaders who practiced this ethos, and it further shaped me as a person and leader.  

The other is the discovery of Kim Scott and her book Radical Candor.  Her writing and efforts' central thesis is that leadership requires a combination of honesty and empathy to be successful.  Truth without compassion is obnoxious aggression.  Empathy to hide the truth is ruinous.  Kim Scott brings plenty of experience to her writing, and it is bracing to hear her talk honestly about her mistakes.  

I combine Radical Candor and servant leadership to guide how I work with others.  It is not a straightforward approach, but it has given me tremendous satisfaction over my career length.

Until next time.

Foucault and the Power Inside an Agile Business.

 Foucault can teach us a few things 
about power and agile.

When you work as a professional person, objectively, your life is better than many others.  You work in environmentally controlled conditions, you get paid more than most workers, and you have the social cache of being an office worker.  In reality, being an office worker has plenty of risks.   Professional people do not unionize, so they are fired “at will.”  White-collar workers deal with high levels of stress and deadline pressure.  Finally, many of your colleagues are damaged, neurotic, or plain mean.  The reality of this situation should not be happening, but it often does. I was thinking about it more seriously this week and decided to write about it. 

As a professional person, I spend most of my time on LinkedIn learning about industry trends, keeping tabs on my colleagues, and finding informative bits of information.  Ville Pellinen posted an interesting nugget this week when he shared the satisfaction survey results from the banking and investment firm Goldman Sachs.  The news was a damning inditement of the company culture.  See for yourself.  

Employees were working on average 96 hours a week, and they were suffering physical and mental health problems because of the pressures to perform.  Managers were not respecting mandated time off over the weekend, and associates were expected to make last-minute changes to presentations and reports up to 20 minutes before discussions with clients.  As one associate said, “ What is not ok to me is 110 to 120 hours over the course of a week!  The math is simple. That leaves 4 hours a day for eating, sleeping, showering, bathroom, and general transition time.  This is beyond the level of ‘hard-working,’ this is inhumane / abuse. “

Compare this information with the company mission of Goldman Sachs, which proclaims, “our people are our greatest asset…” and you can see a severe disconnect between what the company says and what it does.  It occurred to me that a few factors are forcing these employees into these abusive situations.  The first is the notion of workism. Derek Thompson from the Atlantic magazine says working long hours becomes an “arms race” between talented and hard-working people who want to advance their careers.  The next is Karl Marx’s theory of labor exploitation.  Business people know that they can force people to work longer hours for less money because their competitors do it, so they are forced to squeeze harder on their workforces.  The most intriguing notion came from one of the other coaches on the thread who shared a quotation from Michel Foucault.  

He said,

“He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.”

In other words, there is no difference between the prisoners and the guards in prison; they have to live by the same awful rules of surveillance when they are together.  I then joked about if M.B.A’s are being taught Foucault in business school.  It appears that business schools in Europe are sharing Foucault and his unusual philosophy with the future masters of the universe in their business programs.  What do business people have to gain from a radical French philosopher with a colorful history?  

Foucault and all of his writing were concerned with two principal issues.  The first was power, not the power to control but rather the ability to influence.  Peer pressure, new forms of learning, standard means of coercion, and social factors all mix together to create power structures that influence how people think and behave.  This kind of power is what executives and human resources people label as corporate “culture.”  The other thing that Foucault is interested in is how people’s knowledge and perceptions change over time.  In his books, “The Birth of the Clinic” and “Discipline and Punish,” he shows our perceptions of hospitals and prisons have changed over the last 300 years. 

As agile professionals, we can learn plenty of wisdom from Foucault.  We have to see how power flows through an organization, including the less formal means of control like peer pressure.  Next, we need to know how those systems of power affect the people doing the work.

As Foucault says in “Discipline and Punish,”

"In a disciplinary regime, on the other hand, individualization is ‘descending: as power becomes more anonymous and more functional, those on whom it is exercised tend to be more strongly individualized; it is exercised by surveillance rather than ceremonies, by observation rather than commemorative account, by the comparative measure that have the ‘norm’ as reference rather than genealogies giving ancestors as points of reference by ‘gaps’ rather than by deeds."

We improve individual performance, but to do so, we need to exercise more surveillance, and the nature of the administration should be more anonymous than personal.  Employees are worried about letting their fellow team members down than upsetting the boss.  

Finally, we need to understand that the business practices that exploit people are just as destructive to the business because exploitation will extend to clients and shareholders.  People working 110 hours a week are no good to anyone and for a CEO to tolerate something like that is short-sided.  

So pushing people to exhaustion is not intelligent, and it is not agile.  Why people work long hours and tolerate abuse, and poor conditions need examination.  Finally, leaders need to look more clearly at their business and what it does to the people who work there.  The clock is ticking for Goldman Sachs.  

Until next time.