What I Learned at AgileIndy 2023

As a business professional, it helps to spend time with others who you do not work with. It helps provide fresh perspectives and moral support when times are tough. It is also good to hear from others that they share similar struggles in their business situations. It is like cleaning the emotional pallet from the sour aftertaste of daily dysfunction. I took the opportunity to attend the AgileIndy 2023 conference to perform that cleanse. I was a presenter, and I learned a few things. Today, I wanted to share my trip report with everyone. 

I traveled to Indianapolis to present a talk on servant leadership and how to use language to build credibility with team members, stakeholders, and leaders. I had a packed room, and the presentation went well. I look forward to making many connections and seeing if my tips are helpful to people in the field. This journey's best part is meeting old friends and making new ones. The agile community is one big tribe of like-minded people who bicker like family but often unite to make work more sustainable. 

Along with giving a presentation, I got to sit in on some great presentations and discussions about how to make businesses more successful with agile techniques. If there were any big themes at this conference, they were twofold. The first theme was the role of managers in an organization going through an agile change. Teams that self-organize and deliver in rapid iterations create unique challenges for managers who now have to do something else beyond traditional management. The other theme is establishing trust in organizations. I want to discuss each of those themes. 

For many of us in the agile community, implementing agile techniques works well at the team level, and executives occasionally achieve buy-in. Most managers threaten agile methods because they fear the organizational changes that agile demands. Thus, self-organization, empowerment, and transparency often make managers feel redundant and threatened. Many change management efforts fail because middle management strangles it if considered a threat. Fortunately, Diana Williams and Liz Rettig had a great conversation about this forgotten cohort of people who can make or break your agile adoption. I know plenty of folks at Project Brilliant, and I was not disappointed by the advice and suggestions they provided. I am going to devote a future blog post to their advice. 

Mike Cottmeyer from Leading Agile gave the keynote speech about the enormous challenge facing the agile community in 2023: building trust between business leaders and agile teams. We in the agile community demand empowerment for groups doing the work. Still, empowerment does not happen if that team does not create working solutions for the business to sell. It means that for a team to be empowered, the company must trust the team to do the work. Cottmeyer points out there are steps to business agility, and approaches like SAFe and Scrum at scale are about helping the business manage technical debt and dependencies. Dependencies are agile killers in organizations, so it is up to everyone to find ways to mitigate them. The truth will always win between reality and purity, so Agile professionals need to be reality-based. 

I had some great conversations in the green room at the conference. Coaches love to talk shop, and sharing experiences with others is always instructive because our experiences overlap. Finally, I met Dimple Shah and attended her presentation, which covered diversity in organizations and how the drive for diversity is often the same as the desire for organizations to become more agile. In a relaxing manner, she reviewed that people need to both talk the talk of change and walk the walk. By following this simple approach, people create credibility in the organization.

I am fortunate to spend time around so many great people. It is also a blessing to share my knowledge and experience with others and help them. Best of all, I learned a few new things to return to my practice. I hope to present to AgileIndy next year, and I look forward to visiting plenty of old friends and making new ones. 

Until next time. 

Doing the job is harder than it seems.

Bill Belichick is one of the most successful coaches in NFL history. When you talk about coaching excellence, Belichek will come up in the same conversation as greats like Tom Landry and Vince Lombardi. I have a few issues with his methods and general sportsmanship, but the results speak for themselves. He has won the Superbowl as a coach eight times, and his career record is 329 wins to 165 losses, a winning percentage of two-thirds. Belichick is a winner. Like many successful NFL coaches, he is a grumpy authoritarian who believes winning excuses many transgressions. I want to set aside my feelings about the man and his leadership style to focus on something he preaches to every player who plays for him. 

From the biggest superstar to the most lowly practice squad member, Belichick admonishes his players to "Do your F#&%ing job." As long as each player fulfills their role on the team, Belichick is satisfied with them and will keep them around. When someone violates a boundary or does not fulfill their position, the player is often benched and managed out of the organization. It is a ruthless worldview that often treats people like replaceable parts. The clearly defined roles of each player make football easy. A running back blocks and runs with the football, and an offensive lineman prevents others from tackling the quarterback. The list goes on, but all 53 players on an NFL roster have clearly defined roles. Thus, if a player struggles to tackle opposing players or allows the quarterback to get tackled, they are not performing their function. 

Many business people think like Belichick. I suspect that many business leaders developed their leadership skills in high school and collegiate athletics. People often use the lens of winning and losing to evaluate decisions. The business often values toughness and determination more than nuance and introspection. It is a hyper-competitive brew that divides the world into winners and losers; no one wants to be associated with a loser. 

Environments like this are difficult to navigate because many roles are poorly defined and the product of years of social exchange between people. Does an employee with twenty years of experience take orders from a peer more familiar with the technology fresh out of college? How do people of color navigate cultural stereotypes and misconceptions from more narrow-minded colleagues? Finally, as we attempt to flatten organizations, how are chains of authority and accountability managed? If everyone is accountable, often no one is responsible. The ambiguity of roles creates friction and dysfunction in organizations. Where there is confusion is there is failure to get work completed. 

I speak from experience because, for the last ten years, I have served as a scrum master, product owner, or coach on teams. I am in a much different role with a client and have struggled. Moments like this force me to return to L. David Marquet's book "Turn the Ship Around!" for inspiration. In the book, he says that our paradigm for leadership is wrong. We often see the leader as the person in charge giving orders to subordinates who carry out the orders unquestioningly. The job of every successful leader and team member is to develop an environment where everyone shows leadership, from the lowest-ranked sailor cleaning commodes to the ship commander who relies on those sailors to get things done. 

It is a radical idea but helpful for a business environment where five generations of workers, from Boomers to Generation Alpha, start working in the same company. Experienced employees often take direction from newly minted MBAs. In Marquet's vision of leadership experience, employees can show the less experienced tips and tricks to improve, while newer leaders can impart new knowledge to the professional staff. If done correctly, it is a cycle of growth and development for both sides. 

It is not easy. Leaders need to be clear about a person's role on the team. Throwing someone to the deep end to figure out their role is a disservice to the team and the individual thrown into that role. It also requires humility and emotional intelligence. Not everyone can lead and be in charge, so they must sacrifice some of their ego to be part of a team. This task is more demanding than it sounds. Marquet's "Turn the Ship Around" features a different but equally important kind of leadership. It is the kind of leadership where people actively contribute to the team. In Bill Belichick's words, they do their job well. 

Writing about Agile, scrum, and leadership is challenging. You must articulate how you want to improve the world around you and practice that vision in front of others. Fortunately, society has difficult and grumpy people like Bill Belichick to remind us what is essential.

I look forward to seeing everyone at the AgileIndy Conference this Friday, September 22.

Until next time. 

The Paradox of Certainty

The biggest paradox in business is that business people and shareholders demand certainty. Profits must be steady or growing. The business meets expectations with little struggle, and the organization behaves like a perpetual motion money machine, creating gains and dividends. The reality is that business is a deeply uncertain activity filled with plenty of chaos. Consumer tastes change, regulations tighten, and the human beings who run corporations are frail and prone to mistakes, so while everyone demands certainty, there is never any guarantee that the expectation will happen. This paradox is central to most business challenges, and I want to discuss it this week. 

When you speak with business leaders, particularly executives, you hear them say, "I expect." It provides a veneer of certainty and cloaks the person in a coating of faux confidence and confidence. Often, you hear conversations like, "I expect the realse to go well," or "I expect that report on my desk at the end of the day." Meryl Streep portrays this language of callous efficiency with awful accuracy in the film, "The Devil Wears Prada."

Often, these expectations come into conflict with reality and the chaos that often surrounds technology projects. Developers sprinting toward a deadline and working long hours make mistakes, introducing software defects. Last-minute changes and defects extend timelines. Finally, power imbalances in organizations create situations where decisions create conflicting priorities that seize up progress. 

The empiricism and transparency that come with agile are supposed to address these problems but bump into the paradox of certainty. Decision-makers with expectations often do not want to know about the defects and dysfunctions that riddle their organizations. Instead, they demand results, and if they hear the word no or that the organization is creating a constraint hurting delivery, they will treat the messenger as insubordinate. It creates an atmosphere of fear where people know things are wrong, but no one takes action because their risk does not offer any reward other than unemployment. It is a scary place to be, and the effect resembles gaslighting behavior. 

I do not have a solution to this paradox. Still, as an agile coach and software professional, I know that we can reduce uncertainty by ruthlessly inspecting and adapting each time we finish a sprint. It also requires the swallowing of pride by decision-makers and developers to address each project's good, bad, and ugly. It is complex and requires discipline, which many business people lack, but those who are successful will make the effort and grow in the process. To break out of the paradox of uncertainty, try having observations and opportunities for growth instead of having expectations. 

Until next time. 

Burnout and the Technology Professional

Static, distraction, and stress are present in the lives of technology professionals. To stay relevant in the industry, you are active in internet culture, learning about new technologies and ways of doing things. This dynamic online lifestyle feels like staring at a disconnected television with its black-and-white static pattern. At the same time, you need to concentrate on getting work done while forces outside your control view for your attention. Meetings with senior leadership, instant messages from Slack, and even the dog wanting a walk interrupting our need to concentrate on the task are the battles we face with distraction. Finally, deadlines are cruel in the business world, and there are never enough people to do the job correctly. It creates a level of stress which do not exist in other professions. Combined static, distraction, and stress are adequate conditions to lead to professional burnout, and I would like to discuss that today. 

Global business culture makes it challenging to cover the topic of leadership burnout because it focuses on strength, competence, and confidence. Failure is for the sick and lazy. If you are not succeeding in business, you are not working hard or talented enough. The business press amplifies this attitude and the information ecosystem that thrives around it. Turn on Fox Business News or CNBC and watch it for any length of time, and you will notice that it resembles sports programming with winners, losers, human interest stories, and scores rolling by in the form of stock prices. Executives parade on the screen like celebrities, and nothing is worse than a network anchor pointing out less-than-expected revenue figures. 

The business world is about triumph, wealth, and success, but the business press often ignores the lonely wilderness that leads to that success. It is late nights, missing time with family, red-eye flights to meet clients, and dealing with sef-important jerks who often pay the bills. It is a world of rejection and loneliness where you can hustle for forty years and have nothing to show for the struggle. Talk to any business professional; they will have stories about their sacrifices to stay relevant and employed in this ruthless environment. 

It is why two recent blog posts from people I know and respect inspired me to consider my professional burnout and direction. Alan Dayley is an Agile coach and instructor whom I met on the old Google+ social media platform. He was talking about leading a training session with a group of executives, and a director of engineering boasted, "Engineers are like batteries. When they are exhausted, I replace them." Without skipping a beat, Alan said, "Then I am glad I don't work for you," before continuing the training. I am sure he did not receive an invitation to do another training with that client because he spoke truth to power at that moment. When leaders see human beings as expendable and replaceable, we have moments like that with Alan Dayley.  He was invited back to do more training for the client company. The executive with the "just replace them" attitude was from a partner company working with the client. The director sponsor of the training supported Daily in that situation.*   The attitudes of some leaders explain why burnout is so common in the professional ranks. 

Another person I respect, Angela Dugan, suffered a health scare while in the middle of being acquired by another company. She asked for time off to recover and was told no. Fortunately, she had the option to quit to focus on her health. She calls this intermission in her career her "sabbatical," and she uses it to refresh and recover. I have known Angela for over fifteen years, and she is a competent, empathetic, and results-oriented leader from experience. This reality did not matter to her new bosses when she asked for time off when her body and mind began to break down from the responsibilities of leading technology professionals during a pandemic and acquisition. 

These stories could make you cynical and jaded about the technology business, but I see it differently. People like Angela, Alan, and myself are out in the business world fighting the lonely fight of making business better, one project and person at a time. We sacrifice our youth and sometimes our health to provide for our families and improve the world. It is not a heroic life like the one popularized by the business press but one we should respect in our everyday work experience. 

I suffer from burnout from time to time. Unfortunately, I must muddle through the experience to support myself and my family. It is not fun, but I have come out of the experience stronger and wiser. Others are not so lucky, as they have suffered from heart disease, addiction, and mental health breakdowns. Businesses have gotten so big that they neglect that it is people who keep the global economy spinning. 

I wish I had easy recipes to avoid burnout. I do not. Instead, I have a few strategies to keep it at bay. First, I try to get a healthy amount of sleep. Sleep deprivation has the same effect as intoxication, so getting sleep is an intelligent way to approach work. Next, practice moderation with food and alcohol. I used both to help me cope with stress, and all it did was make me fat and miserable. Drink a glass of wine or a Negroni occasionally, but remember that most of life's problems will not be solved at the bottom of a glass. Often, new issues will appear. Finally, step away from work. Set firm boundaries and avoid answering e-mails during time off. Enjoy the company of your significant other and children. Go to a concert or dance the night away with friends, but do something, anything not related to the office. 

Burnout is real. A combination of perverse incentives and unhealthy expectations causes it. We must admit that it happens and that even the best people suffer. In an environment of static, distraction, and stress, it is surprising it does not occur more often.

Until next time. 

*Correction -  Alan Daily provided an updated account, reflected in the blog today, 6-September-2023.