Listening, Compassion, and Shared Context make coaching rewarding.

Healthy Ownership requires plenty of tools.

I have spent a majority of my life around educators.  I have family members who were teachers and administrators.  Many of my peers in college are teaching at the university and high school level.  I also spend my time on social media following teachers, trainers, and educators of all stripes.  A common refrain I hear from all these people in my life is satisfaction they receive when students they serve understand a difficult concept or master a skill.   For many of them, this feeling of satisfaction is why they got into education.  It is the same reason I am an agile coach and why I am championing the notion of “Healthy Ownership.”

My attendance at the agile coach’s retreat earlier this year was an awakening for me.  I spent time with other coaches and learned some valuable lessons about myself.  I also worked closely with ten gifted people who held each other accountable and created something called “Healthy Ownership.”  Born out of frustration in my agile practice, “Healthy Ownership: was an opportunity for me to learn better techniques of coaching. It was also a chance to step aside and learn how others lead and motivate teams.  It is surprising what I learned. 

The most important lesson is to listen to what people are saying.  I struggle with this ability at work.  Put me in front of a PBS documentary, Anime show or Kaiju film, and I am perfectly attentive.  In work situations, I struggle to listen.  My inability to pay attention to verbal and non-verbal cues hurt my coaching.  Thus, I am committing myself to be a better listener, so I understand the hidden and apparent challenges to the teams I am serving. 

After listening, I need to work on guiding others to have more compassion for their colleagues.  You cannot fundamentally change how empathetic a person is but you can help someone it is their self-interest to help others. Ayn Rand speaks about the “virtue of selfishness.”  I consider her thinking to be an alibi for callousness and contempt which will undermine any team attempting to succeed.  It is why everyone needs to understand they are working together.  You may not be able to increase team empathy, but by reducing callousness and contempt among team members, a coach will have a better success rate. 

Finally, after guiding others to help team members, it is essential to create a shared context.  It means a product owner, developer and scrum master should understand how to better focus on what they need to do together to be successful.  For instance, my teams discuss technical debt daily. The purpose of the discussion is for product owners to understand the obstacles the teams need to overcome to deliver the product.  The mindset of continuous improvement seeps into everyone’s mindset, and during sprint planning, we have frank discussions about the amount of refactoring we need to accomplish.  The shared context is building quality for the customer faster.  If the product owner sees how hard it is to get stories finished, they pay attention to technical debt. 

I am going to be in San Diego as part of the agile coaching exchange talking about “Healthy Ownership” and how it has changed my perspective.  As you can see, I am going to be talking about it for the remainder of my career. 

Until next time.

Saying good riddance to 2017

Would you invite these two over for dinner?
This image captures 2017 better than anything else I have seen.

I want to say good things about 2017; I really want to do it.  The sad reality is that the last year was the equivalent of inviting guests over for a dinner party and they allow their toddler to break your china and defecate on your tablecloth.  The world of politics, business, and agile felt like that disgusting and awkward dinner party.  This week, I take a look at last year’s predictions and look ahead to 2018. 

My first prediction came true in ways I did not expect. The new president and the Republican Party kicked off a wave of deregulation. It was not your garden-variety deregulation typical of GOP control of the White House; this was something radically different.  The Secretary of Education had no experience in educational administration.  The new Secretary of Energy on the campaign trail demanded that the department is dismantled and then used his position to promote the interests of the fossil fuel industry.  The head of the EPA is building a secure secret office and treating the organization he is leading as a security threat. 

By far, the most egregious in a colorful cast of characters is Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.  The Goldman Sachs alumni made a career exploiting financial regulations and staying one step ahead of regulators.  Now he is in charge of those rules, and it looks like a repeat of the events which led to the great recession of 2008.  Adding insult to injury is his spouse who has appeared in public with the personae of a Walt Disney villain blended with a trust fund sorority sister.  Her words about how she and her husband do more for the economy are going to live forever in history books written about this period. 

My second prediction was the brief life and death of Net-Neutrality.  Ajit Pai served on the FCC board and said net-neutrality was unnecessary in 2015 when the board supported it.  With the election, he and the Republican members became the majority on the FCC board, and the net neutrality rules were repealed.  In spite of 22-million comments supporting net-neutrality and opposition by 80% of the public, the repeal went through.  It is going to be a considerable give-a-way to companies like Comcast and Verizon.  It is going to hurt innovation and turn internet service providers into protection rackets charging businesses and organizations extra to have high-speed service.  I hate this turn of events and will work with my elected officials to reverse this decision. 

So that was last year, what trends are we going to see in 2018.  I forecast three events. 

Democrats Resurgent?

I made a political prediction in 2016, and the election threw it back into my face.  This time around I am going to say that Democrats have a credible chance of retaking the Senate and the House of Representatives.  Plenty of things can happen between now and November, but if Democrats are smart, they might have a chance.  Some credible polling and research are showing this might happen.  If it does happen, I hope the new Congress will attempt to unwind, the budget-busting tax cut and work on regulating the internet like a utility so that net-neutrality does not come and go with each regulatory change of power. 

The Battle of Home Assistants.

Google and Amazon began a pretty and bitter war last year, and it will get worse in 2018.  The competition between “Alexia” or “Google Home” will get more heated.  It should be good for consumers, but it is going to be a mess.  Home thermostats, lights, and even appliances are going to be affected by this conflict.  It is a battle for billions of dollars in revenue so grab some popcorn and enjoy the spectacle. 

I will own my brand.

For me professionally, 2017 was a tough year.  Thanks to the good folks at the Agile Coaching Symposium in Chicago, I realized that I am part of an elite group of professionals.  We are a caring, creative, and hard-working group of souls who just want to improve how people work.  I am going to embrace that community further.  I am going to put in for my Certified Team Coach credentials from the scrum alliance.  I will also try to become a presenter for the Agile Alliance in fall.  I hope to learn more about LeSS and how it might help my organization. 

So that is my take for 2018, I look forward to sharing it with you. 

Until next time.

Selling It

I am NOT John Galt but Ayn Rand
would still like me.

October is a challenging month for anyone.  It is the start of fourth quarter which drives retail and sales organizations toward a mad rush to profitability.  In the IT world, managers looking to impress their betters push their departments harder hoping to get the most out of them.  I am no different.  I am firmly fixed in two worlds.  I am building my business while at the same time trying to work as a mild mannered software developer during the day. 

In this span of about three weeks I have learned a little about myself.  I am not super human.  I need sleep and food like everyone else.  I also learned that I need to push myself harder than I have in the past because if I am going to break through the clutter of what people are selling I need to make an impression. 

This is the month; I joined the chamber of commerce in my community.  I walked into their office and showed off my Sully® product and they asked me to join right away.  I am pretty proud of that because there is usually a vetting process.  In addition, I have a big trade show this week and I want to close at least one client before the New Year.  It is pretty exciting. 

Many people ask me what I am selling, let me try to explain.  I have noticed for the last few years that many small and medium sized businesses are keeping track of invoices, bills of lading, and packing slips with plain paper and pencil.  Inventory is often managed with index cards or excel spreadsheets; no one had authored a set of tools which could do inventory and warehouse management.  This was a problem begging for a cloud based solution.

Over the last year, I began to write a web application which would work on smart phones, tablet computers and standard web browsers.  I called it Sully® to give it a little blue collar credibility.  Just over a year later I have a working piece of software and I am starting the sales process.  Ayn Rand would be very proud of me.  Like many cloud based applications it is low cost because I didn’t think a business should have to pay a lot of money to have a 21^st century inventory management system.  It is a dream come true but the reality is this is only the beginning.  Now I have to sell my creation. 

I will do my best to keep you posted and up to date on my progress.