All about forgiveness

Talking about forgiveness.

It is evident to me that 2017 is the year of messiness.  Software is a messy activity.  The clutter is caused by the human emotions of foibles which are part of the creative process.  As a scrum master, you are the servant leader of messy people who write software.  You are supposed to live the agile manifesto and principles.  You set the example.  As a scrum master, you set the tone and help the team succeed.  It is rewarding work, but I have my moments where I am not very proud of the example I am setting.  Continuous improvement means striving to get better.  It also means you need to be able to forgive others and yourself.

My professional career has was shaped by my training in journalism and engineering.  The world of mass communications is very judgmental.  We criticize television anchors for hair color choices and how good their dentition looks on camera.  Radio disc jockeys are slaves to ratings and program managers who can crush your career.  Ratings mean money and if you provide ratings, people will ignore some of your worse personal faults.

Engineers are also a judgmental bunch and are willing to back up that judgment with the scientific method.  The code could run a few nanoseconds faster.  The class could better use the Liskov Substitution principle.  Finally, you could always tighten up the code to make it less error prone.  There is additional machismo where team members compete to assert dominance using their intelligence or programming skill.  It is brutal, and these environments discourage vulnerability and innovation.

As a scrum master, you are encouraged to help remove these dysfunctional behaviors.  Sometimes a scrum master gets caught up in these bad practices.  When you do, you are going to hurt the team.  When you hurt the team, you are undermining your credibility in the organization, and with the people, you are supposed to serve.  The first thing you should do when you hurt your team or someone on it is making amends and apologize.  Asking for forgiveness is hard, but it reinforces the agile values of respect and openness.  A team which can forgive each other when they make mistakes is going to be higher performing than one which is not.

Forgiving yourself is a much harder skill.  We know ourselves better than anyone else.  We are also the least forgiving of our mistakes.  We can feel like frauds to ourselves, and this is imposter syndrome.  Our emotional intelligence may be below average, and we find ourselves in situations which would puzzle others.  Finally, emotional control can be undermined by people who just do not want to improve.  You become a tangled bundle of rubber bands, and you feel like you can snap at any minute.  You do snap you feel riddled with guilt and self-loathing.  Over my career, I have spent a few mornings thoroughly hating the person I see in the mirror.  These feelings are not rational or objective.  These feelings just are, and you cannot escape them.

I have been leaning on friends and family for the last few weeks to receive relief.  I am seeing a doctor in order understand if the stress of the role is contributing to my emotional recriminations.  Finally, I have been avoiding alcohol and caffeine.  My brain chemistry is bad enough, and I don’t need to make it worse with outside stimulants and depressants.  I am making a conscious effort to try and forgive myself for past mistakes.

From the outside, this process is not going to look beautiful, but I need to do it if I am going to improve as a scrum master.  Everyone deserves a dose of forgiveness now and then.

Until next time.

The Agile Dentist

You can learn a lot about agile
while you are at the dentists office.

I cannot think of a more helpless feeling than being in the dentist’s chair while getting a major procedure done.  You are medicated, filled with nitrous oxide but you are still conscious and feel pain; you just can’t do anything about it.  It was during this time of profound discomfort that something dawned on me.  Software developers can learn a lot from dentists.  This week I would like to expound on that topic.

I was receiving a root canal and feeling like I was in the middle of fifteen rounds with Mike Tyson.  My regular dentist was not in the office and so another was spending time using endodontic files on my mouth.  This is when it dawned on me.  My dental practice is a highly functioning team with each dentist able to do the same procedure on any other patient in the practice.  There were no specialists and it wasn't necessary for my dentist to be called in on her day off to get my root canal done.  Talk about cross functional.

Next, I had a hygienist numb my mouth and my doctor to the work.  I also noticed another person in the room that I never recognized before. This was a dental resident who held the suction tube and watched and learned while my dentist worked on my bad tooth.  This was pair programming because I could overhear the resident asking questions and providing instruments to the dentist while they worked on me.  It is one thing to pass tests in dental school. I am sure it is completely another thing when you are fiddling around with a real person’s mouth so this is how knowledge is passed from one generation to the next.

Finally, when my root canal was finished and when the dentist ground my tooth for a crown the resident took charge and finished the job.  I watched her as she weaned me from the nitrous oxide.  Then using a dental drill and resin she fashioned a crown to ware until the permanent version is put into place.  What I witnessed was a textbook example of how software developers should work together and I saw it at the dentist office.  Everyone was cross functional.  Senior team members were teamed up with junior members to mentor them and show them the ropes in the real world.  Finally, the junior members were trusted to do work without supervision.  It was a revelation.

So what I can take away from this experience is that software development does not have to be unpleasant like a root canal.  By using pair programming in the correct fashion, trusting junior developers to do the right thing and making sure there are plenty of opportunities to mentor you have the makings of a fantastic cross functional team.  This is good to know as I work toward building my own business that I have a good working model for an agile team.  Who knew that the dentist can be agile?

Until next time.