Emotions Mater to Your Agile Leadership

People describe business people as cold and lacking emotions.  The classic Christmas story by Charles Dickens, “A Christmas Carol,” is a prime example of an emotionally stunted person who needs a supernatural intervention to live a better life.  My personal and professional experience is different.  I have witnessed fits of rage, emotional breakdowns, and plenty of narcissism.  Technology features numerous emotional highs and tragically deep lows.  When people base their identity and ability to support a family on work, you cannot help but get emotional.  As an agile coach or leader, it is up to you to deal with your own emotions and the emotions of others.  Let us take some time to discuss it. 

A common phrase you hear in any office is, “Don’t take it personally; it is just business.”  Ironically, this line comes from gangster movies from the last fifty years.  I firmly believe that business people should be better than typical gangsters.  Many people depend on business to feed their families and provide themselves with a sense of self.  It entangles the personal and professional, which are bound to have emotional implications.

In her book “Radical Candor,” Kim Scott talks about the emotional work of being a leader.  She emphasizes that you should care personally about the people who work with you.  Additionally, it would be best to challenge people directly by praising and criticizing when necessary.  Both praise and criticism should come from a place of genuine concern for the people you lead.  It is a skill that does not come naturally, but it will take your agile skills to the next level with practice.

The most challenging part of being in a leadership role is dealing with your own emotions and how they affect the team because pressure can build up in the office, and it creates one of four reactions; fight, flight, fawn, or freeze.  Our evolutionary legacy has taught us to react to danger with a fight instinct or a flee response.  Running away from trouble is always an intelligent course of thinking when escaping.  Fighting is also natural when we think we can overcome the danger.  You can see the flight response when people do not want to see or speak to you in an office.  A person who picks fights is a typical response to danger, and so to create a better working environment, you need to help remove the threat from a situation so you do not trigger a fight or flight response. 

The fight or flight response happens when the power dynamics are roughly equal.  When there is a big difference in power, fawning and freezing happen.  When someone is scared, that person will freeze.  The response allows the person to access danger and the stillness acts as a form of camouflage when someone is threatening them.  I see this happen all the time in meetings when an executive asks a question.  Everyone freezes because they want to provide an answer which will please the executive.  The fear is that they will be punished or ostracised if they give a wrong answer—situations like this demand psychological safety, and people are allowed to speak.  A messenger with terrible news should never worry about getting shot.  

The fawn response happens when someone decides that false flattery is the only way to deal with someone creating a perceived danger. Fawning is a way to advance within an organization or deflect attention.  In reality, it is manipulative and an example of toxic relationships in the workplace.  The leader being fawned over will crumble at any sign of adversity, and the person doing the fawning will lose respect from their peer group.  Being charming and cute is an excellent short-term strategy, but fawning behavior will undermine credibility in the long term. 

If you witness any of these behaviors, it is clear that the office environment does not have psychological safety, and you need to address it.  Business is personal.  People do feel strong emotions at the office.  As a coach, it is up to you to create an atmosphere of psychological safety because if you do not, people will exhibit fight, flight, freeze, or fawn behavior.  It is better than living like a gangster. 

Until next time. 

Keep Pushing

The life of a scrum master or agile coach contains plenty of ups and downs.  Some days, you have manic energy, and people recognize you are attempting to change the organization for the better.  Other days, you are depressed, feeling the structural problems of the organization crush the enthusiasm out of your body.  The business world brings out the bipolar characteristics of each person.  I am prone to those emotions as much as the next person.  Today on the blog, I wanted to go over the emotional labor we need to be a successful agile professional.  

I am a big fan of Western Philosophy and have devoted numerous blog posts on how different philosophical schools of thought parallel the agile reformation.  I have talked about existentialism, stoicism, the pragmatic nature of agile, and how Heraclitus and his ideas about change affect how we should look at agile.  What has always fascinated me about philosophy is the branch known as ethics.  It is the study of how to live a good or positive life.  Over the last few years in business, I have relied on philosophy to understand what motivates other people and ethics on how to conduct myself when under stress.  

It is a delicate balancing act when you care deeply about something and the daily stress of achieving that something piles up.  The existentialists often talk about how emotions are intentional.  We cannot control the outside world, but we can control our emotional reactions to the outside world.  The stoics also appeal because they teach nothing is ever as good as it gets, and nothing is as awful as it seems.  Both schools of thought offer a healthy dose of wisdom when things time tough in the office. 

Lately, I have been reading the works of Albert Camus.  Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people have read his most famous novel, "The Plague," which describes the outbreak of pneumonic plague in Algeria.  In the book, we follow the story of an Algerian doctor as he attempts to treat the sick during the attack.  We also see how others react to the suffering and death as the plague follows its natural course.  It is a grim book, but it has moments of hope and decency when people step up to help others.  Camus had no illusions about people in times of crisis, but in the end, he supports the idea that our essential humanity comes through when we help others.  The Plague is one of the reasons Camus earned the Nobel prize in literature.  

I am a big fan of Camus's essays, particularly "The Myth of Sisyphus," where he compares the human condition to the Greek myth of Sisyphus.  The gods punished the Greek king Sisyphus to spend eternity in the underworld, pushing an immense boulder up a hill.  When the boulder reached the top, it rolls down to the bottom, and Sisyphus begins the process again. I look at "The Myth of Sisyphus" as a metaphor for project management. It is both a metaphor for futility and human existence.  Humans toil for futile goals and face numerous setbacks to keep going. Often it is a struggle and toil with a brief moment of success before returning to effort and work.  Camus sees this struggle as heroic and says famously at the end of the essay, "one imagines Sisyphus happy."

In my darker moments, I understand the sense of futility that Sisyphus experiences.  What gets me through is that each day I have a goal to push the metaphorical boulder up the hill.  Each day, I have a chance to make a difference.  It is the slow and steady work that is part of the life of many professional people— the grinding of work and the friction of helping others to collaborate toward a common goal.  I use the story of Sisyphus to explain why I do what I do.  It also helps me manage my emotions better because I can say that I moved that boulder up the hill a few more inches on my worst days.  I get to stand at the top of the mountain when I get the boulder to the top.  Finally, I get a few moments of rest when I walk back down to start the process over again.  It is the source of happiness in my life and why I keep doing it even during the worst moments.  

Until next time. 

Emotional Effort is Required to Lead Agile.

Feel your feels. 

The software business is filled with plenty of highs and lows.  It is a profession filled with intelligent and mercurial people.  The trade is one of the few which resists automation because it requires humans to wrangle ones and zeros into something which mimics human thought.  You would think the people who work in this profession would be cold bodies of logic.  Instead, software developers are very messy and human.  Today, I want to discuss how we need to embrace the spectrum of human emotions that are part of the agile software development process.  

To learn how to write software, you have to have a unique mix of skills.  You need to understand the logic and how programming languages can execute that logic.  You have to learn how to be creative and manage levels of stress most employees never face.  Finally, you have to deal with frustrations and uncertainty because your first solution to a problem often does not behave as it should.  

The level of frustration combined with deadline pressure does something to a person.  If they seem grumpy or distracted, it is because they are attempting to solve a knotty problem.  When they are working, they are often trying to concentrate and focus.  Concentration is essential, so when someone interrupts them, the natural reaction is to lash out.  Spending time with computers and other inanimate objects creates a sense of isolation, making it hard to transition into social situations.  Finally, pride and ego issues come into play because developers want to look smart to their peers and valuable to the organization.  

Mix all these factors with traditional office politics and team dynamics, and it creates a complicated landscape for a coach or leader to navigate.  Spend time listening to people, both what they have to say and how they are saying it.  When a developer says, “I am fighting with a few bugs,” the tone of voice decides how you should react to the situation.

The office's pressure affects the team, home, and personal life can upset an individual’s balance.  A talented developer was having marital problems, and he quickly devolved into a weird and counter-productive spiral.  I squirmed as he shared very personal details of his marriage and its dissolution.  I should have been grateful that he trusted me enough to share those details.  Unfortunately, the team became front row spectators to their peer’s emotional disintegration.  It went from something which was a personal tragedy to a distraction for the entire team.  The kindest thing we did was take him off the team and work on independent projects.  It was what was best for him and the other developers at the office.  

The easy thing to do is fire the employee and not deal with the chaotic behavior.  Working with people is messy, and we should embrace that reality.  We welcome it because of the interaction of emotions, ideas, and people creates friction, generating the heat and light of new ideas.  A person I respect very much says, “you just need to feel your feels.”  

We need to respect and understand our emotions.  We also must respect and understand others' feelings if we are going to lead and coach them.  It is both the human and logical thing to do.  

Until next time.

Get Stoic and Get Agile

Hang out on the porch and be stoic.

People in leadership roles like to tell stories.  A story we often tell ourselves is the tale of the coronation of a Roman emperor.  The affair has pomp and circumstance with showers of flower petals, dancing, and conspicuous displays of wealth and power.   In the middle of it all is the emperor, who takes a solemn vow to protect and grow the empire.  There is a member of the Roman senate by his side whispering into the new emperor’s ear, “All of this is fleeting.”  The moral of the story is at your most influential and successful; you have to understand the situation will be temporary.  The world around us has a propensity to humble us and does it in cruel and inventive ways.  As a leader, we need to understand that a situation is never as bad as it seems, and success is never as high as we think.  We call it having a stoic approach to leadership, and I would like to talk about it this week.

The stoics are an exciting bunch of thinkers.  The group was formed in the third century before the current era and got its name from where they practiced their craft on the painted porches on the north side of Agora in Athens.  Stoics liked to sit on the porches, drink wine and talk about philosophy, rhetoric, and politics.  In many respects, they are like us getting together with each other to talk about current events, have a few drinks, and enjoy the company of others on the front porch.  Stoics had lots of influence because they were teachers who taught the political class of Greece and over four hundred years of dominance on Greek thinking.

What sets the stoics apart from people like Socrates, Plato, and later Aristotle was a desire to avoid the ups and downs of life and live in a “rational” manner.  Stoic thought has two main ideas; live in agreement with nature and act like a rational human and not a beast.  Harmony with nature means living in balance, not eating, drinking, or consuming too much.  It appreciates a grassy hill for its natural wonder instead of for its real-estate value or the minerals it might contain.  The reason is what makes everyone human, so to be more human, we should practice more logic.  It sounds high minded and easy to say for academics with enough to eat and the ability to talk about it on some of the most charming porches in Greece.  It is hard to see how an enslaved person might embrace this attitude or someone poor or starving.

The agile world could use more stoicism.  The ability to lead large teams and get them to build software products that help the global economy purr is a rare skill.  It also requires a tremendous amount of emotional intelligence and technical expertise.  People who develop these solutions are messy and need help and support.  The emotions they feel are the emotions you feel.  It is hard to manage those feelings, and it requires energy.  If you are good at it, you will inspire others to their best efforts.  Those who are bad at it are poisonous to their organizations.  Practicing stoic thinking is not a one size solution to leadership, but it is helpful because it is never as bad as it seems and never as good as it gets.

Until next time.

Listen and you will become a servant leader.

Listen Up!

The agile reformation is about making work more sustainable, satisfying, and sane.  I have spent a good majority of my time as a scrum master and coach in my career.  I have learned plenty of things about myself and others.  My educational background is in speech communication and journalism.  I even enjoyed performing in Community Theater.  It made me the kind of person who was comfortable in a room speaking to others.  Unfortunately, the training did not give me the most important skill necessary for servant leadership; listening.  Without the ability to listen to others, you are an empty suit reciting words.

Often, we are distracted when we are attempting to listen to others.  Phones, tablets, and television screens fight for our attention.  It is up to each of us in a leadership role to eliminate these distractions, turn off the devices, and give someone our full attention.  It is not easy.  Leaders are afraid of missing a call from the boss or not receiving an important e-mail.  Great leaders set those fears aside because they are aware the people speaking to them are giving up their time and experience to talk to them.  The exchange of information is always helpful. 

People's communication with you is sharing crucial information about what is happening in the organization.  Individuals are often closer to the problems you cannot see so they have insight into how to fix them or they need feedback before implementing those improvements.  Another reason people speak to you is they want to share their hopes, dreams, and aspirations.  People, especially those in large organizations, want someone to listen. 

The book Co-Active Coaching discusses three levels of listening.  The first level is casual listening we do each day in our social circles.  It acts as a way to get through the day quickly but it is not listening.  The more advanced levels of listening go beyond the superficial and focus on the content of what was said. More profound listening focuses on the subtext of what people are saying.  The more advanced forms of listening allow you to understand body language and what people are NOT saying.  All of this information comes together to create an accurate picture of what the person is thinking, feeling, and meaning. 

It is the listening where you are attempting to understand and empathize with the person speaking where you can find value in the most challenging situations.  If you listen in this fashion without judgment, you will be able to understand what people need in order to succeed rationally.  You will also be in a position to provide it.

Listening is a principle component of servant leadership.  It establishes trust and builds credibility with the people you serve.  The skill allows you to better problem solve.  We do not talk about listening as much as we should be as the economy continues to shift toward service and creativity. I feel that it is changing.  I have been working in technology and agile for over twenty years.  Only recently I have learned how to listen to the people around me.  I wish I had learned that skill sooner. 

Until next time. 

Use Agile to Fight Failure

Failure hurts, but not learning from failure hurts worse.

The purpose of agile is to create working software and solutions.  I have stated this goal repeatedly.  The iterations, meetings, and emotional labor are all designed to get work completed promptly.  The rapid feedback delivers value in the least amount of time without waste exposing failure.  The real test of an agile team is how it copes with failure.

The world of politics, media, and business loves to celebrate winning and success.  John F. Kennedy remarked that success had many fathers, but failure was considered an orphan.  People with careers on the line will do anything to avoid failure.  In a world of achievement, the stigma of failure is very real.  I suspect it is this stigma that makes it hard for business leaders to experiment and try different approaches to problems.  To do so is to risk failure.

Failure is a clarifying experience. We quickly discover what does not work.  We also understand the conditions we are working to overcome.  Failure also creates an emotional connection to the work.  It is the chip on the shoulder that drives you forward which says to the world, “I may have failed now but it will make my future success more powerful.”  I extol the virtues of failure because it makes people and teams better at overcoming adversity.  I have failed a lot in my career and that wisdom follows me around.  It helps me train others to avoid the mistakes I have made in the past.

A team has three reactions to failure.  The first reaction is apathy.  If failure does not have any repercussions, a group of people will continue their bad habits and personal agendas.  The next response is fear, where we have people behaving in self-preservation mode.  Team members withdraw from each other and look to do just enough work to avoid blame or blame someone else.  Leaders micro-manage because they feel helpless and see the people they lead unable or unwilling to do the job.  Fear is a palatable emotion, and everyone experiences it on the team.  The final sentiment is determination.  Where the fear once existed, the emotional survivors of the group become determined to overcome their adversity.  Good leaders and coaches get teams to the point of determination quickly.  Those with less skill will have to slog through the earlier steps.

Agile and scrum help along this process, exposing failure and forcing the team to inspect and adapt.  Each retrospective allows the team to find the points of failure and address them.  The team reflects on what they need to do and what they need to change.  A woman I respect who teaches children says failure is an acronym for the first attempt at learning.  Based on this premise failure is a stepping stone to more substantial success.

I have failed more times than I can recall during my career.  Each setback, mistake, and screw up has made me a better developer, scrum master, and coach.  I like to point out the mistakes I have made in the past so that other people can learn from them.  It is also this display of vulnerability that helps me build credibility with the team.  I strive to be a leader instead of a boss or manager.  So, when you are creating working solutions for customers, you are going to confront failure.  The critical part of the failure experience is how you learn from it and the emotional strength of the team who should develop the ability to overcome.

Until next time.

Be a Kind Scrum Master

The lonely life of a great scrum master.

It is hard to talk about being an agile coach or scrum master.  It is both an art and science.  The science understands computer programming and technical systems.  The art is listening to others and coaching them to address their challenges.  The profession is easy to learn, and it is a hard one to master.   Many of the aspects of being a good coach or scrum master appear to be touchy-feely skills and that is because the difference between a good and great scrum master and coach are those skills.

When I became a scrum master, I thought I understood the skills, and I would become a raging success.  My first few sprints squashed those delusions.  Teams have conflict, they confront deadline pressure, and individuals inside the group have messy emotional lives.  It is up to a scrum master to deal with all of these issues and more.  In the words of Kim Scott, “It is management and it is your job.”

It is a job that requires listening and empathy.  It means not only talking about agile but living the values of agile daily.  It is about courageousness when you are tired or scared.  It is about being focused when you are in your worst moments.  You respect others and their different perspectives when you want to tell them to take a flying leap — openness to the secrets and vulnerability of others and to try out new ideas.  Finally, a good coach or scrum master must show commitment to the shipping product and the people doing the work.  The values are hard to do which makes them more necessary to the performance of each team.

The business world has plenty of damaged, neurotic, and mean people.  These individuals were not born that way; the dysfunctional cultures of many businesses created them. Companies promote the mean because they appear to get work done.  Years of unrealistic deadline pressure, lean budgets, and lack of advancement opportunities created the neurotic.  For the agile community, this is what we face.

To counter the sickness which resides in the corporate office, the agile coach or scrum master walks a lonely road.  It is choosing to be kind over being snarky.  When they see exploitation, a coach needs to point it out.  Finally, it is doing the right thing when other people are not watching.  It was not easy which is why so few people are good at it.

If you are looking for an opportunity to create “healthy ownership” in an organization, a scrum master or agile coach needs to practice the values of scrum, they need to listen, to show empathy, practice kindness and do the right thing.  I continue to walk this path and I hope you join me.

Until next time.

A Year in the Life of a Scrum Master

Sharpen the saw, regularly.

Any scrum master worth their weight in salt, should take time out of their busy careers and take stock.  The book, “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” calls this practice “sharpening the saw.”  It is a chance to review the successes and failures of the recent past and see if you have gained any wisdom along the way.  I do not do it as often as I should.  The last year has been a crazy ride, and I want to share with you a few things I have learned.

A year ago, I left LSC communications. I was profoundly unhappy and filled with rage and contempt.  During my fifth anniversary, my manager joked, “Ed has been dragging this organization kicking and screaming to become more agile.”  I was an effort I was often fighting by myself. I was self-medicating with alcohol and over-eating to deal with the stress.  I was also making below-market rates for my profession.  I took the first opportunity offered to me to leave.  Three weeks later, I was cast aside like a used piece of facial tissue.  It was a valuable lesson.  If an offer is too good to be true, it probably is.

In the first quarter of the year, I worked for a non-profit which wanted to become agile.  I was hungry for a fresh start.  I let my hunger blind me to some distinct realities.  The organization was not serious about agile.  The firm would not hire or appoint product owners.  The managers would not share power with their teams.  Finally, my immediate manager wanted me to shut my mouth and maintain the Jira board rather than coach.  The second lesson learned, do not let hunger blind you to a no-win situation, which will further stunt your career.

I would spend the summer months looking for work and keeping my spirits up.  I could not have done it if I did not have the support of my friends, my family, and an understanding girlfriend.  Jobs come and go, but when you die, the only people who will mourn you are the people who loved you.  It is doubtful your boss or the VP of engineering will show up unless you neglected to check your code back into source control.

Finally, when I had a new opportunity, I set aside my preconceived notions and took time to learn about what works for my client.  It is not a mistake that the creator gave each person two ears and one mouth.  We need to listen to others with a frequency of two to one.  Learn the names of your colleagues and their children.  Find out how to make coffee that everyone in the office will drink.  Learn where the pain points exist and find out if you can fix them.  Share the values and principles of the agile manifesto and then be an example for others.

Plenty of things can happen in a year.  I feel like a different person. I am older and a touch wiser.  I want to bring that knowledge to other software developers and agilests.  I am grateful you are along for the ride.

Until next time.

Emotions are Intentional on Your Agile Team

Existential thinkers have plenty to say about emotions.

I have been busy working on a large project.  My life has become a dull whirlwind of train rides, conference calls, and e-mail chains, which never end.  The days tick by as we draw closer to our deadline.  Everyone is feeling the pressure.  As the scrum master and coach, I have to maintain a semblance of grace under pressure.  If I do not the team will continue to careen out of control, and the project will fail.  I have talked about emotions plenty of times on this blog.  Today, I want to discuss the intentionality of emotions and what it means for your teams.

I have been reading plenty of philosophy books on the train, and I have become intrigued with post-modern and existential philosophy.  In particular, the trio of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus.  Two of these writers earned the Nobel Prize in literature.  The third gave birth to contemporary feminist thought.  The three of them survived the horrors of the great depression and the Second World War.  In the aftermath, they were authoring a philosophy centered on individuals and the life choices they make.  Instead of grand narratives of history like Marx or Hegel, existential thinkers wrote about freedom and opportunity.  The existentialists spend time discussing psychology.  Each of them pushes back against the leading theories of psychoanalysis and attempt to provide a better way to discuss emotions.

As psychoanalysis grew in popularity and respectability, people began to accept many of its presumptions about human nature.  A central hypothesis was the concept of the “unconscious mind.”  The unconscious was a mental black box where we kept our repressed memories, emotions and irrational portions of ourselves.  Therapy could help us unlock some of the mysteries of the unconscious, but it would never be able to untangle the numerous tangled threads of repression, trauma, anxiety, and emotion each of us possesses.  If someone was easily angered the psychoanalysis would say there was nothing to be done because emotions are part of the unconscious mind and it will require extensive therapy to address the complicated issues causing the anger.

Existential thinkers reject this extreme version of the unconscious mind. To an existentialist, humans do have a conscious mind and an unconscious mind, but the unconscious is not a black box that cannot be understood.  Instead, the unconscious mind contains emotions, memories and hidden elements of behavior but instead of them obeying irrational processes they are rational and intentional depending outside stimulus.

For example, you are in a retrospective, and some stories did not get completed.  The inability to get work done becomes the main topic of the retrospective.  Two developers are upset by the discussion.  An existentialist would say this is natural because the two developers did or did not do something which caused the sprint to fail.  The feeling of anger, disappointment, or anxiety is a logical and rational response to failure.  If you are a good enough coach or scrum master the team should be able to express those emotions healthily.  One developer should be able to admit they are struggling writing automated tests.  The other developer should be able to confess that they do not have time to help the other developer improve their testing skills.  In a condition of psychological safety and openness, the team can work out how they can avoid failure like this in the future.

The scrum master should ask “What” style questions instead of “Why” centered questions.  When someone is angry, ask, “What is making you feel this way.”  It is less judgmental than asking why.  Ask people what they are going to do to change and what they can do when they feel angry or upset.  It is not easy, but it guides you and the people on your team to take ownership of emotional behavior.  It means that emotions are still irrational and exhausting, but the reasons we have them are not.  To the existentialist, a feeling serves a real need in each human.

As a scrum master and coach, it is up to you to understand emotions and how they are natural and rational responses to real situations.  It is up to you to ask questions about what is triggering emotions instead of why emotions are triggered.  Finally, a coach or scrum master needs to help others take ownership of emotions instead of dismissing them because emotions affect the team and the individual struggling to express them.

Until next time.

Agile Slowing Down the Corporate Merry-go-round

The business world is a merry-go-round

The business world is cruel.  It is a perverse merry-go-round of glittering success and spectacular failure.  Billions of dollars are created and lost with a handshake.  Someone in the finance department has the power to destroy the livelihood of thousands with a spreadsheet. It is a world filled with fear and uncertainty.  I belong to this world.  I am an agile coach and scrum master.  Each day, I get on the merry-go-round to make sure others do not get hurt.  It is because the ride does not stop and spins faster each day.  As part of the agile reformation, I have a responsibility to make business better.

The three main pillars of agile are inspection, adaptation, and transparency.  Each day we should be able to understand what is happening around us.  Once we know what is going on around us, we should be able to adjust to the current conditions.  Finally, we should be transparent with information with no agendas or secrets so that we can start the process anew.  For those used to playing political games or hiding in plain sight, these values are dangerous.  Transparency means information flows freely in an organization.  Inspection demands we look at that information with healthy skepticism.  Adaptation means we take action and hold others and ourselves accountable.

Agile is not hard to explain to others, but it is challenging to execute.  People need to be vulnerable and trust each other.  The Harvard Business Review calls this psychological safety.  In cutthroat business cultures, this safety is absent; it is up to the coach to create these pockets of safety.  Once these pockets form, they must grow within the organization.  To borrow from the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, agile becomes a rhizome which rises through the organization and inspires change.

Business people have been comfortable with how they ran large organizations since the 1980s.  Shareholders were more important than customers, and as long as they had priority, everything would be fine.  The digital revolution of the last twenty-five years has upset that equation.  Businesses are being created and crushed at an increasingly fast rate.  Bureaucracy once designed to increase corporate value is now interfering with the customer experience.  Poor customer experience hurts the organization.  The realization is creating anxiety among workers and executives.  A coach needs to step in and point out the importance of customers, and speed to market.  The corporate headquarters lose sight of these simple truths.

Each day, I see good people working in dysfunctional situations, and they inspect and adapt.  As a coach, you have to point this out to people who can make a difference and get them to inspect and adapt.  It is this process which makes the organization more transparent and effective.  If employees can respond to change, then business leaders can do the same.  It takes a coach to make this message clear.

The merry-go-round of business keeps spinning.  It is a relentless machine, but the agile reformation makes the ride less scary.  Using inspection, adaptation, and transparency, you can improve the business culture and leadership.  It is not an easy job, but it is mine.

Until next time.

Four Simple things

It can get lonely.

The biggest challenge as an agile professional is leading organizational change.  Often, you are a lonely voice in an ocean of indifference.  People do not like the daily routines and rituals disrupted, and agile professionals are doing it with frequency.  The resistance is a natural response to change.  Humans have a craving for stability in an uncertain business world.  The situation sets the agile professional up for isolation and loneliness.  I want to discuss the support system you need to overcome the adversity.

Being a scrum master or coach is a difficult calling.  It requires tremendous emotional labor, and you are attempting to overcome decades of resistance to change within an organization.  To be successful, you need to have a support system which will help you get through the rough patches.  Here is my formulation of that system.

An Understanding Significant Other

If you have a spouse, boyfriend, or girlfriend, they need to be understanding.  You are going to have unannounced late nights being with the team fixing production bugs.  As a servant leader, you will confront difficult emotions, and it will take you time to unwind from them.  It helps to have someone in your life who loves and respects you to listen. Finally, they should be willing to work with the ebb and flow that technology professionals encounter daily.  It is like being married to a police officer or firefighter.  The job always finds a way of intruding into the relationship.

A User group or Network of fellow Agilests

Many organizations do not have a large cohort of agilests.  It is why being a coach can be so isolating. It is why you need a regular group of people to meet with discussing current trends and new techniques.  It can be an online group or frequent meetup.  The purpose is to have a peer group which can provide emotional and professional support.  Often a problem you think is intractable is something someone else has solved.  The user group acts as a repository of information, a social circle of peers, and group therapy.

Support from Senior Leadership

Change does not happen, spontaneously.  Often, it requires outside events to force change or an internal mandate to make change happen.  An agile coach without the support of senior leadership is not going to be successful.  Cultural inertia is a common obstacle to change.  Often when you ask why something is done a particular way the response is, “…because we have always done it that way.” Senior leadership can give you a mandate and authority to improve a process.  Executives provide the nudge necessary when things need to change and when people dig in their heels.  Finally, senior leadership is a source of validation which makes the hard work and sacrifices worthwhile.

Allies in the Organization

As a firm moves along the agile journey, a coach or scrum master is going to gather like-minded people who are allies.  Organizational allies are gold to a coach or scrum master.  The people joining you will spread the message you are sharing. Associates will provide emotional and technical support.  Colleagues will support you during a difficult decision and join you for lunch when times are less stressful.  Cultivation of colleagues will keep the agile transformation going long after you have left the organization.

So to avoid burn out and isolation a coach or scrum master needs; an understanding significant other, a network of fellow agilest, support from senior leadership, and allies in the organization.  Without these things, an agilest will have a lonely run with an organization.

Until next time.

Agile, Story Points and Rock-n-Roll

The Crüe are very rock-n-roll and agile.

Being an agile coach is filled with plenty of touchy-feely moments.  You have to deal with difficult emotions and move change through an organization which is satisfied with the status quo.  Other times a coach or scrum master must deal with the practical matters of scheduling a meeting and facilitating a retrospective.  Finally, you are learning new things and applying them to your clients.  My vision of how story points work has changed over the years.  Recently, I am looking at story points in a new way, and it is good enough to share.

My first thoughts about story point made me think of them as measures of volume.  A story point contained a certain number of hours, and it would be easy to convert the two back and forth.  After my first 18 months of being a scrum master, I saw the folly in that way of doing things.  It became apparent that story points represented something analogous to distance.  An Olympic runner can cover 3,000 meters in under four minutes.  I can walk it in about a half hour.  Story points provided a quantitative way to measure uncertainty and help communicate to upper management.

Now I see a story point as the sum of four factors; complexity, risk, effort, and uncertainty.  We sum all these factors together and round them up to the nearest whole number in a Fibonacci sequence.

So if I wrote it out a math formula it would look like this:

Story Point = Complexity + Risk + Effort + Uncertainty
F_N = [Story Point]

Where F_N is a number in a Fibonacci sequence.

The new acronym for this is CRÜE, after the rock band Mötley Crüe.  By today’s standards, this giant of 1980’s glam metal would flame out in the public eye.  The band was nihilistic, misogynistic, and poster children for the destruction of alcohol and drugs could do to a person.  Finally, the lead singer killed someone in the act of vehicular manslaughter.  In spite of all the baggage, you could count on the band to put on a great show.  You could also count on them to be blaring out of any stereo at a house party during the 1980s. People of a certain age have memories of significant life events happening with Mötley Crüe playing in the background.

As an agile coach, I will let the young people concern themselves with sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll.  It is not my lifestyle.  I prefer agile, story points, and rock-n-roll.  If you are talking about story points, talk about Crüe; complexity, risk, uncertainty, and effort.

Rock on people and until next time.

More difficult than crayons

Crayons are easier to create than software.

When you spend your career helping people deliver software, it quickly becomes apparent that the biggest challenges you face are not technology problems.  The biggest challenge is working with messy people.  Machines can make pencils and crayons by the thousands each hour, but before that happens, someone has to design the product for manufacturing.  The people who do this are engineers and product designers.  Software relies on Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and software developers.  The creative process is the same, but it is much easier to manufacture crayons than software.  Today, I will try to answer why it is so hard to write software.

Software has only existed since the aftermath of World War Two.  The first documented “bug” was a moth which died among the vacuum tubes of the first computer.  In spite of technological advances, the way we write software is still primitive.  Developers continue test code on local machines and then push that code to remote servers to see if they work.  Testing is manual, and the ability to automatically push code through the web or large enterprises is limited.  The software craft movement is making progress in this area along with the DevOps movement are helping with this antiquated process, but it is still a long, tedious trudge to get software written.

The key adverb here is “written.” The writing of software is a creative process.  People take the vague directions of others and translate it into web pages or client-server applications.  Unlike traditional prose, software contains code, markup, and data.  The disciplines working with each is different and filled with plenty of nuances.  Business people compensate software professionals generously because it is such a rare skill to cultivate.  Developers are also under tremendous pressure to ship code and work long hours to do it.  Imagine, Earnest Hemingway, attempting to write “A Farewell to Arms,” with management standing over him demanding updates each day. Furthermore, imagine the Nobel laureate is required to write one character’s dialog in English, another in Spanish and finally hexadecimal code for each letter on the page for a different character.

If the above was not challenging enough, the people paying for the creation of software are not actively involved in its production.  Software projects often begin with a problem which does not have an answer.  A marketing executive blurts out, “I need a client website!” or a Human Resources professional asks if it is possible to manage timecards online.  The business set aside money hired consultants to do the work, and begin writing software with no idea how it should work.  Agile fixes this problem by requiring rapid time boxes.  Often, lack of participation and vision from business partners thwarts the benefits of agile.

Combined with the difficulty of writing software and the apathy of the people how to pay for the software, the final challenge is the hypercritical nature of everyone who cannot write software have for the people who can write software.  It is similar to the Austrian Emperor mocked in the movie Amadeus whose only criticism of Mozart’s opera is, “There are too many notes in it.”  Many people have opinions about software and provide critiques, which is either nitpicking or unhelpful.  As a developer, a color pallet I used for an application caused controversy, and we spent countless meetings reviewing color chips.  It extended the life of the project by three months and made it over budget.  In a different episode, punctuation on a page sparked hundreds of revisions and emails.

The reality is like a committee of proofreaders, executives, and people not involved in the creative process demanding edits to Hemingway’s work.  The final straw might be the demand that “A Farewell to Arms,” not have one of the main characters die at the end of the book.  The entire narrative arc of the book changes because of the “suggestion,” but if Hemingway does not make the changes, he does not get paid or published.  Considering this type of feedback, Hemingway would have consumed more alcohol than he did.

So this is why writing software is so complicated.  It is a creative process.  Next, the people who want and pay for the software are not actively involved.  Finally, if customer partners are in the project, they provide feedback and guidance, which is often removing value from the software rather than adding it.  I have been in this career for a long time, and I know how to write and deliver software.  It is much more complicated than creating crayons.

Until next time.

Goodhart's Law is Going to Get You.

Goodheart's law strikes!

Information technology is hard work.  I have written about it before on this blog.  I have plenty of empathy for others who work in this profession.  I do not have much understanding of poor service or lazy behavior.  I am even less forgiving when large organizations brag about their success in public and struggle to do the basics in private.

I am at a client, and I have the following interaction with someone from the help desk; they said, “Can we close this ticket? If it ages any longer, it effects out SLA.”  My first reaction was surprise.  My second emotion was anger.  The help desk person was asking permission to close the ticket and open a new one because if they did not fix the ticket at a particular time, it would reflect poorly on him and his consulting company.  He was going to lie to make his response time look better than it was. 

It is human nature to please others.  British economist Charles Goodhart coined the maxim, “When a measure becomes a standard, it ceases to become a good measure.”  When you judge or pay people based on a measure, they will game the system in any fashion to make themselves look better.  You see this in economics.  It happens in video games and depressingly at work.  My help desk technician was living proof of Goodhart’s law.

Martin Fowler wrote a great article on the subject, and it outlines how to avoid this trap in agile practice.  Metrics are abused regularly in business.  In a large organization, the only way leadership can track progress is by reviewing these metrics.  Thus, the people doing the work are more focused on the outputs of hitting the metric numbers instead of the outcomes satisfying the customer.

I see service level agreements or SLAs as a necessary evil in business.  You have to hold vendors and third-party partners accountable.  Such a contract controls my current situation.  In a perfect world, my help ticket would age, and someone who could help me would respond to my issue.  The technician was afraid that if the ticket aged, they would receive a poor performance review or get fired.  It is an ugly situation, and if a company is going to succeed, they with have to address it. 

Large organizations need to focus on execution.  To focus on this goal, metrics and SLA’s need to be used judiciously; outcomes are superior to outputs.  It is a message which did not reach the help desk or his boss. 

Until next time.

A Little Empathy Goes a Long Way

Empathy is a big deal.

As a scrum master, one of the most important qualities you can have is empathy.  It is a special quality where you can put yourself in someone else’s situation and understand the world from their perspective.  It means operating outside your comfort zone.  Today, I would like to discuss the importance of empathy for a scrum master.

Working for a large organization is hard.  Employees often feel alienated from their work and coworkers. I think a significant reason for this situation is many people in leadership roles do not understand what it takes to provide the goods and services their organization offers.  These leaders are good at managing budgets and capacity but little else. It is where empathy matters.  As a leader, you need to walk a mile in another person’s shoes.  If a leader cannot do that in reality, then they must attempt the thought experiment to see the world from the perspective of the employee.

When a leader sees the organization from the perspective of the people interacting with customers several changes take place.  First, they see the people doing the work as people instead of resources who are disposable.  Next, they understand the systems and equipment the employees are using might not be meeting the needs of the customers.  Another by-product of this exercise is leadership understands how long it takes actually to build something.  It gives leadership insight into which deadlines are real and which are fiction.  Finally, leaders discover which activities generate value and which ones do not.

Early in my career, a mentor I respect said I should never order a person to do something I would not do myself.  I still follow those directions today.  It is why I go to meetings, so my coders get a chance to write software.  It is why I fill out expense forms and project requests; so the people doing the work do not have to do it.  It is part of the servant leadership I try to practice each day. So have some empathy for the people who work for you.  You will be surprised by what you might discover.

Until next time.

A Scrum Master Demands Interpersonal Skills.

A scrum master must have a
moral compass and great interpersonal skills.

The role of a scrum master is a challenging one.  Any given day you are confronted with new challenges, and you always face the pressure to deliver software.  You are pulled from the top by the demands of business leadership.  From below, you are leading your team and helping them improve.  I have been reviewing plenty of career postings on the internet lately, and I have noticed an interesting trend.  Postings have mentioned in passing the need for interpersonal skills.  I want to argue interpersonal skills are the essential part of being a scrum master.

When you look at a job posting for a scrum master you often see references to project management systems, years of experience and relevant industry experience, usually there is a request for certifications from the various accrediting agencies involved with agile.  The final bullet point is the requirement is a request for excellent interpersonal skills.

Being a good scrum master demands interpersonal skills.  You spend time coaching and educating others about agile and scrum.  A scrum master must be able to say no to others without sounding dismissive.  It requires solid interpersonal skills to have empathy for others.  A scrum master also must speak truth to power and have the integrity to back up those words.  All of this requires interpersonal skills, and a scrum master who does not have them is in trouble.  Earning a scrum master certification is straight forward, being able to do the job requires hard work and a growth mindset.  

You cannot check off boxes and have a scrum master arrive to make your team better.  It is a process of trial and error.  A team will take two steps forward and then fail in an embarrassing fashion.  It is not a traditional career path, but it is infinitely satisfying.  The foundation is excellent interpersonal skills.

Until next time.

Treat People Like People Instead of Resources

Treat others like people.

Being a scrum master is hard.  It is not a dirty job like being a trash collector.  It does not have the danger associated with being a firefighter or an electrical lineman.  It lacks the prestige and respect of being a member of the armed forces or the toughness of being a lumberjack.  Scrum masters make the world a little better one sprint at a time. 

Forbes magazine categorized four types of toxic professionals; the power hungry, the absent, the incompetent, and the micromanaging.  I have encountered these individuals throughout my career.  I have spoken about how those individuals can spoil an organization.  Each of these people are awful in their unique way, but I think one trait unites them; they see others as resources instead of people.

I blame this state of affairs on contemporary project training.  A modern corporation is deeply concerned about profit.  A company is so worried about profit they will do everything in their power to make sure each employee is running an efficiently as possible.  A software developer with downtime is wasting money.  It is why people expect them to perform multiple projects.  A business leader able to meet and mentor junior employees does not have enough to do or is not generating revenue.  Being busy is more important than being productive.  The agile community calls this putting outputs above outcomes. 

Treating the individuals doing the work like people requires downtime, training, and mentoring to provide value to customers.  If individuals are resources, they are office supplies which can be used up and discarded when they are no longer useful.  Treating people like resources is exploitive and antithetical to an agile mindset.  

I joined the agile reformation ten years ago because I felt there was a better way to deliver software.  People deserve to work in environments which are satisfying, sustainable and sane.  When you treat people as people instead of resources to be used and discarded this will not happen.  I have a simple vocation, and this is to help businesses manage people like people.  I suppose that is why it is so hard being a scrum master.

Until next time.

Your Job is to Work with Messy Emotions.

You get pulled in lots of directions.

An agile coach or scrum master is pulled in plenty of directions.  Servant leadership is difficult because you need to put the needs of the team ahead of your own.  It takes an emotional toll to do it properly.  It also requires practice and maturity.  Today on the blog, I would like to discuss the emotional work necessary to be successful.

I have spent the last three month at a new client.  It is refreshing, and it has taken me out of my comfort zone.  The experience has also opened my eyes to the emotional labor necessary to excel as a coach.  You must work with the emotions of the people you are coaching; everyone has good days and bad days.  A servant leader has to absorb those emotions and process them in ways which will benefit the team.  If this expectation sounds unreasonable Kim Scott the author of “Radical Candor,” says, “It is called management, and it is your job!”  A leader needs to put in the work emotionally to make the team successful.

The emotional labor expected of a leader comes in many forms.  A leader must listen to understand.  It is not enough to hear the words a leader must understand the context and emotions of those words.  Next, a leader needs not to take the ups and downs of the job personally.  For someone who takes pride in their work and has plenty of emotional investment in doing good work, this is challenging.  People are going to get angry with you and others are going to demand more from you than you can give.  The key is the anger and demands they are creating are usually their problems and not yours as Collin Powel said being responsible means pissing people off.  As a servant leader, this is inevitable.

Finally, to solve problems, you need to set aside your emotions and try to look at situations in a focused and rational way.  Again, emotional control like this is more natural said than done.  If you care about anything you are doing, you are going to have an emotional investment.  To succeed, a coach or scrum master has to set those emotions aside during periods of stress so that they can “work the problem,” instead of being an emotional wreck.

Human beings are emotional and messy.  Having some emotional control or awareness is tremendous work.  The product of that work will be the respect of the teams you serve and grace under pressure when things go wrong.  It will enhance your leadership and improve your standing in the organization.

Until next time.

Dealing with Scary Stuff

I am scared but I am going to be OK.

I have a sign on my wall which says, “If your dreams don’t scare you they are not big enough.” It has been a frightening period for me.  I am interviewing for new opportunities, sending out applications, all the while the holiday season approaches.  It is a lonely period despite the support I have received from family, friends, and colleagues.  Periods like this test a person and this week I would like to discuss it.

Since high school, I have been one of those students who could be labeled as “striver.” I wanted to advance myself and do better for myself and my family.  Pushing myself academically and participating in extra circular activities, so I would get noticed by a college.  It happened with a twist. I was offered a scholarship to a university and then it fell through.  I went to a community college for the first two years of my college career.  In hindsight, it was a perfect move as I was able to deal with the pressures of college with the support of my family.  When I transferred to a four-year university, I learned the discipline it takes to succeed academically.  It was not easy, but the early lesson was that success required sacrifice and discipline.

Sadly, those two qualities are not helpful when jobs were scarce as was the case in the recession of 1990.  Keeping the lights on and the rent paid required the swallowing of personal pride.  It meant working retail working for commission.  It was dealing cards at a casino.  I discovered I was good at computers and learning how to program them.  I was lucky when I left the casino industry, it was the giddy and stupid times of the dot-com boom.  I transitioned from dead-end jobs to a career.  It only took seven years out of school to make this basic professional milestone.

In the intervening period, I have been fired and laid off more times than I can mention.  I struggled to keep the lights on and the mortgage paid.  People have treated me in a grossly unfair fashion and I have received numerous second chances throughout my career.  The adversity which has dominated my career makes me contemptuous of others who have not had similar experiences.  It is also why I roll my eyes when I hear certain public figures discuss their “life of struggle.”

The ups and downs of my career took a heavy toll on my marriage and family life.  It has changed me more than I would like to admit.  In spite of it all, I have remained committed to the business of building working software and attempting to make work more satisfying, sustainable, and sane.  I am committed to large businesses treating people with basic decency.

I am going to give that vision a hard test.  The experience is going to challenge me in ways I am not comfortable.  I might fail.  I still have to try because I owe it to the people grinding out code.  I owe it to my family and I owe it to myself.  My dreams are very big and they scare me witless.   I look forward to defeating the fear and sharing those dreams with you.

Until next time.

When you lose a bet on your career.

Boy, did I fail.

It has been a crazy week.  I made the transition from working on a gigantic waterfall project to unemployment in the span of an afternoon.  I was feeling a flurry of emotions.  At first, I was ashamed and disappointed.  My feelings then migrated to anger and bitterness at how cheaply was thrown aside.  Currently, I am feeling determination and resolve to get back to work.  Through all this process, I have been overwhelmed by well wishes and support from the agile community.  It is this support which is keeping me going during this difficult time.

I joked glibly; I was betting my career that the project I was on could benefit from my agile knowledge and approach.  In less than seven business days, I was rolled off the project and laid off.  I did not receive any feedback from peers; I was just marched into the HR office and let go.  I should be angry and bitter, but that is not going to help me get back to work.  Fortunately, my colleagues on social media and #Slack came forward.  I received comfort, coaching, and support.  I also took some time to think.

It is not comfortable looking at failure.  It is necessary if I am going to grow and develop as a person.  It is one of the main postulates of agile is, “…to fail early and often.” In that respect, I was successful.  I failed, and now I have to take that failure and learn from it.  I am going to do a better job vetting employers to make sure they want the agilest working on their staff.  I am going to change the notifications on my mobile phone, so I am not distracted during the workday, and I can concentrate better.  Finally, I am going to focus more intensely on Radical Candor and Non-Violent Communication.

I have plenty of free time, and so I am going to use this opportunity to decompress and spend with family and friends.  I will live through this and would not be this brave without the help and support of everyone around me.

Until next time.