Which Is The Right Kind Of Magic?

Get A Grip

Guys, the question in the title is the wrong question. I see how we got there: we learned to develop software using a three-step-approach:

• Analyse the Problem
• Model the Solution
• Built (and occasionally test) the Solution

Most of us have stopped developing software this way (now rather using some feedback-driven approach like BDD and TDD) yet we didn’t stop thinking this way. Give us a problem, and we will analyse it and be happy with a model that comes up.

Fitting Agile into an organisation’s culture is no more likely to succeed than fitting TDD into waterfall. Or, to take another metaphor: no matter which flavour of coffee I take, if it does not wake me up, it doesn’t fit my definition of coffee.

Good Coffee

Wake Them Up

In my opinion, Agile is meant to challenge the status quo. At least, my way of being Agile always ends up challenging the status quo… Organisational culture is part of the status quo and will be affected when you challenge it. So should you let the prominent culture influence your decision on which flavour of Agile to start with? No matter what you do, Kanban, Scrum, XP, your own combination of practices that work for you: you’re not agile if you do not continuously improve. Unless you challenge the status quo, the organisation will stay in the analytic (or even ad-hoc) mindset no matter how many post-its you put on the walls.

Challenge Mindset, Not Culture

You do not want to directly challenge the Culture anyway. Culture defines where people belong in an organisation. Challenge that and they are likely going to hit you. Challenge their mindset, their beliefs about how the world of work should actually work, their ability to adapt, their eagerness to learn, their grasp on the latent sharedpurpose of their organisation… Improve how the organisation respects people. Explain how complex adaptive systems work and why evolutionary leaps are driven by exaptation, not only adaptation.

Influence how people think, let them change how they work, and the culture will follow. Agile is a framework for change, and change never fits in. Let’s roll up our sleeves!

A big thank you to Bob Marshall for inspirations that went into this post and perfecting it with feedback!

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Jan Georg Kristiansen explaining Professional Coaching

Opening the AgileCoachCamp Norway 2012, we had the pleasure of Jan Georg Kristiansen, ICF-certified Erickson coach MCC and leader of Erickson Coaching Nordic AS (an organisation training coaches and coach trainers in Norway), introduce us to the world of Professional Coaching.

What is Coaching?

He talked about the need for a definition of Coaching, or ICF Coaching as there are so many different uses of the word currently… (Agile Coaching being one of them, we worked on that later) His criteria for a good definition are:

• It should be short
• It should be positive
• It should be respectful to older neighbours like consulting, mentoring, psychology…

He aims at a three-step definition, starting with a very short phrase that, depending on available space, can be elaborated a bit to make it more specific. Definition Jan Georg considered included:

• Coaching is presence
• Coaching is movement
• Coaching is being positive

(ICF) Coaching is a 100% client-focused conversation.

(ICF) Coaching is a 100% client-focused conversation 

with a lasting effect.

(ICF) Coaching is a 100% client-focused conversation 

with a lasting effect

because the focus-person has full control

of their goal, their steps towards that goal and their purpose.

Jan Georg's notes on Professional Coaching

One thing I need to elaborate into my thinking about balance is that he said, to stay balanced you need a keel to stay balanced in stormy waters,

Mapping Authority and Coaching

Jan Georg showed us a map (or scale) ranging from 100% authority (war, I don’t see the other person anymore) along various points in between towards the ideal of 0% authority for coaching (leading to the 100% client-focused conversation defined above).

Authority zone—I know more than you
50/50 zone—friends playing ping pong
Free zone—you have the authority

Discussion during and after the session will lead to multiple posts spinning off from his visit, I’ll try to cover some of it on this blog, and you could follow the #accn discussions on Twitter…

Jan also mentioned the 11 core competences of a coach, you can find them here.

And he gave us a very nice quote “All help is violation”. (I would add that this is only true if you haven’t been asked for help.) That’s why we currently run a session hosted by Johannes Brodwall about Non-Violent Communication…

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AgileCoachCamp Norway

Professional Coaching

The AgileCoachCamp Norway 2012, which I’m currently attending, was opened by an inspiring session with an ICF coaching trainer, Jan Georg Kristiansen from Erickson Coaching Nordic AS in Norway.

He gave us a definition of ICF coaching as a 100% client-focused conversation, and we decided to have an Open Space session to take his definition as a starting point to define our shared understanding of Agile Coaching.

Engagement

Agile coaching is a 100% client-focused engagement which enables continuous improvement, because the client owns aligned goals and purpose across organisational levels and the people doing the work define the steps towards those.

Minimum Required Skills

An Agile Coach needs to have

• a deep understanding of Agile & Lean, which includes Systems Thinking,
• coaching skills, the awareness to know when to coach, mentor, and teach and how to switch hats,
• servant leadership,
• good facilitation skills.

Optional, but not mandatory skills include coding, training, management experience, … We collected this list in a session hosted by Rachel Davies:

Guiding Principles

An Agile Coach makes herself dispensable as quickly as possible.

An Agile Coach is committed to her own personal growth and continuous improvement of her skills. 

Thank you, Michael Leber and Andrea Chiou, for suggesting the second principle!

Please add more comments!

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S is for Sky by Ali Catterall

Crowd-Sourcing Strategy

I worked with the management board on an Agile Strategy Map. We had explored the alignment of the board members the day before, and they had already astonished me by being comfortable with staff members joining that exercise. Similarly, for the Agile Strategy Map, we included some employees so that during group exercises the board members could each pair with someone who was not on the board, increasing the diversity of ideas.

After we had created a draft map and discussed how it should be improved, the CEO suggested two great ideas:

• the map should be set up on a public wall so that everyone could participate in the creation and refinement
• once some alternative paths to success have emerged in a sufficiently clear way to be executed, he’d like all employees to vote (as in “buying real options”, but without money) on the ideas to crowd-source prioritisation. “After all, everybody’s bonus depends on us reaching that goal together next year!”

Embracing and Keeping Emotions

At the end of the first two weeks where I had worked with the Product Owner group, mainly on forming them into a team, we did a short feedback round before I left. We had worked in one of their meeting rooms all the time, plastering it with drawings and post-its and visions and ideas… And during the feedback many of them said that they are glad they’re beginning to think and function as a team, and that they are afraid that some of that spirit and momentum might get lost in daily business.

The CEO replied to these concerns, “I want you to keep this room. The new spirit I feel is captured beautifully on these walls. We can set up a new meeting room easily. Whenever you feel the new spirit depletes, when ever you feel the need to revisit these emotions you feel now, come back to this room and look at the walls. Make this your team room and continue what you have started. Keep this spirit!”

Enabling Excellence

This is what management is supposed to be. Amplifying the drive of your people with little signs like this. Take their ideas and emergent ways of work seriously, integrate them into your culture. Embrace the excellence of your people!

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Some of My Influencers of 2011

The biggest change in my life this year was that I joined agile42. This move created learnings, opportunities, connections and friendships that deserve their own post. Thank you, agile42!

I’ll go along the timeline of this year and reflect, that will lead to one possible, sensible order… which does not reflect importance. I can’t possibly cover all the people I’ve met, and I will intentionally omit some personal stuff. So if you are not mentioned in this post and feel you could be, it’s probably because your contribution to my life has been too profound or personal to share in public.

One person that earned her place outside, above and beyond my timeline of 2011 is my wife, Christiane. I couldn’t have done anything of what I did this year without your love and support! Thank you so much.

How My 2011 Started

I was exhausted after a very busy year, having made the hard decision to leave the company I’d worked with for more than eight years to join another one. That meant changing from the most senior and respected expert to the newbie, the beginner in a team of awesome agile coaches. I was excited, and a bit anxious.

Over the past one and a half year, starting with the ScrumGathering in Munich 2009, I had built a lot of strong connections in the agile community, and finally, at the age of 40, found my tribe. So, before I start with the timeline, a huge thank you to all the readers of this blog and all my followers on Twitter.

Thank you all for following!

Timeline

In January, I visited Norway for the first Norwegian CoachCamp that I had organised with Sergey Dmitriev, Ivana Gancheva, Geir Amsjø and a few others, meeting my friends Ken Power, Rachel Davies, and one of my new colleagues, Ralf Kruse. I met influencial thinkers and practitioners like Niklas Bjørnerstedt, Jon Jagger and Johannes Brodwall. A recurring topic of my year, LeanProcrastination, got a major boost in an open space session and through feedback by the real options gurus Chris Matts and Olav Maassen.

In Febuary, our first Play4Agile unconference brought together playful minds from many countries. Ellen Grove and Michael Sahota came all the way from Canada, inspiring me greatly. I’m especially great they joined the StrategicPlay crowd, just as Juliane Conradt and Thorsten Kalnin… Thanks our amazing StrategicPlay mentor, Katrin Elster! Ken Power was there, and Ole Jepsen, who’s work I admire since then. And I met Jurgen Appelo, we started to develop a plan for the ALE network… And he gave me feedback in a signature which I’m still thankful for (see picture below).

On my way home from Play4Agile, I learned that the ultimate change agent had taken one of my best friends.

In March, I started working with agile42. Wow, so many new inspirations… That kept me intellectually busy in a way that before had only happened “after work”…

In April, Ralf and I started the Awesome Coach of the Week blog series. Although we did not post every week, it’s one of this year’s endeavours that I’m quite proud of.

In May, I attended the XP2011 conference in Madrid and we created the vision for the ALE network. We started organising an unconference in Berlin… I met Liz Keogh, who’s been a source of inspiration since she taught me to write Haiku in 2009… This time, we built a vision in Lego together and I learned her model of Feature Injection in her BDD Tutorial. It’s been altering my work…

Liz building Chris Matts building a Network

I finally met JBrains and Michael Feathers, paired with Matt Wynne to finally learn Ruby, got to know Brian Marick and Esther Derby… (Thank you, Brian, for the chance to tango with Esther!) And the change agent hit again: This time he chose a car crash to take the father of one of my closest friends. Only the good…

One awesome sidetrack that happened while I was in Madrid deserves its own paragraph: I was contacted on Twitter by Pascal Pink, whom I did not know at the time. He wanted to know if I intended to come to the American AgileCoachCamp in Columbus, Ohio, in September … I said it’d not be on my way, and he replied, that would be sad, as so many Americans wanted to meet me and it might be easier for me to come over than for all of them to come here… I was flattered but still said I didn’t plan to go. He asked what kept me, time or money? I said, a bit of both, as to come over for just on weekend would be a bad use of time, and I didn’t know how to pay the flight. He suggested I could come over to LA for a few days, give a talk at an LA meetup and visit one of his clients with him, so that I could learn how they worked in the US. Afterwards, he would go to the ACCUS with me and pay for all my expenses, as part of his sponsorship for the event… I couldn’t believe it at first but he was serious:-) So it happened that one of the three invitations to the US I got this year actually came true.

In June, the ALE2011 organisation started for real, I still haven’t completely conceptualised how we let such an awesome outcome happen by applying anarchy with a purpose… Also in June, I attended the German AgileCoachCamp which I had co-organised and which was sold out in 18 hours… Meeting many awesome friends and getting lots of energy and insights from the community, especially from awesome coaches as Jens Hoffmann, Pierluigi Pugliese, Marc Löffler and Andreas Leidig… And I met Gitte Klitgaard, who’s been joining Twitter in the meantime, leading to lots of awesome conversations with Katrin and my dear Lady of Astonishment. And she’s helped me focus on commitments for this blog…

In July, my wife and me flew to Brussels to attend the amazing wedding of a friend, one of two short holiday trips we had time for this year… Thanks for the invite!

In August, I did my first Kanban trainings with Franz Ivancsich which were well received and we will definitely do more of… ALE2011 organisation took more and more of my time, leading to me not attending Agile2011 although I was one of the few Europeans whose session got accepted. My fellow ProcrastinationCoach Marc Bless played the LeanProcrastination Last Responsible Moment Game with my colleague Dave Sharrock instead, I heard it was well received…

One huge and huggy Thank You needs to go to all my fellow ALE2011 organisers, Marcin, Franck, Oana, Marc, Ivana, Sven, Catia, Jule, Mike&Mike&Mike, Monica, Christiane, Eelco, Ken, Jurgen, Sergey, Yves… We’ve been through a lot. We achieved greatness. Some of us became close friends.

September was easily the busiest and most awesome month of my life. It started with the ALE2011 conference… I met Stephen Parry, who amazed me with insights, a level of thinking I seldom have seen in our community and quotes like “Agile and Lean done wrong only show our clients how to do the wrong things righter”… The most lasting gift he gave me was a signature in his book (next to the one by Jurgen I mentioned above):

Awesome Feedback in Books

The event was a blast. An amazing mixture of innovative talks, open space facilitated by my amazing friend Mike Sutton, and lots of hugs.

Later that month, I went to LA and Columbus, as described above. Gave my talk about LeanProcrastination and played the LRM game, told Pascal’s client about Feature Injection, played our brand-new agile42 Kanban Pizza Game and met inspiring people at the CoachCamp. Siraj Sirajuddin, Pascal Pink, Mike Hill (whom I’d met in Madrid), Paul Boos, Michael Sahota, Mike Cottmeyer, Sameer Bendre and his lovely wife Meghana, Derek W. Wade, George Dinwiddie… Three people I was especially fond of seeing: Angeline “AgileMeister” Tan—it was awesome to finally meet you in RL, Tobias Mayer, a constant source of inspiration, and Matt Barcomb—I seldom made a close friend so fast. Looking forward to the chance to work together next year!

One unexpected gift I got in Columbus was the outcome of a long chat I had with Pascal, where he told me a few things about US culture and how that influences agile coaching, and explained to me why he had invited me in the first place… A topic for another post.

October and November have been comparably quiet… December started with the XPDays Benelux where Nick Oostvogels and I hosted a Coaching Dojo session. I met Ole Jepsen again, who ran a great session on Human Nature and Agile, and Portia Tung, who inspired me greatly with her Tribal Leadership session…

The closing event of my professional year was the agile42 coach camp last week, which like the ALE2011 gathered some of the most important people in my life in one place of awesome collaboration, challenges and new horizons… Thank you Andrea, Marion, Mike, Ivana, Gaetano, Ralf, Franz, Nusco, TaZ, Hugo, Dave, Lasse, Sergey, Benjamin, Geir…

And, to end with where I started: Thank you, Christiane, my Love.

We’ll rock the world in 2012! I’ll do my best to astonish and surprise you. Merry Christmas and God bless …

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21 is only half the truth

I’ve become part of a great team of coaches. There’s a saying about Jazz: “Always be the worst guy in every band you’re in.” My amazing friend Mike Sutton gave me the advice to apply the Law of Two Feet to my job, and to go somewhere where I could learn, again. So that’s what I did, join a team where I was (in many ways, at least) the junior. I began to listen, and learn…

How it all began

Marion Eickmann, who prides herself being a Certified Scrum Impediment (CSI), approached me multiple times in recent years to join agile42. We had worked together for a year at my previous company, and she asked me to join Andrea Tomasini and her when they founded agile42 as an Agile Coaching Company. At the time, I was too comfortable being the most senior consultant in the place I worked at, and while she repeatedly asked me over the years, I was hesitant to leave my comfort zone.

Last year, in autumn, she finally was successful… So she’s the first person I need to thank, for her trust, tenacity, and drive to bring me on board. And the courage to cope with a Linchpin constantly challenging the status quo… I had interviews with Andrea and Dave Sharrock who barely knew me at the time, but did not hesitate to embrace me into their team.

My Year With the People of agile42

The first person I worked with was Ralf Kruse. He joined me at the AgileCoachCamp Norway in January, and we teamed up for my very first agile42 gig. Training and coaching together was a challenge I’ve learned a lot from, and I’ve been enjoying the creative tension between us ever since. Thank you, Ralf, for all the inspiration!

At that same CoachCamp, I met Sergey Dmitriev, Benjamin Sommer and Geir Amsjø, who now work with agile42 Norway. Just this week, we all met in Berlin for our third agile42 coach camp this year and developed our strategy for next year. Looking forward to work more with you guys next year!

Martin Kearns lives and works in Melbourne, which limits our chances to meet in person. He joined us for the first agile42 coach camp in March and inspired me with his experience, how he leads by example and for introducing me to David Bohm’s On Dialogue. Thanks, Kearnsey!

A Coach Assisting to Step Up

I was grateful to immediately have the chance to introduce my new colleagues to StrategicPlay—we’re using it increasingly often!

agile42 is not only about the coaches: we couldn’t do what we do without Nina’s gentle and patient assistance.

Bringing years of practical PO experience into our team, Franz Ivancsich from Vienna joined us shortly after me. We developed the Kanban training together with Ralf, and it was a pleasure to co-train with Franz. Awesome to have a whole-hearted hobbit on the team! And when I recently had a lot of pain with a slipped disc, his help as a yoga trainer came in very useful…

Franz' Yoga Skills

Teaming with Andrea has been inspiring on many levels. His experience in management and enterprise agile transformations was fully revealed to me when we co-trained the agile42 leadership and management training for the first time, in November. Getting the chance to practically apply our alignment exercise, the agile strategy map and our new Cynefin Lego Game and to be able to contribute my StrategicPlay facilitation skills has lead to an amazing outcome. Two people from that company gave us feedback on how substantially we have changed their lives…

Although we haven’t worked together (at a client) yet, Dave Sharrock coached and inspired me greatly this year. He seems to be inclined to bring me just that next step forward that I’m not yet fully ready to see on my own… Thank you.

In the last two months, I pair-trained with Lasse Ziegler from Finland on a number of Scrum trainings for a company in Germany—thank you, Lasse, it’s been a pleasure to work with you!

The regular coach camps we do make sure that I regularly meet inspirational coaches from abroad… I’m especially grateful that my friend Mike Sutton works increasingly often with us. Funny that he’s just as responsible for me working here as I am for him working with us… Paolo “Nusco” Perrotta lured me back into programming and inspired me to learn Ruby. And he greatly improved my English in unprecedented directions… Roberto Bettazzoni is the coach I can rely on to work wonders in C++, and for a totally different type of Italian humour… And I have immense respect for the gentle Hugo Laurenco, wo agilises Iberia… It seems we cover Europe from the far South to the far North… The most recent person to join us has been Gaetano Mazzanti from Italy, who shares my passion for Kanban (which shows, for instance, in these awesome slides).

What I Learned

When I discovered the term “Agile Coaching” less than two years ago, I thought it was just what I did at the time: Leading change in organisations towards agility without telling people what to do. Over time, my picture of Agile Coaching deepened as I met more and more people who brought diverse expertise and experience to the table, and who challenged my viewpoint again and again. What has astonished me most is the level of ignorance (and sometimes arrogance) many of us (including me) apply to the diversity of organisations out there. We think we have a lot of answers, where instead we should just enable our clients to phrase the right questions. And Agile (or Lean) and all the practices we know are just a small part of the possible answer.

agile42 has taught me humbleness. Humbleness about my own skills, and about the maturity of our agile/lean toolset in general. agile42 has also made me proud. Proud for the valuable contribution I can make to the team with my experience and expertise, and proud for the awesome team I am now part of. We’re one hell of a band…

Thank you, agile42, we are fucking awesome!

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Jack bravely tests the new biscuits

Last night, I was invited by Lisa Crispin and Jean-Paul Varwijk to a Potsdam Agile Testers Session (PaTS) at the AgileTestingDays. It was a cool chance to meet friends from the Agile community and to make new ones…

It was an interesting crowd, I was a bit late and didn’t know most of the people (not in real life, anyway). So I sat down, got a beer and listened… There was a list of prioritised topics on a flip chart and one of the discussions went around the question

What Makes a Good Tester?

Many important human virtues were mentioned:

• Curiosity
• Passion
• Communication skills…

Problem Finders

Liz Keogh said in her BDD tutorial at XP2011 in Madrid (she did the tutorial at the AgileTestingDays this week as well):

Testers are problem finders, Developers are problem solvers. That’s why they need each other.

I think that sums it up nicely. Thanks Gaetano for the reference to back up my memory. Nice list by the way!

I have met lots of testers and developers in my career, and I have met very few who have a similar talent for finding and solving problems. What’s your experience?

Problem Solving

Everybody on a good team should have problem solving skills, and surely everybody is able to develop problem finding skills… But there are some people who have this knack of breaking things… And they make the best testers, in my experience.

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Project

Project as a concept was devised in a time when management still thought they could execute an endeavor according to a detailed plan. This worked in the times of Henry Ford, when employees were glad to be paid, and customers accepted that their cars were black. Both is not true anymore. Employees seek mastery and purpose, and request autonomy instead of detailed plans. Customer value today is rather discovered than simply produced. Uncertainty is the only thing you can be certain of.

A project is a temporary organisation formed by people working on a sufficiently identified goal. As long as projects were few, changes infrequent, this paradigm had its use. Now, changes are the norm, and every enterprise runs multiple projects. These don’t function as temporary organisations anymore when each member is belonging to multiple organisations at once. I don’t see the concept adding any value anymore, yet it brings this whole history of misconceptions to the table…

• The idea that costs and benefits of development work could (or should) be calculated in advance.
• The notion of an end date when a product will (or should) be finished.
• The early commitment on scope, decoupling demand from delivery.
• The idea that one could calculate the resource usage of people, summarise the data for some resource management, and even do that for multiple projects…
• This list is not complete.

To briefly sketch an alternative:

• Instead of costs, we should talk about incremental investments. Instead of benefits, we should identify our real optionsand adapt these continuously to our learning.
• Product versions are released, no product is finished anymore. We need to ship fast, and often. The best way to gain knowledge is frequent feedback.
• Instead of pre-defined scope, we need incremental, deliberate discovery of value, and rigorously validated learning to deal with the unknowns.
• We need to balance demand and throughput instead of resource management.

We need to watch the baton, not the runners.

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The last responsible moment is an ephemeral point in the phase space of my real options, where effort and value are in perfect balance for a good enough outcome.

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Resources

People are human. They are not interchangeable. Don’t call them resources, because this term suggests they are.

Beautiful Waterfall (by robbieredball)

Waterfall

Waterfalls are beautiful. The idea to apply the “model” of the same name to software was ridiculous already to the author who coined the term… It has never worked. So let’s not use this metaphor anymore. I use mudslideas a replacement. (I know there have been successful projects that used a mudslide approach, I’ve seen these too. But these did not succeed because of the process, but because of good people.)

“Ideal” Days (Hours, …)

Please stop talking about ideal time as if there was some kind of non-ideal time … It’s a theoretical concept that comes from treating humans as resources (see above). Time is relative, ideal or not. Estimating ideal hours/days does not add value, only confusion, and leads to dysfunction. Don’t go there.

More

Stay tuned. There’s more to come. Next in line: Project.

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