Things can always be better

I’ve never heard or seen agile fail in the sense that it was worse after agile than before.

I have however seen it fail in the sense things did not turn our as well as I would have liked to or would think possible.

Reasons for this are:

- too much, or almost only a focus on the project specific tasks of agile. We easily think that this is just a new delivery enginer that will work well.
- too little focus on the organisational and cultural aspects. Yes, agile is a delivery engine, but the car needs to be re-built to fit the new engine, otherwise it just won’t work.
- not enough long-term buy-in and measurements. I believe metrics is what will make it stick just as much as anything else.

We now have a more or less standard agile backlog for what to do for each project to make it work. Great for the project. Example of deliverable is “make the daily stand-up work”

We also have a standard organisational agile backlog for what to do with the organisation. Example is: ensure there is a collocation policy so that all agile teams will sit collocated by default (not by having to fight for it or make it happen).

Both backlogs comprises about 60 deliverables / stories.

Over-all: it is easy to get that single project off and delivering, it is much, much more difficult to ensure all the next 100 projects of the next 10 years will deliver in the same way even without an agile coach round.

And, I must admit, I have been to project focused at times in the past. So I must “admit” failure in the sense of not adressing all the 60 or so organisational deliverables I would have had I been more aware and a better salesman. We must also remember that an agile coach is often brought in to make that or those projects work, to my experience there is usually no organisational mandate – this must be sold and bought by delivering trust and confidence.

I also think this is two levels of coaching. Agile project coaching and agile organisational coaching. Not everyone can do or is experienced at both.

Where things are going
To our experience organisations are maturing and increasingly willing to understand that a new delivery engine means the car must be re-built. I guess we’re more mature too … I like the way things are going, it will be more fun. And things are happening quickly. This fall (or autumn if you please) will be full of much more organisational coaching than ever before, so something’s in the air.

Open Space Meeting Antwerp

Open Space Meetings are meetings where there is no previously defined agenda.  The participants define the agenda as the initial starting point of the meeting.  The pictures are from an open space meeting I went to in Antwerp hosted by the Agile Consortium. I and we came there to discuss the future of the agile consortium, and my (at the time) favorite item certification got enough attention, so it worked well for me.

Possible (un)agenda

1. Get together.
2. Define the agenda together, including several parallel sessions. This worked well!
3. Get started, move around.

Principles

The principles are quite interesting and are as follows:

• Whoever comes are the right people.
• Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.
• Whenever it starts is the right time.
• When it’s over, it’s over.

There is also the law of two feet:

If you’re neither contributing nor getting value, use your two feet and go somewhere where you can.

Buying buns for me

Every Friday it was coffee time and it was my turn to buy buns for the entire department of which our project team was a small part. I had an appointment with the dentist and forgot all about it. My team, however, rose to the challenge when they (being less forgetful than I) realised I had missed it. A couple of team members went out and bought it for me. I got no remarks, no comments, they just did it. They had accepted that I was sometimes forgetful, but had other stronger points.

What is complementary leadership and empowerment about?

Being complementary is about realising that I am weak where you are strong and vice versa.  We need to complement each other. Colleague to colleague as well as Leader-For-The-Business-At-Hand to Colleague.  We rise to the occasion and help each other deliver, covering up for each other’s formal areas of responsibility.

Why is this important?

In a fast moving world we don’t have time to wait for each other to grow perfectly in to any given role. Who is perfect? Which manager or knowledge worker is perfect? If your manager (or co-worker) isn’t doing what he ought to – so what – stop whining and do it for him. And be open and ready for others helping you out with what may formally be your job.

Open and Transparent

We got new business from New-Customer. Delivering Upgraded-System was supposedly very important. Management had a strong talk with the team, and we worked like h-ll sacrificing weekends and family for the good of our little company community.

So … in the end, we delivered on time and with outward looking good quality.

Just to notice that no one seemed to care. The functionality was not picked up and delivered to production. Suddenly things were not as important as they used to be. I later realized we had been manipulated; schedules had been forced for no reasons at all expect to keep us working hard.

If you manipulate your people like this, moral, passion and loyalty suffers. Product quality also suffers – the forced schedule put us further into technical debt, quality looked good on the outside, but structures beneath the surface were not what they should have been.

Everyone lost out, because someone decided to play mind games with us, not trusting us to deliver on time and not telling us the full truth about what were the real priorities and issues.

What does openness mean?

Being open and transparent means having no hidden agenda. Everyone on your team understands the full business case end everyone has disclosed their personal agendas and goals. Being open and without hidden agendas does not mean that you don’t have a personal agenda, it just means that you are open about your personal needs and wants. Everyone knows everything that has or can have an effect on the team. Being open and transparent from a leadership point of view also means disclosing EVERYTHING you know and not, as an example, creating made-up reasons for delivery at a certain date (all too common).

Why is openness important?

Simple logic, if you decide accept that the people working for and with you are (at least combined) smarter than you are. For all systems (and teams are a kind of a system) bad input and information always means bad output, there is no way around this. You can only expect the best possible performance from a team that has all of the best available data and input.
Also, people are not stupid; as time goes by they will consciously or subconsciously realize they are not seeing the full deck of cards and passion, loyalty and speed will suffer.

Once Upon A Time

In our opening story Once Upon A Time the group was not informed about Supposed-Issue. Someone-At-Work had a hidden agenda (keep Per-Magnus out at all costs), and did not disclose everything to everyone. Someone-At-Work thereby disempowered the group and limited the solution space being discussed, sharply reducing the likelihood of finding the best solution.

So, Someone-At-Work who was also The-Leader-For-The-Business-At-Hand did not provide very good leadership. Not very good humanship either. And, you might add, with friends like that you don’t need enemies.

Anders, a dear colleague of mine, is quite frank and outspoken. Sometime a bit harsh perhaps (to me – not to clients), but I can always trust him to speak his mind. If I have misbehaved, been too unfriendly to him or someone else, I never get feedback later than within 24 hours. This builds trust. I know I can trust him, I know I’ll never get a knife stabbed in my back. I appreciate this greatly and it makes my relationship with him safe.

In his youth, during his university years, Anders was on a bus tour in Europe. The group had one big problem; one of the group members did not seems to understand why showers and soap had been invented and the smell was unbelievable. The group decided initially to deal with it by playing “nice” and pretending everything was OK (while discussing the problem in whispers here and there).

But my friend likes to deal with truth as he sees it, so after tiring of the “nice” game, he walked up to the person in questions and said. “You smell terrible, can you please take a shower – this is a problem for everyone on the bus”.
So, Anders decided to do
the honest, difficult and kind thing – tell the truth. The person being told appreciated the honesty greatly, and they later became good friends.

If you want high-performing happy teams, frank frequent feedback is a necessity. This example on the social side may be somewhat extreme but if you want high performance this is the way you need to go on all issues professional, social, psychological or whatever.

What is frank feedback?

Frank feedback is about airing your concerns immediately. One of the kindest things you can do to a fellow human being is frank thoughtful feedback. Playing the “being nice” game, is often just a cowardly excuse for not dealing with the truth straight in the face.

Included in this principle is the 24 hour feedback rule. If you have problems with anyone’s behavior or performance, you have 24 hours to give feedback; anything else makes you a lesser person.

Obvious as this may seem, too many times we think of people and judge their performance without giving feedback. In too many organizations people are being judged for months without feedback, just to get it all at once during the yearly personal development meeting (or whatever you call it at your place). This kind of behavior is in no way acceptable, if we want high performing teams.  That goes for positive as well as negative feedback – the shorter the feedback loop is the quicker we will improve our performance.

Why is this important?

The first and obvious reason is that people can only perform optimally if they know the full definition of what optimal performance means. We must know all about how we are judged to be able to win in the eyes of our peers, anything else is less than fair.

The second is about innovation and feeling safe. We can only be innovative if we feel save and accepted as human beings. Being sure that all is said that should or could be said, makes you feel safe. Constantly second-guessing what other people are thinking or not, is an energy consumer like few. Second-guessing is waste and baggage and will not work in a high-performing team.

In relation to our opening story

Someone-At-Work had had a problem with Supposed-Issue for months, without telling it to me straight in the face. So…:

• -There was no frank feedback at all for months.
• -Feedback was, late in the game, given in a very rude and indirect way.
• -I had no clue Supposed-Issue was that important to Someone-At-Work, which was not fair to me at all – I was given no chance to deal with it. To me, Supposed-Issue was just one out of 15 major issues we had to deal with – I had no clue Someone-At-Work thought it important enough to declare me incompetent.

Someone-At-Work should have:

• Given feedback within 24 hours after first discovering Supposed-Issue.
• Thereby given me a chance to deal with Supposed-Issue at an early stage.

That was for the professional bit. On a personal level Someone-At-Work, who called me a friend to my face and I thought of as a friend, chose to keep feedback from me just to bring it up months later by picking up the big baseball bat and smashing my skull.

Ouch.

Apologies are logical

So why is a sincere apology important? Aren’t apologies just for day care children learning to behave? Why is sometimes a sincere apology all that stands between conflict or non-cooperation and reconciliation? Are there any logical reasons? Why is this important in business relations?

About apologies

First, let’s re-visit the components of a sincere apology:

• Acknowledgement of error.  This includes understanding and sympathizing with the other person’s point of view with empathy.
• The words “I am sorry” or “please forgive me”.

And let’s re-visit an insincere apology:

In the manager-employee relationship I’ve seen too many clauses like “I understand you and I am sorry you feel that way”.  The problem with this clause is that it much too often really means, or is interpreted to mean:

• I am trying to be polite and therefore I am saying I sympathize with your feelings.
• I have, however, done nothing wrong, these are just your views.

What is lacking here is the most important component in a sincere apology:

• I was wrong. My actions play a part in why our relationship isn’t quite right.

This bit seems difficult to come up with for too many people.  Being wrong, making an error is just too much to admit for some reasons. But we are all fallible human beings, so what is the problem? Am I too proud or afraid of getting too many hits in the blame game? It does not really what the reason is, that kind of apology just does not work.

The Logic

Yes, the reasons for the importance of a sincere apology are no doubt emotional, but I believe our emotions many times hide vastly better logic than our left brain halves. The logic behind the necessities of a sincere apology is the following:

• You misbehaved. I was hurt.
• I’d like to get along with you again.
• But I don’t want it to happen again. You need to promise me that.

This is where the “I was wrong” component of a sincere apology becomes important. Without the acknowledgement of error, the behavior is likely to be repeated and if the erroneous behavior was serious enough, reconciliation cannot happen.  The “I was wrong” bit is a promise not to repeat behavior.

Business relations and the trust factor

Whether it is a business to business or business-person to business-person relationship there is one thing that makes the world go around. And it is not money, it is trust. I trust you to behave in an agreed way and you can trust me too.

If trust is broken, it needs to be mended, and the first requirement is to agree not to repeat the behavior that caused the trust to be broken in the first place. And this is where the sincere apology bit including the admission of error comes in.

Logical, is it not?

Years ago, we had lots of projects coming in and suddenly we were out of project managers.

I had been a techie for years, coding, designing and re-factoring the SAP-like system we were delivering to our customers. But, something in me said that it was time to try new things, so I raised my hand and said “I’d like to try”.

Now, being a somewhat outspoken and sometimes obstinate nerd, anyone could have thought to themselves that sending me to face customers was a risky endeavor. In fact, my manager’s manager could probably have written a medium sized report citing eons of reasons for why giving P-M the assignment was not a good idea. On top of that, we were very different types of persons, and from his point of view I must have been from Mars.

But, he said: “Sure, give it a go”.

So, I was given a chance. One reason was “difficult to find someone else”, of course. But, there were also other reasons. The project delivered successfully and my manager discovered I could actually control myself and behave when necessary. When he in the end began to suspect that I was actually a normal human being, we had a frank and honest de-brief.
He said: “If there is one thing I’ve learned in this job, Per-Magnus, it is that you never know who can do what well. There is no way you can judge a person’s abilities by your impression. There is only one way – give it a try and see what happens.”

He continued: “Sure, I wondered about you, but I knew that it was not my job to pass judgment on you – only giving it a go, giving you chance would answer the question about your abilities. I am happy we gave it a go.”

So, Jerker Setterberg, I don’t know I you remember this but thank you for being a good manager and giving me a chance. And I am sorry about being such an obstinate sub-ordinate.

What is I Believe In You about?

I Believe In You is about believing that others can do much more than they have already done. It is about me believing that you can, you are able until you have tried several times. It is about giving people a chance, if you want to try it – give it a go. I Believe In You is also about believing that failure is an opportunity to learn.

Why Should I Believe In Others?

One reason is that there is a general problem in societies that people are put down rather than being asked to surpass themselves. Just look at our children who easily think they are not smart enough, beautiful enough or thin enough to be good enough. I have discovered that this attitude is still there too often, as young people mature into adults. “I cannot” seems to be a far too common attitude, rather than “yes I can”.

Another reason is that I and many with me have discovered that people can surpass themselves many times over when given a chance, enough reason and freedom. Willpower can move mountains.

There is also an egocentric reason. People that dare to try will grow and take work off your shoulders, which in turn will enable you to grow both your own person and your business.

In relation to our “Once Upon A Time” opening story

Someone-At-Work would not give me chance. The message was clear: “You Cannot”, without even having seen me try. Without even bothering to discuss Supposed-Issue.

Ouch. ]]> http://magile.org/pmblog/?feed=rss2&p=73 0 http://magile.org/pmblog/?p=234 http://magile.org/pmblog/?p=234#comments Mon, 07 Dec 2009 20:23:51 +0000 Per-Magnus http://magile.org/pmblog/?p=234 An Amazing Day

Amazing Day

Today something amazing happened.  Something I thought to be about as unlikely as being hit by a meteorite and winning the lottery at the same time.

So, what was that?  Well … today someone said “forgive me” to me, and not just anyone.

It was not entirely straight forward and free of hints that I was somehow wrong too, but a “forgive me”. And still astonishing. It came from someone I thought could never say the word, so even a somewhat lame “forgive me” coming from that source was amazing and should make the news. It made my day.

In all the time I’ve known this person, I’ve never even heard her even as much as hint she is less than perfect and can make mistakes. A somewhat charming attribute in some persons and in this case too, but when they err and are too proud to acknowledge any error, friendships can run havoc. I don’t know whether this means we can be business partners again, but from my point of view the slate is clean.

What happened?

Well, let’s not get into details but I thought she had erred, been dishonest, violated trust and misbehaved in public in a totally unacceptable way and got very angry and disappointed. As I confronted her, all I was told was how silly I was to make something out of nothing. So … all I was told was that my feelings were my fault and she had done nothing wrong.

This being a seemingly mature adult, I questioned my feelings and judgment, so I double checked with everyone present at the time plus a few more friends. It seemed everyone thought I was too angry, which I had to acknowledge. Everyone also thought that she had behaved in a completely unacceptable way.  So … still very disappointed, but not as angry.

As the weeks and months passed, we communicated in some awkward and strange ways and cooperation between our companies and departments halted to zero.  What continued to amaze me was that a seemingly mature adult could not bring herself to say even a teeny weenie “I was wrong, I am sorry” or “please forgive me”. The words that could have changed everything in a heartbeat were never said.

Forgiving anyway and restoration of trust

After a while, I was not angry any more, only disappointment remained, and I forgave unasked, life had to move on. But why not no more business relations again? Well, the hurt was deep and trust and truth are serious issues in my life. I did forgive, but working again with someone who could not in the tiniest way acknowledge any error was out of the question as I could no longer trust.  Trust and honesty is what I try to live by (and sometimes I fail too).

So … this brings us to another point. Forgiving someone and restoring trust and relationships are not one and the same thing. You can forgive, but that does not mean everything is mended. You can forgive someone for making you lose a limb, but your arm I still not there.

So what is needed to mend broken trust and bad behavior? Well, the starting point is a “forgive me”, and can sometimes work wonders. And you know what? It worked wonders for me. I have lost feelings of disappointment and remaining hurt. I am still not sure whether we can work something out, but my door is open and I can start with the assumption that she is trustworthy. I’ll be watchful, but I can work with that assumption.

Looking in the mirror

So, having me write these wise words must make me a good and wise person? No, the experience has made me take a second ook in the mirror and consider my own behavior. What have my words and actions been like? Do I listen to feedback, can I make sincere apologies? And you know what? I discovered I had a couple of long due “forgive me” in two or three relations where I needed to use the f word myself and I guess I have one or two more to go.

We all know that 35 degrees can sometimes be pleasant when in a hot shower or tub or at the beach. Even 70 to 80 degrees can be pleasant for a short while in a sauna. But 30 degrees at night when you want to sleep, can be very uncomfortable. Different types of heat are also very affective in cooking. For example electrical heat, gas heat, grill or water bade have great impact on the result of your cooking. And of course we should not forget the time factor, in all cases of human appreciation and result of cooking the time has a large impact.

By saying the above I want to point out; its not only the level of heat that influences the result. There are other dimensions like time, type and condition of the target that matters. Without these dimensions it could be risky to give advise about applying a certain level of heat. Without taking care of these dimensions you can even expect a bad result.

Now when transferring this analogy to human organisations the heat is the driving force that make people do things. The heat comes from commands or instructions from a boss or work colleague (outer heat), but the heat may also come from within a person (inner heat) based on interest, social requirements or desire. We often want to combine the outer heat with the inner heat. In the best of worlds the outer heat let us set goals and the inner heat takes care of the action. When we only use outer heat people may protest and perform badly or not at all. With only inner heat people may loose direction or get bored, again the result is bad or no performance at all. Thus a manager have to feel the balance and to strive for the perfect mix of outer and inner heat, not only for individuals but also for the team.

In the original Scrum paper by Takeuchi and Nonaka an executive is quoted;   “I believe creativity is born by pushing people against the wall and pressuring them almost to the extreme”. This paper which was written in 1986 is very thoughtful and inspiring, but I’m so glad that that the modern view of leadership has developed so much away from this quote. A great example is when heat is created by giving a team responsibility and possibility to influence, which indeed is a way to create a high level of heat. The level of heat may even be higher than heat just given by control and command.

As described in the analogy, at the top of this post, time is an important parameter and letting the team work under this heat without any slack or pause might not give the long term result we need. A moderate level of heat for a long time will ultimately cause the same burn out as a high level in a short while. Even if we can avoid a burn out we will surely loose focus on the complete picture and miss creative opportunities and valuable corrections when just continuing with the same heat.

The  Scrum framework and its rules might be small and simple, but behind every part of it I recognise deep thoughts about any topic I look into. When thinking of type of heat I see the view of:

• a developer, putting himself and team under heat by committing to a clear unanimous objective, still he knows the commitment is not for ever. The developer and the team will be allowed to evaluate, make corrections and commit again.
• a Scrummaster who creates heat with great feeling when mixing the objectives of the product owner with challenging questions on the best way to deliver.

By telling the story about this analogy I would like to say that when you want to lead a self organised team you can not just turn on a certain level of heat. You have to understand the other dimensions  and apply different types of heat depending on the circumstances. You have to be open for feedback and adjust accordingly.

The scrum framework when followed gives an excellent support for an appropriate level and type of heat, but I think it is important to understand the background and philosophy to really make it work. It’s not about blindly applying certain rules, it’s about applying them with awareness of why we want to apply them.

multi-coloured post-its
on the wall,
chewing gum

becoming the product owner
flinching,
stepping back