Geoff Mazeroff

Agile

Setting Up an Internal Coaching Office (via Agile Amped)

• Takeaways
  • Understand the five levels of listening
  • Understand what modality to use in the Cynefin framework
  • Build new habits to create change
• When the whole is less than the sum of its parts, then there’s a communication problem
• Coach: a vehicle that transports a person from where they are to where they want to be
• Agile Coaches are different than Scrum Masters because they can step back (and abstract) from being responsible for the delivery of products
• Who should do this work? Those who have a passion for optimizing the performance of others (need empathy, selflessness, servant leadership).
• Cornerstone of this role is listening
• Shuhari stages of mastery – shu (rules, process), ha (expand, learn from other masters), ri (learn from your own practice)
• Levels of listening; you need to know what it’s like to do this, and to be on the receiving end
  • Ignoring
  • Pretending (nodding, “uh huh”, multitasking)
  • Selective (listening for agreement, specific keywords, your name)
  • Comparative (filtering what matters to you, “are you talking about something I want to listen to?”)
  • Empathetic (I understand you from your perspective)
• If you’re in a place to create change, you need to listen at Level 5 (suspend disagreement to understand others). You can’t change someone’s mind if you don’t know what’s in it.
• Different styles: coach, teacher, mentor, facilitator
• Cynefin framework:
  • simple — no degrees of freedom (e.g., assembly line); teach by saying “do this”
  • complicated — governed constraints (e.g., marketing); mentor by asking “have you tried this?”
  • complex — loose coupling (e.g., global markets); too many unknowns, so you need to coach them to let smart people develop solutions through good questions
  • chaotic — decoupled without constraints (e.g., beginning of the Internet); just act because there is no “right way” yet
• Teach when you know more than the student. Mentor when you have more practical skills than the mentee.
• What to do when everyone sees the benefit of something, but it’s different than what they’re currently doing? You need to establish a new habit. When X happens, instead of Y, I will do Z. (You have to know what you used to do.) They have to create the habit; not you.

Agile challenges and opportunities in 2020, what do you think? (via Mountain Goat Software)

• Many of the Agile consultants are going after the late adopters (e.g, banking, airlines) because they’re less resistant now that Agile has been more or less proven.
• One survey (no sample size or industry description given) said 97% of companies are using Agile, but 22% are using it in all teams.
• Think of Scrum as training wheels, then learn more about the values and principles of Agile.
• Most teams have problems with unplanned or interrupted work; this is where you move to something more like Kanban, or reduce planned capacity for Scrum.
• Another struggle: How do you take siloed skillsets across the organization and put them on one team? Everyone focuses on the same goal, and it’s your skillset that delivers product faster; not everyone has to know all skills.
• Less learning by talking, more by doing; otherwise the training courses drag on. It’s even more effective if you can use actual company problems/backlog.
• Certifications are more helpful when you lack the experience; experience always trumps certifications. Some HR orgs will throw out resumes without certs, which isn’t ideal. Certifications showed you cared enough to go learn about it. (I disagree; many of these courses are not about passion; they’re about having $1000+ and time to complete a course.)

Lean Portfolio Management (via Leading Agile)

• What is this? Use lean and systems thinking for portfolio management. Deliver quality and value at a sustainable pace (instead of centralized decision making, project-specific advice, annual planning, departments and silos).
• Lean = maximizing flow and minimizing waste. In software, this is minimizing waiting (short lead/cycle times) and minimizing defects. The portfolio releases continually with built-in feedback loops to ensure hypotheses are met.
• Traditional portfolio management… spent October/November finding the 100 things they want to work on, only 20 of those get funded, and in the next year only 10 get completed. The portfolio vision needs to align with the enterprise’s strategy. Decompose the strategic goals into things the teams can execute on.
• Today we’re focusing on doing small experiments with smaller amounts of funding instead of months of research to ask the board for large sums of money. Once you get the feedback about what will work, you place the larger, long-term bet.
• Systems thinking is about optimizing globally, not locally. It’s not enough for a restaurant to have a good chef and ambiance; if it takes an hour to get your food, you probably won’t go back.
• Key elements: 1) Alignment to enterprise strategy, 2) collaboration across the system, 3) transparency.

Validating Hypothesis-Driven Development with Telemetry and UAT (via Agile Amped)

• Come up with a hypothesis about what people will use and how much; you need telemetry around this. Continue on? Stop because it’s not useful? Change it a bit?
• Hypotheses must be testable.
• Any change will produce chaos; how much chaos will it introduce? Estimate it and measure it. Limit the amount of change in progress, because humans don’t tolerate too much too soon.
• You can get automation around data collection and analysis
• Compared to software development decades ago, there’s more communication even before you start development on features
• Acceptance criteria (build the right thing) are not quite the same acceptance tests (build the thing right). Triad: developer, customer, tester. Collaborate to create the acceptance tests.
• Business-value driven development — this is weighted shortest job first (WSJF) from SAFe

Enabling Autonomy at Spotify (via Wade Chandler)

• As of 2017, Spotify had 180+ squads and over 3,000 employees. Hire the best and do your best to support them (instead of “get out of their way”).
• See my book summary around motivation from Drive. Also search for McChrystal’s book on VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity). Push the decisions closer to the work.
• Spotify’s early model was (from the CTO) the autonomous squad: self-organizing, clear mission, cross-functional, owned everything end-to-end, seven plus/minus two people. Used self-health-check models to implement accountability. Each team has a product owner and an Agile coach.
• Servant leaders don’t control, they enable. They do gemba walks and understand how the work is being done. Also see Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet; you need competence, clarity, and control.
• Everything gets more complicated if you don’t trust people.
• From Reinertsen’s The Principles of Product Development Flow… decentralizing control requires decentralizing both authority to make decisions and the information to make them correctly.
• You need some mission and boundaries (what can you do, what can’t you do), otherwise people will do anything or nothing. Spotify specifies “minimum viable agility” (e.g., standups, planning, retros), but then specifies activities that people can opt into. Try things, keep what works, and change what doesn’t.
• Autonomy vs. alignment is a false dichotomy. Alignment enables autonomy.
• Structure (top-down): company beliefs, north star and two-year goals, company bets, OKRs
• “Golden path” examples of how to go from nothing to something in the ideal sense at Spotify; there are also boot camps
• Don’t copy the model, but the principles are likely portable
• Q: What about accountability? A: Individual accountability, squad responsibility. Constantly communicate and be transparent.
• Q: What about cross-cutting concerns that could impact multiple squads? A: There’s only one architect, and there are senior engineers to answer questions.
• Q: Where do squads come from? A: Many examples of product management coming up with ideas that flopped. Several examples of ideas from hack-a-thons that were successful.

Business

Could Digital Currencies Make Being Poor Less Costly? (via Harvard Business Review)

A considerable amount of the world is unbanked or underbanked, making it costly to be poor. Many global banks are considering central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) which would increase options for consumers. For peer-to-peer payment infrastructure to be viable, we need 1) regulatory certainty, 2) good compliance from the start, and 3) commitment to keeping things open-source.

How HR Leaders Can Adapt to Uncertain Times (via Harvard Business Review)

With COVID-19 we’ve moved from complicated to complex (i.e., good practices to emergent practices). To succeed, HR leaders need to use their organization’s collective intelligence, prioritize company values, and allow solutions to emerge.

Harnessing Everyday Genius (via Harvard Business Review)

Thanks to Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management” there are still assumptions that low-wage jobs are filled by minimally capable people, which has set up a caste system of thinkers and doers. This article explains how Michelin empowered people closest to the work to be decision makers. The path: 1) begin at the bottom, 2) make it voluntary, 3) encourage discovery, 4) keep your commitments, 5) upgrade skills, 6) be patient,7) work for win-wins.

A Financial Crisis Is Looming for Smaller Suppliers (via Harvard Business Review)

This is the outcome of optimizing for efficiency over resiliency. Governments and larger suppliers can work together to balance out shocks to the system.

Companies Must Go Beyond Random Acts of Humanitarianism (via Harvard Business Review)

It’s all well and good for a company to write a check for a cause, but if that cause isn’t aligned with the company’s stated core values, the effort can seem shallow (or worse, a political act). For example, PayPal already had a purpose of “democratizing financial services;” it extended that by offering payroll protection loans to small businesses.

My Favorite Templates (via Software Lead Weekly)

This article has a collection of several examples for one-pagers, product requirement documents, strategies, visions, go-to-markets, and other templates that tech or business leaders will likely encounter.

Career

A Road Map for the Modern Nonlinear Life (via Harvard Business Review)

• “The proper response to a setback is a story.”
• Every culture has a paradigmatic shape of what life is supposed to be (linear). Even things like the stages of grief or “the hero’s journey” assume a linear course. Say farewell to the linear life.
• Everyone experiences disruptive events; some (53%) are involuntary (job loss) but many (47%) are voluntary (you choose to leave your job). The author claims that we go through about 30-40 of these that we roll with, but a handful are “life quakes.” There are also personal events (you or your family) and collective (recession, pandemic).
• You have to chose to enter a state of change; the transition is the mechanism of getting unstuck.
• Phase 1: The long goodbye (tame the emotions); Phase 2: The Messy Middle (shed habits); Phase 3: The New Beginning (unveil your new self). Fear, sadness, and shame are the most common emotions.
• You can comfort people (“You can do this!”). You can nudge people (“Don’t you think you should do X?”). You can be a slapper (tough love). Ask the person what kind of advice they want; don’t assume.
• Look for small wins; transitions are essential.

Can You Be Too Well Connected? (via Harvard Business Review)

Being well-connected is associated with higher engagement and being more likely to speak up about issues. However, you are less likely to engage in actions that would upset those relationships and are less likely to have a good work-life balance. Having regular check-ins with your supervisor can ensure you have a healthy ratio.

Culture

America’s Overwork Obsession (via Second Thought)

• The US’s definition of success is short-sighted and fundamentally opposed to humans flourishing.
• Those in the workforce today will likely not achieve the financial stability of those in their parents’ generation. Jobs are harder to find and pay less than our parents made for comparable positions. Pensions and retirement plans are more rare.
• American dream: Everyone has the opportunity for prosperity and success, regardless of their background and is based solely upon their ability or achievement. Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps via will and hard work with no help from others. The origin of the phrase refers to an impossible task.
• When settlers arrived in US, there was an endless expanse of land to explore and claim (restless nature). “If they attained Paradise, they would move on if they heard of a better place farther west.” (source) What we have is never enough.
• For comparison…
  • In the 1960s only around 20% of American mothers worked; most households only needed one source of income. Today 70% of children live in households where both parents are employed.
  • At least 134 countries have laws that cap the maximum length of the workweek; not in the US. 88% of men and 66% of women work more than 40 hours per week. The average American works 137 more hours than the Japanese per year, 260 more than the British, and 499 more than the French.
  • Since 1950 the average productivity of the American worker is four times greater, but we’re not working 1/4 of the hours. The workers don’t benefit from the labor.
  • The US ranks low in the industrialized world — even lower than third-world countries — in paid parental leave (i.e., zero days). Some countries also offer paternal leave. Estonia offers 86 weeks paid parental leave.
  • The US is the only nation among the OECD nations that has no federal law requiring paid sick leave or paid annual leave for holidays.
• There is a large proportion of gig economy workers that buys into the notion of “hustle culture,” saying the key is to work all day every day. Deifying rich people that accumulated their wealth by exploiting others or inheriting vast sums of money doesn’t make you smart; it means you’ve bought their propaganda. If you drive all day for Uber, you have no opportunity for advancement, health insurance, or vacation time. You’re a piece of equipment to them.
• The false divisions among the working class (i.e., wage workers, gig workers) is what the ruling class wants. There’s another division between the working class and middle class; if you see yourself as superior to others, you’ll never organize against your oppressors because you realize you may someday become part of the upper echelon.
• The motivation to work more is fueled by earning more wealth, not the rewards of the labor (e.g., creativity). When was the last time you took a day to just relax and didn’t feel guilty?
• Americans think that because we work so hard that we are exceptional, which is true: increased labor hours, reduced standard of living, shorter life expectancy, decreased happiness, our economy can’t weather a pandemic, and we can’t handle a pandemic that other countries are bearing because we’re conditioned that we must always be working.

Leadership

How to (Actually) Change Someone’s Mind (via Harvard Business Review)

• The cognitive conversation — use when there’s an objective (not emotional) reason for disagreement; have sound arguments and a good presentation
• The champion conversation — use when cognitive won’t work; build rapport and understand them personally
• The credible colleague — use when deeply-held personal beliefs make them fundamentally opposed to your proposal; a third party disentangles you from your argument

Radical Candor (Part 7)

Our book club finished chapter 4 — the final two components of the collaborative results cycle (execute and learn). Next, we started on chapter 5 (relationships), focusing on staying centered and being free at work.

Health

Reframe How You Think About Self-Care (via Harvard Business Review)

• Not enough sleep hinders cognitive capacity. Coffee seems to work for rule-based tasks, but not creative or divergent ones.
• Eat food the fuels your prefrontal cortex; even mild dehydration can affect memory and attention
• Fatigue impacts the quality of cognitive performance (e.g., judges granting parole to prisoners)
• Help others with their wellness goals, and find ways to replace unhealthy habits with healthier ones

Anxious About What’s Next? Here’s How to Cope. (via Harvard Business Review)

• Acknowledge the present instead of over-analyzing
• Turn outward, not inward (get help from and give help to others)
• Employ self-discovery to find times of day where your have focus, energy, and productivity. When do you worry? How does sleep affect your mood?

Process

How to Break Up with Your Commitments (via Harvard Business Review)

Although the article has a few “fluff” steps, there’s value in the process of more formally ending an engagement both for yourself, and for the group you’re leaving. It’s easier to not show up, but putting the break-up into words can help overall.

The Four Quadrants of Conformism (via Software Lead Weekly)

• “I’m biased, I admit, but it seems to me that aggressively conventional-minded people are responsible for a disproportionate amount of the trouble in the world, and that a lot of the customs we’ve evolved since the Enlightenment have been designed to protect the rest of us from them.”
• “The conventional-minded say, as they always do, that they don’t want to shut down the discussion of all ideas, just the bad ones.” However, “… any process for deciding which ideas to ban is bound to make mistakes.”
• “Enforcers of orthodoxy can’t allow a borderline idea to exist, because that gives other enforcers an opportunity to one-up them in the moral purity department, and perhaps even to turn enforcer upon them. So instead of getting the margin for error we need, we get the opposite: a race to the bottom in which any idea that seems at all bannable ends up being banned.”

How to make your data science team faster (and speed up progress) (via Software Lead Weekly)

I’d argue this is about any process and doesn’t apply solely to data science teams

1. “It feels like we’ve been working on this forever” — likely culprit is latency, not throughput
2. “Whenever we ask for something new, we don’t get time to work on it” — likely culprit is flexibility, not capacity
3. “I was told this would be finished months ago” — likely culprits are communication, predictability, and reliability, not speed

When You Hear ____, Pay Attention (via Software Lead Weekly)

An interesting collection of phrases that serve as alerts to a larger issue (e.g., “We don’t need everyone in the room for [big decision]”, or “This doesn’t need UX/QA/Ops/etc,”). I’m sure it would be easy to adapt to various orgs and teams.