Agile
So What Does an Agile Coach Actually Do (via Marten den Haring)
- “…Agile Coaching is an approach towards fostering an organisational shift to improve the work, behaviours, and outcomes in the context of the development of solutions/products; it is not only about adopting framework X or Y.”
- What good coaches do…
- Catalyze improvement — get from current state to future state
- Promote awareness — you can’t fix what you can’t see
- Boost ownership — instill responsibility in others; help people build, don’t dictate
- Develop competencies — mentoring = provide answers; coaching = make an environment where people provide their own answers
- Facilitate barrier removal to improving
- It’s not about frameworks — Scrums, Kanban, SAFe, etc. — it’s about understanding how some aspects of those frameworks can help the org.
Biological Systems, Organizational Systems, and Catalyzing Change (via Leading Agile)
- Just like organisms have functions to help them serve some purpose, so do organizations. Much of what we do is beyond conscious thought (digesting, breathing), but we can pay attention to those to get fitter. Companies can do this in communication, product delivery, etc.
- A company is a system of systems, and you’ll likely only be able to influence a few things at a time.
- Weight loss could be a bad metric for health; instead think about better body composition, cardiovascular health. The same applies for bad metrics in business.
- There are many impediments to change in a system. What’s rewarding your current homeostasis? What would need to change to reward some different state?
- Some transformations fail because while you observe things, they start acting better. However, because you don’t address the underpinning things, it goes back to an undesired state once observation stops.
- It’s not enough to say, “We’re value-centric” but then not invest the energy/attention to clarify what that means.
- Models can be useful but all models are wrong.
- Effective transformation never finishes; things evolve.
Business
Validation is a Mirage (via Signal v Noise)
“What people are asking about is certainty ahead of time.” This request is typically impossible to fulfill. You need to get something out there for people to actually use and give feedback on. I liked the misleading analogy of the MVP being a slice of pie, assuming that every subsequent piece will be the same so long as the users like the slice you gave them.
Culture
Be a Better Ally (via Harvard Business Review)
- Educate yourself (don’t put the burden on others)
- Own your privilege
- Accept feedback
- Become a confidant
- Bring diversity to the table
- See something, say something
- Sponsor marginalized coworkers
- Insist on diverse candidates
- Build a community of allies
What People (Still) Get Wrong About Emotional Intelligence (via Harvard Business Review)
Being “nice” isn’t what being emotionally intelligent means. EI has several components at play: self-awareness, relationship management, social awareness, and self-management.