Lyssa Adkins and Tobias Mayer gave a practical and experiential session at the end of Agile 2009. Lyssa has written more about this on her blog. The original name for the session was Human-Centred coaching.

One useful trick (unrelated to the topic) is to raise one’s hand and wait for everyone else to raise their hands as a soft and effective way to get people’s attention.

Powerful Questions

• Are open rather than closed
• Draw out hidden information
• Lead people to new perspectives
• Driven by curiousity
• Give people time to respond

To get good at them you can write some new ones on cards every week and use them where they make sense. The book Co-Active Coaching has a section that discusses powerful questions. It is partly related to the NLP practice of using the Meta-Model to ask questions to reveal hidden assumptions.

Powerful requests

Some tips are written in light blue above.  This is similar to the core protocol Ask for Help.

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There were a number demonstrations:

1. The first was of self-assembly (orange) and illustrated through people getting into an elevator.  They have no common goal and there is no change in behaviour.
2. Another was of people who were given the simple instructions (brown) of don’t bump, stay at the same speed and converge to the centre.  This demonstrated the idea of the team as a complex adaptive system where simple rules can lead to emergent behaviour.
3. Another was to ask people to clap there hands and then see how long it takes before everyone synchronizes.

He then went on to share some interesting ideas such as Core Group Theory – where the purpose of a company is to satisfy a core group of people.  To influence and organization, you need to know who they are.

Then things got really interesting.  Joseph likened self-organizing teams like making vegetable soup – the trick is to get the temperature right.

Checkout the heat gauge below.  As you can see there is a green zone where things are really cooking.  But beware the danger of too much heat (burning) and the cooling down phase where bad things can happen.  Gelled state is stable but there is not much innovation.  It is stable, but heat is needed to get cooking again.

What are the ways we can apply heat?

Stove #1 is about performance planning for individuals where challenge needs to be balanced against skill.  For a given skill level there is a range of challenge that can lead to a state of flow. With this model, there are two ways to climb in proficiency:

1. People can surf the top line and take on challenges beyond our capability.  Think of a snowboarder pushing boundaries of what they can do.
2. People can follow the bottom line and develop skills before taking on new challenges. This reminds me very much of Deliberate Practice – a key to Craftsmanship.

The next simulation was to have a group of people sit in a circle and pretend they are a development team.  The people on the outside interrupted them to ask questions.  Even when the team resisted, they felt pressured.

Stove #2 is to use the ABIDE model by David Snowden. (The pre-requisite is the have a context and a container.)  We need to think about how to stimulate the social network.  Here are some hooks:

• Attractor – Pride, money, quality, charisma
• Boundaries – Team boundaries e.g. traditional Dev/QA
• Identities – Role, responsibility
• Diversity – Gender, age, skills, personality
• Environment – Team room, desks, computers

We can make changes to any of these to get a shift in team dynamics.

Like this?  Joseph has some online talks on InfoQ:

• Coaching Self-Organizing Teams speaks to self-organization and the cooking metaphor.
• Dealing With the Organizational Challenges of Agile Adoption is about models for understanding conflict when adopting Agile.

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Consider the fifth value statement proposed for the Agile Manifesto by Bob Martin:

Craftsmanship over Crap

This presentation follows in the theme craftsmanship – How do we as a community bring it about?

The answer given in this talk is we need to consider what it takes to develop elite level skills in other professions – deliberate practice.  Consider the visual note below:

It seems to me that virtually every company I have every worked for or with has done virtually nothing to bring about excellence in technical (or other) skills.  Imagine what the world would be like if companies viewed their employees as assets and invested in them with mentoring and challenges so that they get deliberate practice.  This requires companies to think about Production Capability and not just Production.  More than just thinking about hitting the deadline.  This is an essential component in build lasting success.

Ever heard of this crazy-sounding approach called eXtreme Programming (XP)? Maybe they were on to something.

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The first part of the workshop was an exercise for us to describe how we see ourselves as coaches.  My vision (top left in black below) at the time was “Change Agent … by the numbers”.  I know flexibility and adapting is good … and my favourite place to go in an Agile transition is Scrum.  Scrum is pretty structured.  For those new to Agile, this is a good thing.  On the other hand it can make adoption more difficult and increase resistance.  But it puts in the basic engine of change that can go a long way.  The advantage of clear rules and names is that it makes it difficult for organizations to water down Agile so that it becomes the same old process with a different name.

I loved this session since it comes at  adoption in a totally different direction… using the metaphor of producing music.

Most of the session was about Pre-Production. Check out the photo below.  David stresses the importance of understanding out clients’s world so that you understand how to lead them to a better place.  One key element of this is not being prescriptive - tell them about something that worked in another context and see if it resonates with them.

The second phase is Finding a Groove.  This is about helping the team find out what works and what doesn’t.  Again David, talked about story telling as an indirect way of sharing knowledge and suggesting ideas.

The final phase is Keeping the Band Together.  This is all about keeping things fresh through questioning.

All in all, this was a great session for me.

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On the surface this may seem like a rehash of standard trainers games, but that is missing the point.

One important aspect is that all the games are statistical and can be numerically measured so that it appeals to the left-brain scientific types that dominate the software industry.  The three games are outlined below.

The bottom left of the diagram show the NLP logical levels.   By asking specific questions related to identity and values, it is possible to get a shift in perspective that will provide an openness to learning about Agile.

After playing game #1 comparing the effect of large batches versus small, there are some hard hitting questions:

1. Who has decided to keep your team too slow? (by using large batches)
2. Why has your team agreed with that?
3. What stops your team from changing this situation?
4. Do delivery and time really matter to your managers?

These questions use the NLP meta model to help people uncover information that has been buried beneath their conscious awareness.   This can help them get unstuck from their waterfall world and be open to considering new ideas.  How cool is that?

The games plus the questions form a useful adoption tool. Check out the presentation and try out the questions – there are some real zingers there.  Once caveat – these are appropriate for a Brazilian context and may need some tuning for other locales.

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First off, let me say that I am not a big fan of military metaphors.  I like to think more in terms of growing understanding.

Anyway, the main point of this talk is that it is really helpful to draw an influence diagram with all the players involved in and surrounding and Agile project.  Colour code all the players so that you know where to focus your attention.

In the diagram, one can see that negative influencers (far right) may eventually impact the team, so this is the purpose of casting a wide net when drawing this out.

The fog of war is just a reminder that we often don’t know people’s real disposition so it’s a good idea to guess and then update the diagram as information becomes available.

Also, check out Portia Tung’s description of the session.

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The 1 to 10 is pretty self-explanatory.  Post a comment if you would like elaboration or check out Mark Levison’s post on InfoQ.

The bonus section is what the audience contributed as their top tips.

Also, if you like this, check out my other post on 10 Temptations of an Agile Coach.

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Case and point is Apple.  We watched an Apple video from the 80’s that showed Apple’s vision for the future of the computer (funny/sad was a plot element so long ago was about global climate change).  Everyone at Apple knew what the vision was and could explain it.  So what this means is that everyone is thinking about the long-term vision.  Every time they have a choice to make on design they can take a step in the right direction so that the future can be achieved in part through many many tiny shifts.

Good design is INVISIBLE.  NetFlicks is destroying their competition through a ridiculously high net promoter score (how likely someone is to refer a friend).  No one ever mentions their Web UI even though it rocks – it’s invisble: It does what it needs to and it’s easy.  How do they do it?  In part through a culture of excellence – employees are the top priority and the CEO puts this ahead of board meetings.  To support this they hire fast and fire fast.  They also pass the culture test.

How do you learn good user interface design?  Mentoring!  Good designers know what good design is, but cannot explain it.  Like chicken sexing.  (Makes me wonder how much we are kidding ourselves that good design can simply be taught through patterns or what not.)

The company test is a recipe for successful cultures.  All the companies with awesome user experience met the test even though they were radically different in many ways.

The last point about celebrating failure is critical.  If people are not making mistakes, then they are playing it safe.  And if they are playing it safe, the result is mediocrity not excellence.  There is a similar field of thought around innovation – it also requires support for failure.

If you need help building better UI, start with #2 – spend some time observing your users and then make it better.

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Sidebar comment: This talk really has nothing to do with Agile so it appears that the conference program is branching out in new directions.  On the other hand, if you want to coach or build a high-performance team, then this is useful information.

The top left corner has the most important bit of information.  We are hard wired to not accept responsibility and would readily blame others.  As we are more self-aware we can progress from denial to blame to justification – all the way up to ladder to responsibility.   You can request a free poster here and there is a short description here.

The 3 keys are about how you can shift your own behaviour:

1. Intention – intend to change your behaviour so you can win!
2. Awareness – pay attention to your language and thinking.  Make a chart of how many times a day you can catch yourself not taking responsibility.  One way is to carry around change and give yourself a penny for noticing when you say something unresourceful and 10cents if you catch yourself before you say it.
3. Confront – you need be honest with yourself or you’re not going to get anywhere.

The daily practices are some additional tricks to help move towards personal responsibility.

The anxiety hierarchy is about how some words you use when talking to others can trigger defenses.  Approaching someone about a PROBLEM will result in getting their input on a consideration.

As an NLP Master Practitioner, there is a note in the corner to remind myself that it’s not that easy to shift behaviour.  We often have limiting beliefs and values conflicts that may need some shifting in order to make a persistent change.  Awareness is a good start, but in my experience often not enough.

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So, why doesn’t the title of this blog post match?  The title is really catchy, but the the talk was more of an investigation and discussion of what the ScrumMaster role really entails.  Check out the Mind Map below.

Some of the interesting things to note are that there are a lot of roles that a ScrumMaster is supposed to take on if you are following Scrum – see the green checkmarks.  (If you are not following Scrum – why do you have a ScrumMaster?  Anyway, it’s a tough job!

One hot area  is around the role of Project Manager or Task Master – there is often a management expectation that they will play this role.  I have seen this many times.  Hint: a better answer is that work needs to come through the Product Manager and that the team is un-interrupted for the duration of the Sprint.  But every situation is different, so there is no always in this.

On the left in purple, can be seen a number of candidates for taking on the role of ScrumMaster.  It can be a tough role to fill.

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