A Random number of tips about life, the universe, and everything

Agility in organizations is fundamentally about people behaving in effective ways.  Yeah... I know those soft topics that most leaders find about as comfortable as fiberglass insulated underwear.  Unfortunately, this most important dimension of business can't be easily quantified, analyzed, or understood via pivot tables.

This is one of those 'people' focused things.  Take it with a grain of salt (it's early and my caffeine serum level is still dangerously low).

This morning I stumbled upon one of those enumerable blogs with truthy sounding tips about how to live life.  Normally, I give them a browse; scan for a tidbit here or there that might inspire a thought, but this time I mostly smirked. It reminded me of one of those obsequious posters that once adorned office walls and inspired an entire genre of (far more entertaining) Dilbertesque 'demotivational' posters.

Now.... I've learned a thing or two about people (at least the one peering through bleary eyeballs at the world this morning) and on the eve of a brand new journey of my own, I used the above as inspiration for my own list.  So, in no particular order (and with tongue somewhat in cheek), here's a few of my own tips about life, universe, and everything mirroring the above blog. 

1. True wisdom and insight comes at great cost (TANSTAAFL)
2. Real power arises from trusting others with yours (knowing whom to trust is another matter)
3. Embrace the fact that most of us are wrong about a great many things - we just haven't realized it yet.
4. Screw library cards - get a Kindle (if you're not scribbling in the margins and highlighting things, you're not really learning)
5. Stop using the word 'respect' when 'courtesy' is what you mean.  (Courtesy is nearly always due but respect is something earned)
6. Think critically - not skeptically. A closed mind gathers no thought (see 3 above).
7. Collaborate and really listen to others to achieve what matters (and stop all the damned fighting)
8. There are many methods that work (The concept of 'best practice' is a myth - there is only stuff that works pretty good so far)
9. Start a movement (the world is full of joiners)
10. Drink your coffee any damn well way you please (and don't hesitate to spit in the pot of those who believe they've figured out the 'right' way for you to drink your Joe)
11. Photoshop your ass off if it makes you happy - save the photojournalism for war orphans and kittens (okay.. maybe not kittens).
12. Read broadly, well out of your area of expertise (but most importantly read)
13. Stop feeling stupid - you're just wrong about a lot of stuff like the rest of us
14. Don't judge people strictly by their behavior - actually stop and try to understand what's going on. That 'slacker' in the office might be struggling with a wife at home with Cancer.
15. Teach something to somebody - we learn most when we teach
16. Inspire others (it's fun to watch the surprise on their faces)
17. Never skip breakfast.  No really... you're mom was right about that.
18. Thrive on just a little, just to prove you can do it (mere survival is for beginners)
19. You're a success for just having won the sperm races. Find satisfaction not in just the big things but in the every day wins (like beating your boss to the good parking spot)
20. Keeping your commitments is important but more important is a) knowing when not to commit and b) communicating your ass off when you realize that you can't keep them.
21. Learn a new programming language
22. Eat more stuff that grows in the ground (try not to get enough protein on most American Diets!)
23. Seek truth from others and offer the same but for Odin's sake remember to use a little tact 
24. Execution is nothing if it doesn't achieve the desired result. Remember Algebra? Cross check your answers dummy.
25. If you can't do a pull-up, so what? It's not important what you do to stay fit - but it's important to stay fit.
26. Everyone likes somebody who will really listen to them empatheticaly. Get good at it.
27. Stay up as late as you like, some of us do our best work when our eyeballs are feeling like their ready to bleed. 
28. Learn how to climb down from trees (climbing up is easy)
29. Buying stuff won't make you happy, but it's a hell of a lot of fun at the time
30. Leave the internet access on your phone, wifi is overkill most of the time
31. Take warm showers... long warm showers - they sooth the body and inspire creative thought
32. Before you get a tattoo - imagine you had the choice to get one when you were five.  How appealing would that Powers Rangers ink be to you today?
33. Avoid using any sentence that includes the phrase "don't take this personally but.. "
34. Instead of finding ways to cheat the system, find ways to change the system
35. Catastrophic failures rarely arise from a single fault - they're nearly always the result of lots of little mistakes that didn't seem like a big deal at the time
36. People who think agility is about process are almost never agile. The world is far too complex and changes far too fast to rely on rigid steps to deliver best results.

And... I'm up way too early this morning.  I'll play with this more later.

Cheers,
J.

An Alternative To Dogma: Disciplined Teams Making Effective Decisions

This morning, the #kanban and #scrum Twittersphere was buzzing over a guest blog by Jim Cope on Jeff Sutherland's Scrum Blog; "An Alternative to Kanban: One-Piece Continuous Flow"

This is a gross oversimplification but in essence, Cope is asserting that, 'we don't need no stinking Kanban'.  While my experience as an Agile Coach is inconsistent with some of his conclusions (i.e. that Kanban " take[s] away the sense of teamwork and "positive pressure") he does make some good points.  For example, he points out that, "Kanban is properly applied as a selective, detailed fix to a specific problem. It is not a philosophy of development." and he's exactly right.  Kanban is a tool not a philosophy. It's a tip of the iceberg thing. Sort of like 'daily scrums', burn-down charts, retrospectives, and Sprints. 

Cope states, "We see teams adopting this form of kanban, as a tool or methodology in its own right rather than as a worldview, without first having built foundations and disciplines of one-piece flow."  I agree with that wholeheartedly but the irony is that you could just as easily substitute the word "Scrum" for "kanban" and the statement would be no less true.  The wide spread practice of, 'Scrum-But' is sufficient proof of this.

The problem of teams applying frameworks and tools without a grasp of the underlying worldview and principles isn't isolated to the use of Kanban; Ceremony rich cargo cult adoptions of Scrum are hardly a rarity and a CSM course provides no guarantee that good teamwork will naturally follow nor that the decisions made by a team will be effective. Single piece flow requires a lot of discipline.

Kanban, like elements of Scrum, is essentially one tool in the Agile arsenal to augment the decisions made by a team to achieve single piece flow. If the team achieves that flow using Kanban without sacrificing other objectives (i.e. teamwork, high motivation, etc.) then the tool is effective. If the same results can be achieved with lower ceremony and overhead, all the better.

Without the application of the underlying disciplines, BOTH Scrum and Kanban are likely to flounder.

I think the real takeaway here is that blind application of any tool, be it Kanban or Scrum, does not confer automatic benefits. Ultimately, it gets down to individuals interacting as a disciplined team guided by principles (such as the dynamics that give rise to single piece flow) to make effective decisions.

Fantastic results conducting my first Agile Decsion Flow workshop

There's nothing like a deadline to boost ones Agility. As we approach the event horizon of a deadline, our focus on the goal becomes laser like and decisions we would otherwise have delayed get made. At least, that was my experience today as I put the finishing touches on my first Agile 2.0 workshop. I added content, reordered information, and refined the telling until the first head poked through the doorway of B1-157, configured to seat 50 members of the product management area.

Frankly, the odds were stacked against me; It was a Friday, siesta time, and few of the participants who had responded to the request to attend knew what to expect. Actually, it turns out they did expect something. Since the subject line for the meeting contained the word "Agile" - these business people came prepared with laptops locked and loaded to weather a lecture around processes they felt little passion for.

Business people don't tend to get terribly excited by process. They're usually very bottom line results oriented.

That's exactly what I wanted. I wasn't there to talk about process. I was there to talk about something far more fundamental; agility in the truest sense of the word.

That's one of the reasons I targeted the product strategy members of our organization to deliver my first presentation on what I've been coming to think of as Agile 2.0 (Yes.. I'm mindfully guilty of great hubris in presuming any advancement at all in the art of Agile, let alone a step function breakthrough - but virtually all the feedback I'm getting suggests I'm right. It does need a proper name of some kind).

I wasn't there to talk about process. I was there to talk about Agility in the truest sense of the word.

I confess I felt a great deal of trepidation. I've presented bits and pieces of what's starting to gel as a whole new approach to Agile development to a few people and while the feedback so far has been terrific, I had no idea how a room full of business people would respond to stuff that's not only new but fairly radical. I felt there were two equally likely outcomes; 1) I'd confuse and lose most of them completely, 2) they'd get it and see the potential almost as much as I do (well.... maybe not that much, but at least they'd be intrigued).

My experience was the latter. The overwhelming response was positive. Even though the concepts and thinking tools I presented were new to virtually everyone in the room and the exercise time to try them brief - I could tell that a lot of it stuck.

Not bad for an alpha run. I learned a bunch (I always do when I teach), generated a wealth of useful data from the exercises, and identified quite a few gaps that need to be filled before I can really roll with this.

I wasn't seeking buy-in from everyone but that wasn't my goal. My goal was to get people talking and curious about Agile Decision flow and entice innovators and early adopters to put the principles to work in practical applications in their areas.

Based on the responses I've received so far and the tone of the room, I was successful on both counts.

It just reinforces my belief that I'm on the right track here and will be able to start delivering some real breakthroughs in organizational agility far faster than would have been possible before.

Oh.. one of the workshop participants suggested I name whatever it is I've pulled together as "Agile On Rails" and I rather liked that. Now that I'm bringing more brains on line to help me with this, I'm sure a better name will emerge.

I'll keep you posted.

Cheers!
J.

Running From The Bears

You're an experienced coach, you teach a class, you coach the team, you attend their stand-up meetings, the heads bob up and down in unison and still you come back a few months later to find the team has reverted to their Paleolithic practices.

There's a lot of reasons this can happen but one of the most common is they're running from the bears.

I found myself Running From The Bears in Vail Colorado this last January when I took my near expert groomed slope muscle memory to the mogul fields and found myself - over and over reverting to reflexes that have served me well walking on solid ground in high friction foot gear but served no useful function whatsoever navigating steep icy mounds in snow skis. I knew better but in the moments of panic that punctuate a new experience like this - instincts prevail and we do 'dumb' things - things that actually can hurt us.

No matter how good an idea is, no matter how much we believe in it.. until it's groked at a fundamental level in a panic situation hundreds of thousands of years of evolution overpower reason and under pressure we revert to the habits that have kept us in the gene pool so far.

What does this mean for an agile organization? It means that if your teams are to accelerate their adoption of agile principles, extinguishing old habits and replacing them with new ones - you've got to either 1) keep the bears off of their back until they master the new techniques or 2) remain engaged as a coach and talk them out of the trees when the bears inevitably show up.

Eventually the team will grok the new stuff and keep doing it even when the Bears show up... and the bears ALWAYS show up sooner or later.