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.
No comments:
Post a Comment