Agilifying Agile Coaches: 1 of 6.

This is a follow on from my original Linkedin Post. "Many Agile Coaches aren't." A discussion ensued in the comments, and I promised to expand on some thoughts of ways to handle this situation.

In the original follow-up post I said this:

"Now, I believe I have written a little on the idea of coach vs consultant in the past. I know I have spoken about it at conferences. Just this week, I mentioned it at my session the Scrum Gathering Minneapolis. Of course, by doing so, I introduced the idea via a consultant/telling stance rather than a coaching. So, hypocritically. But hopefully humourously so. :-)

This does open up the conversation of coaching stances, whereas a coach can move between stances to find the right approach to work in any particular scenario. Whatever terminology you use, the idea is not that one stance is "wrong", but only having one stance, and only being aware of one stance could be very limiting.

But that isn't the point of this post. This post is about applying that idea to Agile. How agile are Agile Coaches? Many of us are inflexible. Admanant and pushing method without care for context.. dogmatists.

BUT Context has been the excuse for too much half baked agility. "Dark Scrum". "Kantban" Flexibility of principles in political situations.

That delicate dance of agile vs Agile, "purist vs pragmatic" is an area worth a dozen posts on it's own. Here is the first. The second will come next week. 1/12"

I've since decided (in an Agile way) rather than to do this as posts, I will do it in the slightly longer form of an article. Thus 12 posts become 6 articles!

So. How as a coach do we decide which stance to use? How do we decide how agile to be with our Agile? These two aspects,"Agile" and "Coach" link together for me, in many fascinating ways.

(BTW If you would like to know more about Coaching Stances, as there is a lot of different variations of the idea across industries and sports, I recommend a good google! Here is one quick example: https://www.slideshare.net/Bneam/consult-collaborate-coaching)

So, let's look at that first word. Agile. Synonyms include adaptable, supple, flexible.

 Flexibility means options. Options means choices. Choices means decisions. Decisions means cognitive thought and effort. Thought can mean uncertainty.

Uncertainty hurts. Uncertainty wounds. Uncertainty is scary. There is a recent UCL study that showed that uncertainty can cause more stress than inevitable pain. "Knowing that there is a small chance of getting a painful electric shock can lead to significantly more stress than knowing that you will definitely be shocked, finds a new UCL study funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC)

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0316/290316-uncertainty-stress

This is a huge concern. People generally crave certainty. I remember (I think) Steve McConnell saying at the Seattle ScrumGathering in 2011

“Businesses prefer wrong over vague.”

 This isn't just true of businesses. Imagine you are an Agile Coach. Your clients may indeed seek and actively request certainty from you. Should we do X? Or should we do Y?.

And as a human being. It may be painful for you to be unsure in that situation. So we speak with confidence. We gain assurance in our knowledge, our experience and we confirm that indeed the answer is X. This makes us feel less pain. No uncertainty. It may make them happy. No uncertainty.

But it maybe wrong.

Most classic project models are built around rapidly reducing uncertainty in requirements, estimates and work. Most don't work. But that rapid reduction of obvious fear is attractive.

This is where the door opens to Cynefin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework

Now, I am no Cynefin expert, but I am a fan. For me it helps build a more appropriate mental model for our complex deliveries. Which is really the inherent uncertainty in the evolutionary nature of complex systems. This is as true about the PEOPLE and the METHODS as it is about the CONTENT of product development. They are all complicated and complex and in reality blur together more than we appreciate. The idea of safe-to-fail empirical trails or experiments, to discover the right direction of your approach is very different to how organisation or team change has historically been undertaken.

So, as an Agile Coach, our understanding of Agile may lead directly into the coaching stances we take.

Example 1. As a brand new coach, I may make the mistake of using classic delivery models to introduce agile (or any change really.) The big up front plan, minimal change, imposed top-down by senior management. We have all seen this! This is the meta-concern for me. This is just traditional management. Command rather than Consult or Collaborate or Coach.

So let's say as a Coach I am now aware that the overall approach the organisation is taking maybe flawed. They are not being Agile with their introduction of it. But I am aware of that!

That does not make me immune from the same natural human conditions.

Example 2 As a newbie coach, I may only ever adopt the consult/teach stance, as I cannot emotionally handle the uncertain nature of a changing method or framework in differing content conditions. My breadth of knowledge is low, so I stick to the shallow waters. If someone disagrees, we can use industry documentation such as "The Scrum Guide" or something similar to show how we are "correct". This is at best argument from authority. And potentially is a classic debating fallacy. I am not deliberately, (or maybe even consciously) adopting "traditional methods". I am just handling the pain of uncertainty by being faux-certain.

So one way to mitigate this, is to gain a deeper understanding of the approaches we take, to understand where we can (and indeed should) flex the method, and where we should keep discipline and not malform the particular approach. That deeper knowledge would also allow us to be able to build ideas up from first principles. (Bottom-Up Coaching) rather than impose them in a semi-religious format. (Top-Down Consultancy). By doing so, we start appreciating the different options as opportunities. We have journeyed down many of these paths before, and so "know the way"... well, with complex work that isn't really true and so we probably don't in reality! But far more importantly, by understanding that these paths are "safe-to-take", the fear of the hanging damocles sword (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damocles) above our head fades. There will be no shock.

The next post will be on the subject: "People often get wrong the difference between Difference and wrong." Where we will discuss some methods to help mitigate this and understand which paths are safer than others.

Article 2 is HERE: https://lnkd.in/dNbE3Nc