Choose Wisely!

The first half of the bagel is always better.

I just had a vibrant conversation with some agilist friends Carina S. , Vandana Rajagopal , and Elizabethe Kramer as part of the Columbus Women in Agile meetup group. The connection and sheer joy of spending time with people that get you is wonderful and fulfilling. One of the topics our group discussed today ended up connecting a few different ideas in my mind that I’d love to share.

We make choices every day. Thousands of them. Some out of habit. Some without realizing it. Some we wrestle with, dwell on, and debate in our minds. And some are easily influenced by others while some we believe in adamantly.

There are a few choices we make in life that I want to highlight that are in fact much more profound and impactful than others. But first, let’s explore the idea of choices and habits.

About Choices

So, maybe which side of the bagel you start with might not be the most profound choice you make in a day, but it could in fact contribute to your happiness and state of mind… which may very well help you in other ways. We make different choices just based on our current mood!

The choices we make in life are perhaps all driven by a common philosophy whether you realize it or not. You likely have your own beliefs, your own psychology, experiences, and philosophy that drive you. Some of this is top of mind and part of your identity. Some of it is hidden in childhood life experiences that have shaped who’ve you become, created patterns you don’t even realize or acknowledge anymore. And whether you believe in fate, or religion, manifestation, Stoicism, or the Buddhist aspects of suffering, every choice you make has the potential to mean something profound, either now or in your future.

Persistence of Habits

When it comes to making everyday choices, this exact time of the year is especially meaningful for one specific reason. If you happened to make the decision to change something this year in the form of a New Year resolution, this is the 6 week milestone where many of those resolutions tend to fizzle and, all too often, our actions and choices revert back to old ways of thinking… and, well, doing whatever is more comfortable. Sitting on the sofa, not going jogging. Eating pizza instead of salads… or abandoning your Dry January program.

Change is hard. Whether it’s at work as you and your colleagues try to make different choices about the way you do work, or in your personal life, making yourself a little uncomfortable as you attempt a new approach to your daily routine. For all humans, change is easy to resist and forces us to be uncomfortable for a period of time before it becomes a part of us.

The Most Important Choices

So, of all the choices you make each day, which ones are perhaps more profound? I think it’s the harder ones to make. The ones where we are still trying to achieve something new, the ones that are a bit of a struggle. Choosing to put on your gym shorts. Choosing to not eat the comfort foods or grab a beer. Interestingly, you don’t even need to go on the jog or eat the salad. But by choosing to continue on the path and not revert to old habits is the true win. Celebrate even those small wins. On this very topic, I heard a coach say “All I want you to do is pick out your gym clothes and set them out today,” which is powerful, I think. Making the very difficult choice to stay on the path of change is the hardest and most profound choice.

Carina, in our conversation today, reminded me of why change at work is so hard: it’s like a rubber band that’s been stretched as teams and individuals try to embrace new ways of working. And it takes a long time to embrace the mindset and culture shifts that are needed to make the change part of them. When stress is added back into any system or individual undergoing change, it can snap back that rubber band to its original shape.

Under stress, it’s easier to just do what you’re more comfortable with, the well trodden path.

Parenting and Scrum Masters

Big companies in our world have attempted to change their ways of working, but often fall into the mechanical forms of being agile without actually stretching the rubber band in ways that create change. They don’t create an environment that challenges assumptions, pushing into new experiences where the discomfort helps build new muscles.

Many companies and teams fail to embrace the new ways of thinking… they only go through the motions of the new ways of working, treating it like it’s a new set of rules to follow. Doing so, they lose all of the benefits without even realizing it.

Instead, they measure things according to their old ways of thinking and don’t know how to think differently about outcomes over outputs, for example, or how to measure progress in new ways at all because it’s not yet in them. The team doesn’t produce enough outputs. Where is the Gantt chart with milestone delivery dates? Why do they even need a Scrum Master when the managers are there to tell the teams what to do?

So they fire the Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches.

Scrum Masters are there to keep stretching the rubber band, reinforcing the Agile Mindset, and helping the team make choices every day to embrace the new ways of working that lead to greater results.

Through the old ways lens, it’s tempting to ask about productivity. How many hours of work does a Scrum Master do every week? Is it an effective use of time and our budget? When you get it, you know this doesn’t make sense. It’s the wrong way to think.

To respond to this line of thinking, I like to compare it to parenting. How many hours of the day does a parent actively care for a child? Even as a toddler, there are times the Mom or Dad is doing something else entirely unrelated to parenting. But this does not diminish their value as a parent. When they are needed, they are there. And… they are always listening for when they are needed.

Teams and individuals need to do the work of absorbing change and learning the new ways of working. But having a Scrum Master or Coach available to help reinforce crucial concepts and proactively help instill the cultural changes related to psychological safety, iterative thinking, and all the aspects of an Agile Mindset is what will eventually make them successful.

The most important choice we need to make is to continue on the path and keep stretching our rubber bands. This is something I was very happy to rediscover today in speaking with my friends and fellow agilists. And I hope it’s helpful for you too, no matter what kind of change you are working on in your own life.

Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the complexity of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense.

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