Reflecting on Agile - Part 4 of 5

Purely for educational purposes... this has taken a life of its own... listen to my mix tape while reading for the full experience.... muahahaha >.<

Hey yo, this week in the context of Agile we are to reflect on our own leadership style. I would say in general my style... is something that isn’t... also my leadership style... is similarly something that isn’t... yeah... I have no game... Others may disagree and say I have “something”, but what this something is, I don’t know... What I do know is that I feel I have a lot to do and always challenged to have to try to do the right things when it seems “right” is not always right. My thought is that both management and leadership are intertwined and having just one or the other is folly to me.

Are you more comfortable managing or leading? Can you recall any situations where you could have used a better balance of leadership versus management tools, practices, and behaviors?

In some ways I’ve found that you need to actually have a mindset where you build competencies in both. It’s not a “or” thing it’s an “and” thing. You can’t expect to just be known as a leader without being able to do management activities. Similarly, you can’t manage and just be expected to not lead or be seen as a leader. There is a sense that leadership is something that is hierarchical. Sometimes it is, but leadership can be seen everywhere in an organization and practiced not with only the people in it, but leadership can be seen as the organization itself (I have a story about this you’ll have to ask for later). After all this has been said, I would consider myself continually learning about management and leadership, and not comfortable in either. Yet, conversely do feel I’m probably better in both than most because of just the amount of odd life experiences I’ve had.

In relation to Agile I do find that there is a belief that embodies what is more what people would consider leadership, such as “be agile” instead of “do agile”. Yet, I am continually disappointed when I see metrics and deadlines overshadow much of the ways we do work. Agile in practice at companies then become a means to an end to making people track their work. I think the right mindset is what I mentioned at the start, people should learn both and not say one "or" or “over” another. I believe people need to learn how to balance both without causing such an imbalance that it turns into what everyone doesn’t want. Which is leaders who cannot manage and managers who can’t lead.

I think nowadays I have formed a certain balance of leadership to management. Depending on the situation, I will adjust appropriately given what I have come to understand with a team, a group of people, or a company. I know there are times when I come into a new team and find that people are very disconnected with each other, at these times I find I need to act the part of what some people call “glue”. In these situations I do a lot of tactical and strategic behaviors to bring people together and try to form any bonds possible, then let things run their course and have humans be humans. This sometimes is something simple as having lunch or arranging outings with people to help people feel connected. It comes down to finding stimuli or triggers to draw people together. In other situations, I’ve found that people are connected, but they have been together so long they’ve forgone things like metrics, and metrics as an enemy that makes them die a little every day. In these situations it’s hard to convince people to become disciplined to follow a routine. To change this it usually starts with beginning a cadence. The pattern of repetition is what builds discipline, and just like with a routine of running or exercise it takes a couple months to make things a habit. Yes, people think making a habit it is something that can be done with shorter time, but my experience tells me it is somewhere between 1 month and more than 2 months. I error on being conservative here and think over 2 months to really make something stick. With Agile and building a Scrum team I think this can actually take 6 months. Yes, you can deliver things in 1 month or less, but I’m sure it takes longer to make things stick and form bonds that work.

Cynefin <sounds like a noise you make when you sneeze>

Okay, so we learned a little about Cynefin (pronounced can-ne-fin not sin-ne-fin) and it’s something that I think we do every day but don’t put on paper to think through. Any type of work, or practically any decision (such as deciding if a song is obviously a favorite) your mind goes through a process to take in complexity and turn it into a decision about how to proceed or not to proceed. Cynefin to me is a process where you take a problem or a story, and go through the experience of solving the problem so that later you know what to do. This is something that again requires experience and repetition. Cynefin is something that is trending in Agile and other similar communities, so probably worth looking at closely when going through your next sprint improvement activity.

So, what you’ll see depicted are 4 domains, and going from left to right you are going from unordered to ordered. Where unordered is where you can’t determine cause and know what to do, and ordered you have a sense of predictability and a known cause. Then you move from chaos to obvious as you move in a clockwise motion through the domains. There is this initial blob area in the middle where everyone starts when they are first introduced to something... as an example... you just heard “The Man Who Sold the World” by David Bowie and think... what is this? The music may initially feel chaotic, complex, and complicated at the same time. Since it’s new to you don’t know what to do? Should I dance, bob my head, is this something that is good or repulsive? In the Chaotic domain you act-sense-respond, thinking that this is not normal music and what you’ve been introduced to before in your life. You may move back and forth between Complex and Complicated where you probe-sense and sense-analyse to determine some sort of response. Later, after talking with friends and getting a sense this is good stuff, you hear it over and over and decide to make a mixtape to share. This tape happens to play this song and in the future it is an “obvious” decision on what to do when this music plays, and you begin to bob your head.

So maybe my explanation isn’t straight forward, but now think about how everyone deals with problems that come up in a system. Before I relate this to scrum I’m gonna bust out “The Phoneix Project” by Gene Kim, George Spafford, and Kevin Behr again. Just to recap on the major takeaways from the book:

There are 4 types of work in a system influencing people and stressing us at work:

1. Business Projects = these is some planned business related project
2. Internal Projects = this is IT related work to modify current systems
3. Changes = these are operational changes
4. Unplanned Work = this is the work that arises to recover from a critical problem, and takes away the ability to do other work

There are “3 ways” that need to be mastered to control work:

1. The First Way looks at the entire system to understand and control the flow of work.
2. The Second Way is about creating feedback to make continual corrections.
3. The Third Way is to continually experiment to learn from mistakes.

I think if I were to relate Cynefin domains, scrum practices, and “The Phoenix Project” this is how I think it would gel... I would say initially a team may receive Business or Internal Projects and these are in the domain mix of Chaotic, Complex, and Complicated depending on what is put into the product backlog. As a sprint is running, the items churn within the chaotic, complex, and complicated until some sort of pattern emerges on what needs to be done or built. When portions of some product or deliverable materialized things become more obvious. This makes way to patterns that later are seen as obvious and repeatable work. Work changes in a system flow in the same manner as projects, but because the changes have an element of understanding on what needs to be performed, these items fall into the complicated and obvious domains. The unplanned work is not really chaotic in itself, but instead the unexpected problem causing the unplanned work to fix what is broker in what causes things to start as chaotic. Example, these are the kinds of problems where payroll is down that is going to cause a newspaper worthy story... it was because some fields in a database was unexpectedly encrypted... troubleshooting to fix the problem derailed people working on other things to focus all their energy on fixing the priority production issue.

Now in relation to the 3 ways, I think the most important connection to Cynefin is that there is this feedback and improvement process as part of the 3 ways. As systems are understood and the flow of work is controlled. The sense is there is a movement going from unorganized-chaotic to organized-obvious. This transition is what people look for while engaging in scrum practices. In scrum inspection and adaptation through the 4 formal events of Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective are what influence turning stories that are ambiguous into something that works and is obvious. The process to whittle away at a problem through cycles of probing and sensing, and then acting when something is known. When knowledge occurs we see patterns where things become obvious and ultimately we have some patterns on how things are done and develop best practices.

What might a personal development plan look for you to be a more versatile leader across work in multiple domains?

Simple, listen to a variety of music and learn to love all the generations and genres instead of just the 80s... Gah, let me try harder to answer this question... I think Cynefin works for the logically minded individuals where there is a flow from chaotic to obvious. What would make no sense is taking obvious and going the other way, but this is what I believe would show true mastery. If you can go forwards and backwards that would be masterful. Surprisingly, I think the Netflix story where they mastered chaos by introducing a monkey is proof of this mastery. For me this is the versatile I wish to strive for, learn how to harness forwards with domains, and then with controlled intention go backwards and introduce chaos to show mastery of situations.

OUTATIME - Happy Turkey Break!

John Kuk