Thinking about Agile

the agile leader?

Posted on February 24, 2015 by coachwithheart

“Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.” Peter Drucker

Hmm, doing the right thing is more important that doing the thing right. Is that the kind of thing you experience in your line of work? Do the right thing? In some organizations it is about doing and getting things done and it’s not always the right thing to do. There are things that could be left undone that would be of benefit.

What does a leader who is versed in agile thinking do? Is the leader in search of doing the right thing most of the time? The right thing done at the right time is part of doing iterative work.

Leadership is about the ability to ADAPT to the future.

A – Awareness of yourself, the environment and others.

D – Desire to serve others

A – Ability, leadership ability, emotional maturity

P – Promotion, having a clear vision

T – Transfer your knowledge to build other leaders and people

The job of a leader is to grow new leaders. The agile leader is preparing for change and looking to the edge for the emerging future.

What is your leadership model?

think about staying positive

Posted on February 16, 2015 by coachwithheart

“When you are joyful, when you say yes to life and have fun and project positivity all around you, you become a sun in the center of every constellation, and people want to be near you.”
― Shannon L. Alder

Working in a high demand environment can get tiring, it can get to the point where motivation starts seeping out of the soul. Negative feelings creep in when the pressure is always on, the pressure to perform and do it well start impacting your thinking and our ability to contribute your best work.

To help reduce the negative noise take a break every hour and for four or five minutes just find a comfortable position to be in, release the tension and breathe in slowly to the count of six and then pause before exhaling fully. As you are breathing focus on counting, in on six, pause for two and exhale on a count of six. Breathe and relax, breathe and relax.

As work pressure increases the ability to think clearly decreases for most people. The blood flow to the rational thinking part of your brain starts to diminish as more of that blood goes to fear response part of the brain. You can see that when people react in anger and say things that they regret. The brain is reacting to what it believes is a threat and is preparing take action. In that moment the brain isn’t figuring out if the threat is real or not, it doesn’t want to spend the time evaluating a threat, it just wants to take action.

When the situation is getting tense try to notice what is causing the tension. What words are being said? What actions are being described? Notice your own feelings and try to figure out what values are being threatened. If you can quickly understand what you think might be a threat you can mentally step back and adjust the emotional ramp up.

When you think positive or move from threat to peace you activate different parts of your nervous system. Positive thinking activates the parasympathetic nervous system where there is more peace and contentment in your body. Activating the sympathetic nervous system happens when there is a perceived threat. The goal, to stay in balance, in control of your emotions so that you able to effectively manage your emotions and so that you can help providing a calming force in tense situations.

To learn how to activate the parasympathetic try:

1. Writing a gratitude journal. Keep track of the good things in life. Reflect back on those.

2. Deep breathing – calms the nervous system.

3. Pay attention to positive experiences

4. Reframe the experience, what can you do to shift your emotional perspective.

5. Spend time cultivating positive experiences (reduce time watching TV – or reading the News).

Find things that have positive outcomes, bring greater joy, greater happiness and more calm to your life. The more you develop skills that help you stay positive in negative situations the better you will be able to manage the outcomes.

thinking about doing

Posted on February 2, 2015 by coachwithheart

“You can’t just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood.
What mood is that?
Last-minute panic.”
― Bill Watterson

Getting things done is hard for some people. Procrastination that waiting until things are at a crisis before any action is taken and then there is a feeling of guilt and shame for not getting the work done earlier. Maybe that has happened to you. It’s not a good feeling is it? It may have worked in school where the report was furiously worked on just hours before it was due. You made it before the deadline. That last-minute rush of activity doesn’t always produce the right results though.

Getting started on a task is often interrupted by some other idea, thought or distraction and before you know it a big chunk of time has passed and there are other things that need to get done and panic or overwhelm sets in. When there are too many things needing attention at the same time something is going to get missed and not get done. That starts the cycle of thought, “that I must not be …”. Have you had those thoughts, “I should have …”?

Let’s look at those places you might be procrastinating about.

What areas of your life do you find yourself procrastinating?

– Getting things done at home.

– Getting bills paid.

– Getting work done at work.

– Getting work done at school.

– Maintaining social relationships.

– Taking good care of self.

Just note which areas tend to be the most challenging for you.

What is your procrastination technique? This is the activity you take instead of the one you know needs your attention.

– Personal reward ( a break, a snack, …)

– Watching TV

– Surfing the Net

– Reading email – Facebook – social media

– I need to know more

– It can wait

Which excuse do you use? How strong is your excuse?

Nothing changes until you understand the size of the problem. Start with writing down when you make a personal excuse to do something else instead of what is important. Now, if you don’t know what is important then that might be where it all starts.

Have a written plan, with the time you want to start a task. Use that as a guide to see how you are doing on just getting started.

Steps to take:

1. Create a written daily plan.
2. Notice when you don’t follow the plan.
3. Reflect on what happened when you didn’t follow the plan.
4. What can you do differently?

It is easy to think about doing and much harder to do when something else seems more interesting.

creativity doesn’t follow a schedule

Posted on January 29, 2015 by coachwithheart

“I like to remind people that creativity also isn’t a spark; it’s a slog. Every artist, inventor, designer, writer, or other creative in the world will talk about his work being an iterative experience. He’ll start with one idea, shape it, move it, combine it, break it, begin anew, discover something within himself, see a new vision, go at it again, test it, share it, fix it, break it, hone it, hone it, hone it, hone it. This might sound like common sense, but it’s not common practice, and that’s why so many people are terribly uncreative – they’re not willing to do the work required to create something that’s beautiful, useful, desirable, celebrated. No masterpiece was shaped or written in a day. It’s a long slog to get something right. This knowledge and willingness to iterate is what makes the world’s most creative people so creative (and successful).”
― Brendon Burchard

Software is an art. It is a creative endeavor that needs to be shaped, formed and molded.

Business is a science. Business follows processes, rules, timelines, it is repeatable, predictable and controlled.

Art vs. science. Business would like to control the process of creating art and it fails to do so. How many projects have failed to meet their objectives because the “art” wasn’t completed on time. The unknown of art perplexes those who want things to be ordered and controlled. You’ll hear it in the form “we have limited funds”, “we have to get it done by _______” and projects miss their targets. They get done, they cost more and many will miss the so called deadline.

Ask an artist how long it takes to create a work of art and it is likely they won’t be able to tell you. It isn’t about how long it takes, it is about reaching the state of being done. Sometimes the art has to be thrown away and it all starts over. That is what happens when ideas, thoughts and solutions emerge out of a problem. The solution doesn’t follow a schedule, it emerges.

How do your systems and processes enable creativity?

What would need to change?

Agile Principle:

Responding to change over following a plan

advancing the culture

Posted on January 27, 2015 by coachwithheart

“Unfortunately, in many cases, the rule book goes way too far – it tries to tell people how to be instead of explaining what we’re trying to do.. We need recipes, not rules.”
― Howard Behar

More rules. Isn’t that what happens in a lot of organizations, the creation of more rules, more rules to follow and adhere to. After a while you don’t even know all the rules and just trying to follow the rules takes more effort and time than the work you are supposed to be doing. Software development methods can evolve to a huge number of rules that have to be followed, so much so that a programmer’s productivity falls.

The rules are there to help reduce error and integrate what was learned over time so mistakes are not repeated. We learn and we add rules, learn some more and add some rules. At some point we have rules that have been followed and no one really understands why the rules are in place. It is easier to follow a rule than to challenge the rule or to even be aware that some rules do need to be challenged.

Instead of rules we need to be focused on the intention of the work we are doing. What is it we are trying to accomplish and to think about it with a new mind.

What happens when a culture gets rule bound? It is focused on following rules rather than trying to focus on the intention of the organization and it limits the potential of the organization.

When you think of the Agile manifesto and responding to change over following a plan the idea might be to focus on the intention of the work rather than following a lot of rules. If we can focus on what needs to be done perhaps more can get done. An organizational culture that is rules filled will be challenged by methods that believe fewer rules are better.

What is your organizational culture like? Is it filled with rules or filled with opportunity?

thinking about organizational change

Posted on January 20, 2015 by coachwithheart

“The essence of community, its heart and soul, is the non-monetary exchange of value; things we do and share because we care for others, and for the good of the place.”
― Dee Hock

How do you get an organization, a business to change? Does it start from the top and works it way down? Does it take a voice from the bottom and then become a good idea?

Organizations struggle to change because people struggle with change. It is hard for an organization that is commanded to suddenly embrace the characteristics of leadership. Leadership is about letting go of power and control and enabling the people in the organization to have power. For managers that may mean giving up their power so that the team or group has that power and for many organizations power and position are the same. How do you give up one without giving up on the other. Power and importance are linked and being important or more important than others fuels some people and some organizations.

Let’s say that the organization does a lot of software development and the process is shaped by power and positional authority, how does it adopt agile principles? That is going to be one of the struggles. Agile thinking is about leadership, shared responsibility and shared power. A command and control hierarchical system of management where permission is granted and control is granted will shake when it comes to releasing that control to a group of people.

How do you encourage an organization with a decidedly hierarchical approach to embrace something radically different?

How do you let people who have had control release that control?

It is going to be very unsettling in an environment where control is a part of the culture. Begin as an experiment. Set out to discover how alternative means of leadership can work. A group of people who are given permission to be collaborative and to find their own answers may struggle when they have always reached to a manager to make a decision for them.

One of the reasons changes are hard is the way of doing things today is based on the belief that those things work. The belief that the current system works is a hard belief to change. It isn’t enough to say things aren’t working as well as they could be, it takes evidence to show that things aren’t working and each person is going to have a different level of proof in order to abandon an existing system to embrace something new.

If you’re the person who is attempting to create an organizational change there is a lot tied in beliefs about the current system that have to be overcome. You can’t say the “new” way is better because there isn’t enough evidence that it would be better even if other organizations have said so. What are the truths about the current system? Can those truths or beliefs be tested?

Are you in a place where organizational change is difficult?

What cultural attributes would need to change?

What are the truths the organization believes in?

deeper listening … better results

Posted on January 16, 2015 by coachwithheart

“Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.” –Karl A. Menniger

Any organization, any leader or any person who wants to get better results just needs to listen better. Most people when they listen aren’t really listening to what is being said. Instead they are likely to be thinking about other things and paying attention to their own thoughts rather than your words. It might just feel like words are going into thin air.

Just by spending more effort any person can improve communications results. All it takes is putting energy into listening.

Organizations that are implementing Agile methods often overlook how critical listening is in the process. Are the teams, the stakeholders, product owners, customers and leaders really listening? Probably not. Not at the level that it takes to understand what other people are saying.

Meetings are often held where the words of the speaker are competing with text messaging, email, web surfing, side conversations, or day dreaming. The few that might be listening are only paying attention to part of the words that are being said and not really putting an effort into understanding what is being said. For an organization that represents a huge loss of time and a huge opportunity to improve results.

The next time you are in a meeting virtual or face-to-face notice the level of engagement. What is really going on? Notice your own level of participation (listening to understand). Do you notice yourself losing focus? Is the speaker focused and delivering content on point?

What do you think needs to improve?