Scripture-based Agile Coaching: Staying Out Of Arguments

A few years into my professional career, I was a Software Developer back then, I was a hot-tempered fool who easily got into arguments. I was proud of my accomplishments and I felt that I always had the right thing to say. I felt that I always had something to contribute, something important to say.

Fortunately, through the years and through many humbling experiences, I have gained wisdom and self-control. Many Bible verses have helped me learn and relearn this lesson of having more restraint and not getting into pointless arguments. This verse is one I have read recently:

Any fool can start arguments; the honorable thing is to stay out of them.

Proverbs 20:3

One main reason I easily got into arguments, is because I was in a hurry to express my point of view. I hastily assume that I understand what I am hearing and quickly form my response. And most of the time I ended up having the wrong understanding and being a fool. To grow out of this behavior I have taken to heart one of the habits of effective people as defined by Steven Covey: “Seek first to understand, and then be understood.”

This change helped me grow to become a better Agile Coach. I can form healthy working relationships with my colleagues. These relationships are based on trust, respect, and honesty, and not on position nor power. I have found my influence growing, allowing me to do my best to help people do their best.

Continuous Improvement with Iron Man

I love Iron Man in the MCU! His armors are awesome and his character development is superb. He started out as an egotistic and self-centered billionaire/playboy and became a hero who sacrificed his life to save the universe from Thanos. 🤩 As an Agile Coach, Tony Stark’s continuous improvement and evolution deeply resonates with me. You can see that with every new armor version, Iron Man becomes better, based on what he has learned and experienced. If that doesn’t scream kaizen, I don’t know what will!

The world may have seemed to stop during this Covid-19 pandemic with everyone staying at home and streets being empty, but continuous improvement and learning did not. And rightfully so. I think it became even more important, so we can evolve and adapt. In this post, I want to share key learnings I valued during this time of the pandemic.

Focus

Agile and Lean puts emphasis in the value of focusing on the most important thing to work on for the product. Stephen Covey defined the habit of putting first things first as one of the 7 habits of highly effective people. This is one of the values that helped me adjust to the effects of the pandemic. It was easy to feel overwhelmed, and countless of times I had to stop, take a deep breath, and focus. The guiding principle is to do the most important tasks first and accept that you will let go of other activities. You will not be able to do everything you want, but you ensure you are able to do what is important at any given time. When you feel you are veering away from your target, you stop, be still, and then refocus.

Part of being focused is knowing not to take on too many tasks, responsibilities, or activities. It is ok to say “no”, and there are a lot of good, respectful, and kind ways to say it. One key thing is you don’t want to be defensive about it, just be open and say what you have on your plate and what is important to you. Trust that people will understand, especially your family, friends, and even your bosses and colleagues at work. They know you and have trust in you too.

You Work with Humans

Even though Tony Stark comes off as being arrogant and narcissistic, I think he has great compassion for others. He takes care of his teammates, providing them with armor, tools, tech that helps protect them. He provided the team with the Avengers Tower and Avengers facility in Upstate New York. He mentored Spider-Man and deeply cared for him. He had good relationships with his employees – Happy Hogan and Pepper Potts.

One of the Agile values defined in the Agile Manifesto is: “People and interactions over processes and tools.” For me, one application of this value is having compassion for the people you work with. I greatly appreciate the support I got from my boss when I had to adjust my working schedule to help my kids with school-at-home. My peers appreciated the times I caught up with them to see how they were doing and how they were coping with the effects of the pandemic. They were happy to have someone show concern for them. As an Agile Coach, this is one of the services I offer to people I work with. As someone working with an Agile Coach, I think this is one thing you can expect from your coach.

God says in Ephesians 4:32: “Be kind and compassionate to one another…”. This Bible verse speaks to me more and more each day during this pandemic.

Attitude of Gratitude

Modern society doesn’t promote being content with what you have. It is easy to get lost in acquiring new things, getting more and more of what you want. You are blasted with ads of products claiming to be better than the products you currently have. Advancements in technology, always a double-edged sword, can easily make you want to get the latest, the best so far. With the restrictions, lockdowns, and quarantines, the things we thought we could not live without, became less important.

Expressing gratitude for the things I have and appreciating them more are actions that are helping me cope with the challenges of the pandemic. It takes my mind away from things I worry about and focuses it instead on things I should be thankful for. This attitude of gratitude brings much needed positivity. As an Agile Coach, I make it a point to celebrate success and wins with the team. Even a simple “thank you” to show appreciation can go a long way in promoting a positive attitude and strengthening of relationships.

Work in Harmony

When Iron Man first met Thor in the MCU, he learned that Thor’s lightning can power up his armor. In Endgame, we saw how Iron Man used this knowledge when he made the Nano Lightning Refocuser and asked Thor to hit him with lightning so that he can use the energy to blast Thanos. It’s always a treat to see in the movies how the Avengers come together as a team and combine their powers to be stronger.

This past year I have constantly reflected on how respect, trust, and patience are very important for collaboration. Respect your teammates and colleagues: their effort, contributions, insights, skills and experience. Trust them that they will do their best. Be patient when things don’t go as planned or your expectations are not met. The pandemic added numerous challenges and difficulties to the way we work together and in addition had great effects to our lives outside of work. Finding harmony with my colleagues was one critical thing that helped me this past year.

Part of the Journey is the End

I don’t see the end of this pandemic yet, but I do know that it will end and then there will be other challenges in our journey through life. It is my hope that I can learn and adapt like Iron Man. Even in the end, you can see how he prepared his Mark 85 armor to take on enough of the power of the Infinity Stones. That was not part of the plan, but he was ready, he designed his last armor in the MCU with that capability.

I hope these learnings may be of some help to you. Let’s make sure to open ourselves to even more learnings this 2021.

ICAgile Certified Agile Coach Training

Last August 1 – 2, I attended an ICAgile accredited Agile Certified Coach Training class.  The training was facilitated by Elizabeth Thakkar from Agility4All.

The learnings from the training course equips the attendees with a good understanding of the roles and responsibilities of an Agile Coach.  The content of the course was really interesting and I liked how it covered the essential things one needs to learn to become a good Agile Coach.

Knowledge Gained

The learnings I got from the training helped me gain a better understanding of the answers to two big questions I had about being an Agile Coach:

• What is an Agile Coach?  What does an Agile Coach do?
• How does an Agile Coach fulfill his / her responsibilities?

Included in the course material is a great introduction to Agile Coaching.  I like how it was said that it was mostly about forming good relationships with the people you coach so that you are able to help them achieve their goals.  For an Agile Coach, as the name implies, it is all about helping people be successful in projects by applying Agile principles and values.

I learned how Agile Coaches can wear different hats depending on the situation.  The Agile Coach can be a teacher, a mentor, a facilitator.  And sometimes the coach digs in and shows people how to do the work.  I think the last one is generally avoided by coaches and often saved as a last resort in the effort of teaching something to the coachee.

During the training, we did exercises to practice some techniques and methods used by Agile Coaches.  I learned how to form coaching agreements between coach and coachee to set the correct expectations.  We practiced active listening and giving feedback.  We also discussed different kinds of conflicts and how to handle them.

The Experience

I felt very lucky to have taken the training with a group of very talented people who were very generous in sharing their insights and knowledge.  During the two days, the participants actively engaged in discussions and sharing about the course content.  It was good for me to hear stories of scenarios which happened in companies and organizations that have a different settings and environments than the companies I have worked for.  I really liked the sharing about the challenges which Agile Coaches encounter: getting support from leadership / management team, dealing with unreasonable expectations about being Agile, coaching difficult team members, making sure everyone has a good understanding of Agile principles and values.

Here are some comments I have about how the training was facilitated:

• I think time management could have gone better.  I felt we rushed through some parts of the course and activities.  We lost time mostly by going on tangent discussions during some of the sharing.  If discussions were more focused and contained, then I think we could have made a better use of the time in the training.
• While it was good that the trainer brought out a lot of sharing from the participants, I was expecting to hear more from the trainer; sharing anecdotes, analogies and insights about the various topics discussed during the training.  The training would have been better for me if I have learned more from the trainer, from experiences and anecdotes I could relate to.
• In my opinion, I could have gotten more learnings from the activities done during the training if the trainer gave more feedback.  The participants were able to share their thoughts about the activities but I felt we lacked feedback from the trainer.  I expected that the trainer would be a mentor in this part of the training and provide actionable feedback for the participants.

Moving Forward

I have learned a lot from the training and gained a better understanding about the role of an Agile Coach.  I would like to continue growing as an Agile Coach and I am very interested in completing the Agile Coaching Track of ICAgile.  The next step on that journey is to take an Agile Team Facilitation class.  It is my hope that having these certifications would open up for me opportunities which will allow me to gain more experience as an Agile Coach and expose me to different settings and environments.

Challenges of Retrospectives

One of the principles stated in the Agile Manifesto is:
“At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.”

To apply this principle, Agile teams hold retrospective meetings at regular intervals (we do them every 2 weeks).  In retrospectives, the team discuss what they have experienced since the last meeting, reflect upon their observations, and agree to do improvements which would allow them to work more efficiently. This sounds simple enough but the retrospective meeting is one of the hardest meetings to facilitate when you’re an Agile Coach or Scrum Master.

Here are the top challenges I encounter when facilitating retrospectives:

Getting active participation

It is hard to a get a good discussion going during the retrospectives when only a small number of participants are speaking. If most of the team is satisfied with just listening, conversations tend to be one-sided, or only 2 persons are actively discussing.  Most of the time, the discussion ends prematurely.

Being comfortable with silence

As a facilitator, you are able to fulfill your responsibilities in the meeting when you let the team do the talking.  You are there to help the team discover for themselves what they want to do to improve. However, silence can be uncomfortable. Especially the silence which comes after you ask a powerful question. As a facilitator, you tend to panic when there is a long lingering silence, because it makes you think the meeting is a waste of time for everyone.

Asking powerful questions

In retrospectives you ask powerful questions to guide the discussion and make the team think hard about how they can improve. Most of the time the powerful questions you should ask is dependent on the responses you get from the team. However, if they are mostly silent during the meeting, you have nothing to work with.

The problems with getting active participation, being comfortable with silence, and asking powerful questions are even harder to face when you are working with remote teams.  You have online meetings which is usually done with voice-only calls.  You can’t see the body language of the participants and you miss out on non-verbal cues. You can’t see people nodding, frowning, glancing at something or someone, fiddling their thumbs, and you are not even sure if they have their full attention in the meeting.

Staying neutral

Good facilitators remain neutral during meetings. This enables the team to take ownership of achieving the goals of the meeting. In order to remain neutral, the facilitator should not have a vested interest on the outcome of the meeting.  This hard to do during retrospectives because as the team coach you feel responsible for making sure the team improves and that they grow to become more efficient in what they do. However retrospectives are more effective when the team itself decides what they want to do to improve.

Keeping meetings fresh

For retrospective meetings you can’t do the same thing over and over again.  The team will get bored and discussions will grow stale.  As the facilitator you have to use a wide variety of meeting formats, techniques and tricks to keep these meetings fresh so that the team is motivated to think about improvements they need to do.

People not wanting to think about how to improve

This may be the hardest challenge because this makes the retrospective meetings a total waste of time for all. Teams can become complacent and high performing teams may think that there is nothing more they can do to improve. It is up to the Coach or Scrum Master to challenge the team and not let the retrospective meeting become a routine that the team thinks they just have to endure.

One attitude which helps me face these challenges is: Being Persistent.  You have to keep at it. As the Scrum Master or Agile Coach of the team you have to “walk the talk”. You have to show the team members that you yourself is continuously improving. Can’t get the engagement you are expecting? Then learn about more ways on how to get the team engaged. Is the team getting tired of doing the same retrospective format every two weeks? Then learn more about new techniques which you can use. Do you need help in figuring out which approaches work best with the team? Then solicit feedback and ask the team members about the changes you can make in the way you facilitate the retrospective meeting. Just keep on doing the good work and making that effort to connect with the team. The alternative, which is to let the team settle for mediocrity of the status-quo and not aim to improve, would be anti-Agile.

In future posts, I plan to discuss what I have learned in facing these challenges and what tools and techniques I have added to my utility belt for overcoming these challenges.

Continuous Improvement

What do I mean by continuous improvement?

One of the principles behind the Agile Manifesto states: “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.”

To be Agile is to be continuously improving. Our world is ever-changing and in order for us to cope with those changes we must seek to become better, to improve constantly.

I think continuous improvement is part of the habit of “sharpening the saw”, one of the 7 habits of highly effective people as explained by Stephen Covey. This is the habit of renewing yourself, physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. By doing this you keep yourself ready to face new challenges as they come. Continuous improvement is a good mental exercise, it helps you learn more about what you already know and can also learn something new.

Why is continuous improvement important?

It is only natural for us, as living organisms in this word, to evolve. Continuous improvement is evolution. It is crucial to our survival. And it certainly applies to how we make a living, how we do our job and get money which we need to survive in our world right now. So basically continuous improvement is important because it helps us survive. If we don’t continuously improve, we can not adapt to the changes in our industry. If we can not adapt to changes, our jobs are at risk. If we lose our jobs we won’t have money for our needs.

What do I do to sharpen my saw?

Read articles and blog posts

I have developed the habit of reading at least one article or blog post every day. Doing this activity regularly helps me in a number of ways:

• I learn about latest trends on how to do my work or on how to be better in what I do
• I gain new insights to problems I am currently dealing with or have dealt with in the past. I can read about how other Agile practitioners solved the problems.
• I am able to collect references which I use when I teach about how to be Agile.
• My favorite authors become my mentors in a way. I can learn from them by reading their blogs. And sometimes I get to have discussions with them when I post comments on their blogs or articles.

I would recommend subscribing to your favorite blogs so you can easily get notifications when new content has been published. My favorite are blogs from Mike Cohn.

Read books

I usually read a book if I want to immerse myself in learning about a particular subject.  Recently I have finished reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Agile Coaching. I’ve read this one cover-to-cover. Sometimes I would just read selected chapters of a book, just to focus on the subtopics relevant to what I am currently doing. Usually when I read a book, I try to apply what I have learned immediately so that I can better understand what I have learned and retain the knowledge.

Watch online training videos

I love how online training videos are more accessible these days. It is a nice alternative to just reading about a topic.  You just have to make sure you are attentive to the video. Some online training sites have quizzes which will make you more engaged while some have projects you can do, so you can apply what you have learned from the videos.

My favorite online training sites are:

• Front Row Agile
• Pluralsight
• Udacity

Attend meetups and conferences

Recently I have been attending the monthly meetups of the Agile PH community and it is great to hear about the insights and experiences of other Agile practitioners. Plus it is fun to go out and meet new people and break your daily routine at work once in a while.

I consider it a great privilege and opportunity to be able to attend conferences. There is a ton of knowledge and wisdom you can gain from listening and participating on the sessions to having side discussions with attendees. You get to share “war stories” and learn how somebody else from another part of the world is dealing with the same problems you encounter.

To make the most out of attending meetups and conferences you must make sure you participate in the discussions. Listen to what others are sharing. Talk with people. Engage in conversations.

Discuss with peers

You’re lucky when you have a group of people you can discuss with about what’s going on with your work. These individuals have the same role as you or at least have experience shouldering the same responsibilities that you have. Sharing stories and insights is a great way to learn. It is important to get a new perspective on challenges you face at work, it allows you to become better and more creative at handling upcoming obstacles.

Learn from a mentor

When you want to continuously learn and improve, that means you are always a student who needs a teacher –  a master to surpass, a mentor to follow. If you are able to find a mentor who really cares about your growth and is generous in sharing with you all the wisdom he or she has gained, then you should do your best to take care of that relationship and learn all you can. Having a mentor is critical because you need someone to guide you.  Somebody who has walked the path to get to where you want to be. A mentor is also someone you look up to, someone who you want to be. All of this gives you the drive and focus to be better, to improve.