The Virtue of Coercion

Is coercion a VIRTUE?

Someone has proposed a session for the Agile2015 conference entitled:

“The Virtue of Coercion” …it goes like this….quoting:

…There almost no chance of Agile transformation without the imposition of Agile practices on teams. Pushing Agile practices on teams is the primary way to obtain lasting enterprise-wide Agile adoptions.

…in this session we present 4 years of data proving that employee engagement actually has nothing whatsoever to do with successfully scaling Agile. Rather, the right underlying conditions for agility have more to do with buy-in (and appropriate funding) at the C-level.”

 

Is this blasphemy….or just good business?

…if you elect to add a comment this session, you may be in good company!

Others (besides myself) who have commented include:

  • Tobias Meyer, author of THE PEOPLE’s SCRUM
  • Harrison Owen, formulator of Open Space and author of OPEN SPACE: A USERS GUIDE
  • John Buck, expert on consent as applied to Sociocracy, and co-author (with Sharon Villenes) of WE THE PEOPLE
  • …and many more !

Can a genuine process-change take root in ANY organization WITHOUT THE CONSENT of the people affected?

Has this EVER worked?

Consider the American BILL OF RIGHTS. Here is how it starts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consent_of_the_governed

“…Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

And so…here is THE question: Do you care to comment?

Steps:

 

Kind Regards,

Daniel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Generosity, Thrivability and Self-Organization

Harrison Owen is the formulator/composer of the Open Space meeting format.

 

Harrison is fond of saying these two things:

  • All systems are open
  • All systems are self-organizing

In this essay, I am assuming you have a good grip on what ‘open’ and ‘self-organizing’ mean.

With that established, let’s move right into a discussion of generosity and its role is self-organizing systems.

Self-organizing systems are composed of agents. Like people, for example. Agents exercise their agency, that is, their autonomy. Law of 2 Feet. One way to express your agency is in the withholding or releasing of your time, or your effort, or your attention. Or your money! When you choose to release some of your time, effort, attention, money etc to someone else, you are exercising your agency (Law of 2 Feet) by being generous.

By giving a gift. It’s an act of agency. An act that contributes to the level of self-organization overall.

This has very serious implications for building a new & thriving world.

Because anyone at any time can be generous to anyone else for any reason, generosity has very serious implications for building a new & different (thriving) world.

In a culture that strongly values generosity, anything can– and will– happen.

Acts of generosity contribute  to (and are part of) the mysterious, unknowable process of self-organization.

Now, what’s really interesting about this is that every act of generosity, however small, is immediately disruptive to the current system…the broken one…the one with the story that’s not clearly not working.

The one that’s going away.

The one dominated by contract, and economic exchange.

The Global Scrum Gathering Keynote: Paris 2013

I am grateful to have been invited into (and have accepted) the opportunity to deliver a plenary (keynote) address at the Global Scrum Gathering in Paris, France. The event runs from September 23-25 and the keynote is scheduled for Tuesday, September 24. I am honored to be part of this event with Henrik Kniberg and Dario Nardi, who also are delivering keynote addresses on Sept 23 and Sept 25 respectively.

You can learn about the 2013 Global Scrum Gathering in Paris here. If you click the [Keynotes] tab and then the right-arrow, you can examine the three keynotes, including the description of my talk.

I also list it here, for your convenience:

Open Agile Adoption 
The Agile journey may be best characterized as a rite of passage. Those who are taking the next step always do so as a group. During the journey, all the participants share the same basic status. Successful participants find themselves in a new and very unfamiliar place. And lastly, anyone who wants to complete the journey must also be willing to leave many things behind.

  • In tribal societies, passage rites from start to finish are facilitated and in fact led, by a “master of ceremonies.” What has changed?
  • Is the modern journey into agile actually a passage rite… for modern tribes?
  • Is the Scrum Master in fact the master of ceremonies in a modern rite of passage for teams and organizations?

In this session, together we explore the surprising answer. We also explore how to specifically leverage Open Space as a tool for helping to create authentic and lasting Agile adoptions.

I plan to explain Open Agile Adoption, an approach to implementing Agile that I have developed over a three-year period during which I have coached inside over 20 organizations. I have coached Agile since late 2007 and began experimenting with new approaches in 2009. At that time I noticed how some very intelligent people became disengaged during Agile adoptions. I began to ask why.

I began experimenting with the use of Open Space to help encourage more engagement, in service to rapid and lasting Agile adoptions. These Open Space experiments  generated some very surprising results. I’m grateful to the many organizations in and around Boston that have allowed me to experiment with sociological approaches to solving the Agile adoption puzzle.

Sociology First, THEN Practices

For my part, I value practices…because sound practices are very important. Yet solid, sound practices implemented with disregard to what people want, what they think and what they feel is, at best, misguided. It tends to generate disengagement.

I have learned the hard way, through experience, that the people who do the work are telling themselves a story. And that story is:

  • I get paid for thinking, and
  • I get paid for solving problems, and
  • I get paid for being creative.

That’s the story. This is one reason why it is essential to value sociological factors: if we mandate specific practices, the thinking and the problem-solving and the creativity that people bring to work is suddenly dampened. Squelched. Discouraged. Even killed off. Further, and more importantly, any sense of control is diminished. A sense of perceived control is essential for any sense of well-being.

Result: The prescription of specific practices becomes a topic for resentment…and eventually, disengagement. In my experience, it doesn’t take too long for people to “check out” on mandates and prescriptions. This disengagement is death to any honest attempt to bring improvement to an organization.

In Paris, I plan to tell you the wider story of Open Agile Adoption. The story includes many interesting people…and more than one courageous leader who took a legitimate shot of greatness with their Agile adoptions. I’ll tell the stories, and present several case studies. I’ll also provide a toolkit, free to the world… that anyone, anywhere can use to repeat the Agile adoption results I am getting.

I hope to see you in Paris. If you cannot attend, you can follow the Open Agile Adoption story on Twitter and here on my blog. As we head into September, I’ll explain more and more about the concepts and facilities of Open Agile Adoption. I’ll also explain the specific components, which are firmly rooted in sociology and cultural anthropology. On September 24 in Paris, I’ll present the actual case data and experience reports, and numerous testimonials on video.

More importantly, on September 24 2013, the date of the Paris keynote, I will make available to you and everyone, worldwide, a free, comprehensive, open-source toolkit for implementing a rapid and lasting Open Agile Adoption.

Frank Zappa, the offbeat musical genius, once said: “Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.” I believe he is correct.

I hope you will join me in learning more and more about the details of the Open Agile Adoption technique, incorporating Open Space Technology, as we head into September. You can stay up-to-date on my writing about it by bookmarking this link.

Mandated Agile, Part 2

I have a lot of heat around how Agile gets implemented in typical organizations. I’ve been ranting about the evils and oxymoronic nature of mandated collaboration [1]. Let me explain.

When I say mandated collaboration, I mean the prescription of both Agile adoption and specific practices.

I am clarifying my messaging here: naming a clear Agile direction is OK. However, stop right there. Prescribing practices as non-negotiable mandates and prescriptions is not OK, precisely because it kills engagement, the very fuel of progress….

…businesses are facing all kinds of pressures. The pace of change, driven by technology, is speeding up. So not just lots of change, but the velocity of change itself is intensifying. This is making is essential for enterprises to become highly adaptive. Right away. This means lots of group/team/org learning or what I call Tribal Learning has to be taking place all the time. AGILE CAN HELP.

So: when I say mandated collaboration [1] is dumb, I am NOT saying mandating an Agile direction is dumb. FAR FROM IT. This is exactly what leadership needs to do.

Leadership actually needs to do several things:

  • Explain the business case for Agile. Explain the challenges the business is facing in terms of competition, pricing pressure, obselete products etc
  • Make it clear the enterprise is heading into an Agile journey– an epic adventure. This part is not optional.
  • Invite everyone involved into the process of writing the Agile story. Communicate that leadership DOES NOT have all the answers and is looking FOR THE VERY BEST IDEAS PEOPLE HAVE to make the move to Agile genuine, authentic, rapid, and lasting.
  • Make it plain that everything that is tried as an Agile practice at the start is an experiment, and is optional, and going to be inspected, and is not set in stone. For example, if the org is giving Scrum a try, it is an experiment, and subject to inspection. If an off-the-rack practice like Scrum cannot be tailored and customized to fit well, it will be THROWN OUT and we will try something else that might work. We might even “roll our own” practices, using the Agile Manifesto as our guidance.

By doing it this way, the people doing the work can engage, and have a strong sense of control and of progress [2]. Prescribing practices makes no allowance for what people want, what people think, and what people feel. It reduces engagement and causes people to check out and disengage.

So leadership makes it plain we are moving into an Agile stance as a company. So far so good. Next: Leadership then frames the initial use of ANY practice as an experiment, one that will be inspected for usefulness and effectiveness in service to the stated aims of the Agile adoption.

This is the exact opposite of what usually happens. Usually, the following happens, usually after a small pilot test of Agile with a small team:

  • Authority says we are going Agile
  • Authority says we are doing Scrum, or Kanban, of SAFe, or some other method. The message is that this is not negotiable.
  • A coach is selected by authority on the basis of expertise with the prescribed practices. Typically, Scrum skills. The coach is imposed on the people, just like Scrum.
  • Workers are triggered to disengage by the experience of a low sense of control and progress. They learn that the goal is fuzzy, the rules are fuzzy, the way we track progress is vague. Participating is not opt-in. The Agile adoption is not an enjoyable game because there is no opportunity to opt-in, because it’s not an invitation. Far from it. Agile and Scrum (for example) are a mandate and a prescription.

Folks, this is at best misguided. I’ve explained why in previous posts [1].

It kills engagement, the very fuel of a rapid and lasting Agile adoption.

The good news is, we can prescribe and mandate Agile without mandating collaboration. Leaders can frame the move to Agile as a necessary direction, and then invite everyone to bring the very best they have into the game, and help write the story. Authority can and must frame Agile practices as trials, and as experiments, which is code for saying that initial practices are not prescriptions from authority, and that everyone gets a hearing and will be asked what they want, think and feel about the experience of using of specific practices.

If we do not do this, we can expect the very poor results so-called Agile adoptions are getting after 12 months, 18 months, 24 months. The role of the coach is huge here. We need to stop being party to mandated Agile practices, and…

“Build projects around motivated (opted-in) individuals, give them the environment (the safe space) and support (the authorization) they need, and trust them to get the job done. [4].”

Related Links:

[1] Mezick, Daniel J. Mandated Collaboration: The Recipe for Botched Agile Adoptions. Blog Post. (link)

[2] Mezick, Daniel J. How Games Deliver Happiness. Blog post. (link)

[3] The Agile Manifesto Principles. Web page. 5th item listed. (link)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Principle 4: Apply Self-regulation & Accept feedback

This is one is a series of post on the application of the 12 principles of Permaculture [2] to organizations, and other social systems.  The posts are being generated by members of the Organizational Permaculture [1] group on Facebook. If you like this post, consider joining the group and adding to the  conversation with your own blog post on 1 or more of the 12 Principles of Permaculture [2]

Principle #4: Apply Self-Regulation and Accept Feedback

Principle #4, “Apply Self-Regulation and Accept Feedback” speaks to self-discipline, psychological safety and being open. It is important to note that these personal and system-level properties are a means to an and, not an end in and of themselves. The principle “Apply Self-Regulation and Accept Feedback” mean in part that we intend to tune and tailor our social systems to be highly receptive to feedback. It means we intend for our social systems to be aware.

It also means we work to actively create and then maintain the ability of the entire system to rapidly identify and respond to change.

This is the essence of organizational agility. The agile world uses the slogan “inspect and adapt” to express the importance of accepting feedback and applying self-regulation.

Self Discipline

Collecting observations is essential to responding to change. Observations can be proactive or reactive, active or passive. Reactive observing is what happens after taking an action, such as introducing an experiment.

Proactive observations are observations of the system as it is, without introducing anything new except your own presence.

Feedback as a Resource

Responding to change can be formal or informal, and frequent or infrequent. As a norm, it can even be absent entirely. There is no adapting without inspecting, observing or otherwise experiencing the environment. This plays out in social systems by using any practice that operationalizes the proactive and reactive styles of observation.

Psychological Safety

Technically, Jay Forrester describes social systems as “1st order nonlinear feedback systems” in his paper, Designing the Future. [3] . For an entire social system to become adept at responding to change, a high level of what Amy Edmondson calls ‘psychological safety’ [4] which is the willingness to take ‘interpersonal risk’ during interactions with individuals, in front of the group. Psychological safety in social systems is important for individuals. When the level of psychological safety is low, levels of self-regulation and acceptance of feedback at the level of individual and group will also be low.

Openness

I’ve written on Openness previously when discussing the Five Scrum Values [5]. Openness includes accepting the best idea, regardless of source. Discussing ideas is a way to express the identification of changes, and also a way to discuss a rational and well-reasoned set of possible responses to that change.

Practical Steps

Any activities that formalize frequent generation  and inspection of feedback are directly supporting Principle #4 of Permaculture: “Apply Self-Regulation and Accept Feedback.” Scrum [7] and Open Space [8] both define feedback systems with formal structures. Scrum is a complete framework, while Open Space is a meeting format. Both feature explicit loops of feedback with specific guidance on how to best process the feedback generated.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 1. Small Session In Open Space.

 

Practical patterns and processes that can support this principle have certain common characteristics.

First, they share a formalization of frequent feedback loops. Scrum is a good example; it has a daily feedback loop (the Daily Scrum) and feedback loop (the Sprint Review) at the end of each iteration of work.

Second, they have an opt-in aspect, the people in the system choose to participate in using the pattern or process, and are not compelled to use it. Open Space is a good example; everything about it from the beginning to the end is an exercise in opting in or out.

Another good example is the Core Protocols. The Core Protocols [9] are structured interactions that have mechanisms for sending and collecting feedback. (Perfection Game and Investigate protocols respectively). Open Space is a 100% opt-in meeting. Scrum defined the Daily Scrum and Sprint Review as formal observe & inspect points.

 

Summary

To be self-regulating, there must be feedback. The more frequent, the better. The frequency of sampling the environment for feedback by observing in social systems can be monthly, weekly, daily or continuous. Teams and organizations that focus on identifying sources of feedback (and who also become adept at processing it) are in position to learn much faster than organizations that do not [6]. This learning in social systems is essential if we are to Obtain a Yield [10].

 

References:

[1] Organizational Permaculture Group on Facebook. (link)

[2] 12 Principles of Permaculture on Wikipedia (link)

[3] Forrester, Jay. Designing the Future at Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain 1999 (link)

[4] Edmondson Amy, Harvard University. Paper: Psychological Safety in Work Teams” (link)

[5] Mezick, Daniel J., “Scrum Values”, blog post (link)

[6] Mezick, Daniel J. , “Culture That Learn are Superior”, blog post. (link)

[7] Schwaber Ken and Sutherland, Jeff. The Scrum Guide (link)

[8] Herman, Michael. Essay: About Open Space. (link)

[9] Core Protocols explained (link)

[10] Lloyd, Andreas. “Principle 3, Obtain a Yield”, explained. (link)

 

 

 

Agile Coaching: Core Values & Supporting Principles

The idea of hammering out a set of guiding Values and Principles for Agile Coaches is an idea whose time has come. Increasing reports of problems in Agile Coaching are tarnishing our profession and diluting our effectiveness as change agents. This is a very serious problem.

A set of community-built, open-source Values and Principles is one solution we can all act on today. Rather than looking to institutions to lead us, or assigning blame, we can choose instead to look to ourselves and do something about it, right now. Click. Done.

I invite you to come and play with this idea. The aim of the group is to hammer out an opt-in set of Agile Coaching Values and Principles for Agile Coaches, with intent to improve the working lives of Agile Coaches and Agile Coaching Clients throughout the world.

Please come and play!

 

 

 

Click here to JOIN the Agile Coaching Values discussion group on Google+

Will you please also forward this invitation to other agile coaches and agile coaching clients that might be interested in this conversation?

Thank you!

Intrigued? Here is more detail:

Agile Coaches are familiar with the patterns of naive and vulnerable client organizations that are new to Agile. In my view, Agile Coaching pros have an obligation to help clients understand what is best for them. This always includes helping the client take 100% responsibility for their own learning. This usually means the coach must refuse opportunities to play a larger role.

Being there, 5 days a week, full time, for 3 months or more can be lucrative and hard to resist. As coaching professionals, we do our best (and live up to our potential) by serving the learning of the client organization. This includes challenging the client org to take 100% responsibility to reach a self-sustaining state of Agility, without the need for an external coach.

These Agile Coaching values and principles listed below are a good and solid basis for guiding coach-client relationships and interactions. These values and principles are listed in the familiar ‘agile manifesto‘ format.

The content- these values and principles– are optimized on the continuous, progressive and ongoing organizational learning of the coached organization.

 

In serving our clients, we have come to value:

Creating Independence over generating billing
Championing Learning over avoiding risk
Building Relationships over building transactions
Inviting Participation over assigning responsibility

We use these Principles to guide our work with clients:

Voluntary engagement of everyone involved in organizational change is an essential requirement for success.

Coaching every single day in an organization creates a serious risk of client dependency and is to be avoided, consistent with common sense and good judgement with respect to client needs.

Organizations are responsible for their own learning. Arms-length, time-boxed working agreements between clients and coaches are essential.

Coaches must look for every opportunity to increase the learning of the organization as a whole, with strong intent to vacate or otherwise evolve the current coaching role as soon as possible.

Coaching requires the willingness to identify any cultural impediments to continuous improvement, and to communicate these to the people in the organization who have the authority to address them.

The primary task of a coach is to help improve the effective results and working lives of the people employed in the organizations they serve.

The ability of an organization to respond to change is the primary measure of progress.

Leaders in an organization must continuously signal positive encouragement, and create safe space for others to think and learn, if positive culture change is to be lasting and effective.

Culture Hacking, Organizational Permaculture & Kanban

I explained to you in a previous post how Kanban supports 12 of the 16 Tribal (team) Learning Patterns [1] found in The Culture Game Book [2]. That post also contains a link to an interesting post that connects Kanban to the Agile Manifesto’s 12 Principles.

Culture Hacking, Permaculture and Kanban

This post identifies an agricultural technique (actually an agricultural-sustainability hack) called permaculture.

Permaculture principles and practices associate with culture hacking in general, and Kanban (in particular.)

A full set of links for all footnotes are provided at the end of this post.

Kanban

Kanban is a method for managing work and work flow. It is visual, and exposes certain things that are going on within a group doing work, and makes those things explicit. In the canonical form of Kanban, it imposes at least SOME structure by also making policies explicit, limiting work-in-progress, and so on. (If you need a primer on Kanban you can reference link [3] to catch up).

Organizationally, it’s hard to object to Kanban, in part because it does not ask very much of you– at least at first. There are few if any  anxiety-triggering changes in current roles, goals, meetings, and artifacts. This makes it easy for everyone to relax, and opt-in to the Kanban game, because Kanban, at least at first, does not seem to demand very much of you. Kanban is something that is easy to insert into the situation. And that ‘something’ is a refocusing of attention on things that matter to work groups, things like “the type of work we are doing”, “the flow of that work”, “the regulation of those flows”, and the like.

Now I want you to notice that when you introduce Kanban, you are actually engaging in the introduction and composition of new elements with existing elements in ways that are complimentary. Repeat: With Kanban, you are engaging in the introduction and composition of new elements with existing elements in ways that are complimentary.

Which brings us to the fascinating topic of permaculture.

Permaculture

Permaculture is a form of agriculture. It is a discipline of design and composition that leads to the sustainable extraction of value from the resulting system. Rather than make wide-scope changes, permaculture practitioners compose complimentary elements in service to sustainability of yield:

Permaculture asks the question, “Where does this element go? How can it be placed for the maximum benefit of the system?” To answer this question, the central concept of permaculture is maximizing useful connections between components and synergy of the final design. The focus of permaculture, therefore, is not on each separate element, but rather on the relationships created among elements by the way they are placed together; the whole becoming greater than the sum of its parts. Permaculture design therefore seeks to minimize waste, human labor, and energy input by building systems with maximal benefits between design elements to achieve a high level of synergy. Permaculture designs evolve over time by taking into account these relationships and elements and can become extremely complex systems that produce a high density of food and materials with minimal input. (Source: Wikipedia [4] )

It’s drop-dead obvious that Kanban is an application of permaculture applied to low-producing social-systems instead of low-producing tracts of land.

Intrigued? Check out these 12 Principles of Permaculture…as you examine the list, map the permaculture concepts listed to what is going on inside Kanban implementations as described in the book KANBAN by David Anderson [5]:

Permaculture Principles

  1. Observe and interact: By taking time to engage with nature we can design solutions that suit our particular situation.
  2. Catch and store energy: By developing systems that collect resources at peak abundance, we can use them in times of need.
  3. Obtain a yield: Ensure that you are getting truly useful rewards as part of the work that you are doing.
  4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback: We need to discourage inappropriate activity to ensure that systems can continue to function well.
  5. Use and value renewable resources and services: Make the best use of nature’s abundance to reduce our consumptive behavior and dependence on non-renewable resources.
  6. Produce no waste: By valuing and making use of all the resources that are available to us, nothing goes to waste.
  7. Design from patterns to details: By stepping back, we can observe patterns in nature and society. These can form the backbone of our designs, with the details filled in as we go.
  8. Integrate rather than segregate: By putting the right things in the right place, relationships develop between those things and they work together to support each other.
  9. Use small and slow solutions: Small and slow systems are easier to maintain than big ones, making better use of local resources and producing more sustainable outcomes.
  10. Use and value diversity: Diversity reduces vulnerability to a variety of threats and takes advantage of the unique nature of the environment in which it resides.
  11. Use edges and value the marginal: The interface between things is where the most interesting events take place. These are often the most valuable, diverse and productive elements in the system.
  12. Creatively use and respond to change: We can have a positive impact on inevitable change by carefully observing, and then intervening at the right time.

Source: Wikipedia Permaculture Design Principles [6]

Is understanding the language of permaculture a key to understanding and implementing effective culture change in organizations? Probably!

What’s interesting is how the language of agricultural permaculture supports the best incremental-culture-change ideas found in my book THE CULTURE GAME book [2] and the KANBAN book from David Anderson [3].

 

Kanban…is permaculture…applied to knowledge workers. — Alexis Nicolas (France)

 

The Organizational Permaculture Approach

Here is even more support for the incremental, here-and-now permaculture approach, from a blog post, by noted complexity-science authority David Snowden [7] :

So if you want to change organizations, three basic principles:

  1. You don’t lecture management on how they are old fashioned in their thinking, instead you put them into situations and give them tools where old ways of thinking are not sustainable and they have to act differently. If they work it out for themselves its sustainable.
  2. You pick off areas where the pain threshold is the highest, for example (to pick up Agile themes) the interaction between approaches such as Agile and the measurement and management practices of the HR function.
  3. You then create approaches that change the measurement and feedback mechanisms that work in parallel with existing methods.

Implications of Organizational Permaculture

  1. Client organizations, coaches and other culture hackers can probably benefit tremendously by studying and applying the core concept of permaculture to the design of interventions. Kanban is an element for designing and composing permaculture learning solutions inside existing organizations.
  2. The most effective culture hacks are probably those that strongly align with the 12 Principles of Permaculture. This likely explains (in part) the success of Kanban [3] and the 16 Culture Game Tribal Learning patterns [2]
  3. We probably need to pay particularly close attention to Kanban case studies, since Kanban is actually a particularly good example of how to introduce and apply permaculture techniques and permaculture thinking to culture change in organizations.
  4. We probably need to search for and find more easy-to-introduce permaculture technologies like Kanban and repeat the pattern. Techniques that can co-exist with what is already there and substantially improve team learning quickly are what we are looking for.

Summary

Kanban implementations are significantly aligned with the 12 core principles of agricultural permaculture. Culture change via the incremental permaculture approach is an interesting idea whose time has come. Most effective culture hacks probably have very strong alignment with the 12 Principles of Permaculture.

 

Footnotes:

[1] Kanban and Tribal Learning (link)

[2] The Culture Game Book (link)

[3] Kanban Explained (Wikipedia entry) (link)

[4] Permaculture (Wikipedia entry) (link)

[5] KANBAN: Successful Evolutionary Change for your Business (link)

[6] Wikipedia: Permaculture Design Principles (link)

[7] David Snowden Blog Post with 3 Big Ideas: “Rose Tinting” (link)

 

Agile Coaching Values

Agile Coaches are familiar with the patterns of naive and vulnerable client organizations that are new to Agile. In my view, Agile Coaching pros have an obligation to help clients understand what is best for them. This always includes helping the client take 100% responsibility for their own learning. This usually means the coach must refuse opportunities to play a larger role.

Being there, 5 days a week, full time, for 3 months or more can be lucrative and hard to resist. As coaching professionals, we do our best by serving the learning of the client organization. This includes challenging the client org to take 100% responsibility to reach a self-sustaining state of Agility without the need for an external coach.

These Agile Coaching values and principles listed below are a good and solid basis for guiding coach-client relationships and interactions. These values and principles are listed in the familiar ‘agile manifesto‘ format.

The content- the values and principles- are optimizing towards the continuous, progressive and ongoing organizational learning of the coached organization.

NOTE: These values and principles listed here are re-posted with permission from www.FreeStandingAgility.com.

 

In serving our clients, we have come to value:

Creating Independence over generating billing
Championing Learning over avoiding risk
Building Relationships over building transactions
Inviting Participation over assigning responsibility

 

We use these Principles to guide our work with clients:

Voluntary engagement of everyone involved in organizational change is an essential requirement for success.

Coaching every single day in an organization creates a serious risk of client dependency and is to be avoided, consistent with common sense and good judgement with respect to client needs.

Organizations are responsible for their own learning. Arms-length, time-boxed working agreements between clients and coaches are essential.

Coaches must look for every opportunity to increase the learning of the organization as a whole, with strong intent to vacate or otherwise evolve the current coaching role as soon as possible.

Coaching requires the willingness to identify any cultural impediments to continuous improvement, and to communicate these to the people in the organization who have the authority to address them.

The primary task of a coach is to help improve the effective results and working lives of the people employed in the organizations they serve.

The ability of an organization to respond to change is the primary measure of progress.

Leaders in an organization must continuously signal positive encouragement, and create safe space for others to think and learn, if positive culture change is to be lasting and effective.

 

Agile Inherits CultureHack

Ok, let’s define culturehacking: here is a definition offered by Jim McCarthy, which is listed in the List of CultureGaming Lingo:
Culture hacking is cultural design that does one or more of the following in notable, admirable ways:

 

 

 

  1. Respects/promotes/extends personal freedoms
  2. Increases personal/group democratic power
  3. Protects personal, psychological, and/or creative safety
  4. Improves the world and/or sets it on a course of continuous improvement
  5. Subverts illegitimate authority
  6. Is especially admirable for one or more of its elegance, cleverness, beauty, efficacy, humor, and other design values of its implementation.

We can see that all of Agile complies with this definition for the most part. Agile is simply a specific kind of culture hack focused on software teams.

The Agile class inherits the CultureHacking class

OK, here is a description of the relationship between Culture Hacking and Agile, in the language of computer programming.  If you are a programmer, I am going to talk to dirty to you now. (Disclosure: To really get aroused by what I am about to say, you have to be an object-oriented programmer…)

If CultureHacking is an inheritable Class in the programming sense, the Agile Class directly inherits from it. That means Agile has all the functionality of the CultureHacking class, and more. And, if permissible, it may override some of the standard behaviors of the CultureHacking class with “custom code”.

Agile is a Culture Hack. And that is all it is. Agile inherits CultureHacking. The CultureHacking class is actually an inherit-only, non-instance-able, abstract class.