Two notes of
caution before I start:
1. This post has nothing to do with Scrum, It does,
however, have a lot to do with agile coaching. (well… more on the coaching
part of it)
2. All notes here are purely
subjective, and are meant mainly as reminders to my future self, your
experience may prove the exact opposite :)
This post
is written in the train, getting back from an awesome coach retreat in Nantes, while
listening to John Cale and trying to record what I learnt, click…
At the end
of the day, Irene posed me back a question I asked her the day before – what
do you take from today and start applying tomorrow?
-
The
answer became clear just when I started answering, and it is even clearer now when
John Cale’s “music for a new society”
fills my ears and heart:
Note #1 - Check in and take an emotional step
back, don’t mix between acute listening (with strong empathy) and emotional
involvement.
The event
consisted of four (fictional) coaching sessions, each with one person (call her
the customer) having a problem (always the same problem) in her agile
implementation, two coaches, and three to four observers, and we practiced four
different ‘techniques’. I played a coach twice, an observer once and a customer
once.
Note #2 – As an observer, you see very clearly
the coach-customer relationship and dynamics, as a customer, you see quite
clearly the problem (at least part of it), but as a coach you are in total darkness, and along with
it comes the responsibility to arrive to a result in a small interval, hence to
let the customer leave in a better position that she started with (be it a
clearer vision, an action-plan, or a decision (this is why note #1 is so important))
Note #3 – the power of silence: I wrote about
it already, but I received feedback on this today, and my (current) conclusion
is that it is extremely powerful. when the customer says something strong,
states a powerful insight, your natural tendency is to affirm it, say “great!”,
restate it, explain it, but saying nothing and absorbing the discomfort of you
two (three in today’s case) proved to be extremely effective (as a feedback
from both observers and customer). HOWEVER, since it puts the customer in a
strong state of discomfort, use it only if the customer trusts you!! otherwise
the discomfort will be used to sabotage the relationship.
While I played the customer, during the improvisation of the scenario, I started feeling the
stress of my (fictional) situation very clearly.
my coach did not propose any solution, but ‘just’
walked me thru a clear vision of the project, and suddenly I saw in a flash all
of the project’s situation like an epiphany, (the problems of unclear
requirements given to dev by the PO, of mistrust by dev, of disappointment by the
PO, they are all due to mistrust, to the inability to accept imperfection in the
other side, which is caused by a strong pressure from top management, and the
solution is to take the dev and product team, and share this insight, so they
understand what I (the fictional I) see. )
If the
solution I came up with was proposed by the coach, I would have treated it as
a shallow one from someone who doesn't know the complexity of the situation.
Coming from me, it seemed extremely powerful, hence
Note #4 – it is waaay better to give way to the
customer to see the problem than to propose a solution.
I'm sure there is more, but this alone was well worth it for me!
Many thanks
to everyone involved! Was a delight!
