Amateur Coach

Cultural factors that affect your designs

Context

COVID-19 has forced the issue. All my teams are now distributed because everyone’s working from home. As a coach, this has given me a few things to think about. Mostly about how I need to rethink many of my coaching strategies, as they mostly take advantage of the rich information flow that’s tacitly a part of face to face.

As part of my attempts at designing new coaching strategies that could be used with entirely remote teams, I’ve been going back to basics. I need to think about how cultural factors play a part in how I approach coaching. I’m using Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions as a framework.

Power Distance

This is the extent to which the less powerful accept and expect power to be distributed unevenly.

Low Power Difference – people prefer to be engaged irregardless of their “position”. They’re more willing to challenge concepts if they disagree, but if they’re persuaded, they become strong advocates. This is where I can find future coaches in order to make myself obsolete.
High Power Difference – people like authority, they prefer solid structures and rules. Agreements can be more easily obtained if they perceive you as being more powerful, but those agreements could swing to the next authority figure that comes along. If enough of the team is like this, then I’ll have to leave something like a “Documented Process with an Owner” to act as an authority figure.

Individualism vs Collectivism

This is to what extent the consequences of an individual’s actions are thought about.

Individualism – These folks take the initiative and act on their needs and desires. They make decisions for themselves. They can be partial to “what’s in it for them” discussions. Maybe focus on how changes can help their career progression.
Collectivism – These folks consider the impact of their social groups such as their teams – e.g. “what will my friends think if I did this”. Discussions about how collectives they care about (their team, their community of practice) can be helped can be effective.

Uncertainty Avoidance

This is to what extent uncertainty and ambiguity are tolerated.

High Uncertainty Avoidance – Prefer deductive approaches, they think things over, make decisions based on reducing the perception of risk (NOTE: that’s independent of actual risk reduction). Also make decisions that follow their preferred deductive strategies (e.g. rational, intuitive etc). Focus more on limiting the downsides, but pay special attention to how they reason.
Low Uncertainty Avoidance – more open to new ideas, better risk taking appetite. Articulate the potential gains that could be achieved.

Tough vs Tender

This is to what extent aggressive competition or nurturing cooperation is preferred. This used to be called masculine/feminine but I prefer more gender/sex agnostic terms as they’re less controversial, especially with new coaching engagements.

Tough – prefer heroic achievements, material gains and competition. Might be worth engaging from a perspective on how the person can stretch themselves, how they can get reward and recognition.
Tender – prefer a more nurturing and caring approach. More interested in a balanced work/life split. Might be an overlap with Collectivism?

Short Term vs Long Term Orientation

This is to what extent time exists in a person’s mental model. From a coaching agile teams perspective, I’d say short term is 1-3 iterations, and long term is 6 months – 1 year.

Short Term – More focus on past and present. Prefer quick results in line with known values and traditions. Language like “low hanging fruit” will probably resonate. These folks will need habit forming nudges to get beyond short term thinking.
Long Term – Better focus on the future. More likely to make trade-offs with short term pain for longer term returns. You’ll need people like these if you’re going to attempt “seismic shifts”.

Indulgence vs Restraint

This is the extent to which a team would act in a way that fulfils their desires, or acts with restraint according to their environmental rules (e.g. office dress code etc)

I’m not really sure if there’s anything I can usefully do with this dimension. However, if something comes up, I’ll amend this post.

Cost cutting and agile teams – finding a way to cope

Disclaimer

This is not a post about avoiding cost cutting.
Not about paying lip service to cost cutting.
Not about hostage situations (we’ve come this far, you have to give us more money)
This is also not aimed at extremely agile organisations that have active executive engagement with delivery teams, they’re the lucky ones.
It’s also not aimed at organisations that have a “courageous executive” supporting an agile approach to delivery. Again, they’re relatively lucky.

Basic Admin

Determine your team’s annual run rate – most likely it’s the base cost to employ your team for a year. Can be awkward if you’re a contractor and have permanent members of staff in your team, but there’s usually a way. Many organisations have either a median cost figure for an “average employee” or a mid-band figure for each employee grade. Make sure you factor in holidays.

It is vital that “team” in this context is the full cross functional team. It makes far less sense to reduce headcount of just one or two roles. By reducing the team skill capacity “relatively evenly”, you reduce the chances that you make a fatal cut. The corollary to this, is if your team is significantly unbalanced when compared to the work they deliver, then consider a rebalancing exercise first.

It’s pessimistic, but reliable to assume that all the other “overhead” costs associated with project execution will remain unaffected. Given the likely conditions, being able to reduce the non-value-add-overheads would be something outside your sphere of influence.

Convert your cost cutting target into an equivalent team burn rate. This gives you an indication of how much smaller your team has to be in order for you to fit within the requested cost envelope.

Your most expensive people are usually more experienced. Therefore, it’s reasonable to assume that your pared down team will not be as capable, and therefore will increase the rate that errors are produced. You have a trade-off decision to make – accept the lower quality output or sacrifice some of your (reduced) “volume output” to maintain your quality levels.

The most significant factor (for me) in making this decision, is how long that system / component needs to be changed/developed. For example a single use component that will only be used for 3 months (i.e. disposable) can be generally tolerated with a significantly lower quality than a system that needs to regularly evolve over a period of a decade. Lehman’s Laws of Software Evolution are worth revisiting for inference.

Assuming that your reduced team will have to maintain their system for a long time (the average life of an IT system is about a decade, if this article is to be believed – “Software Lifetime and its Evolution Process over Generations”) then you have no real choice when it comes to quality or output – you have to prioritise quality.

That brings you to your next challenge. How do you compensate for the fact that your team will simply be not as skilled once you lose some members? Simply continuing your team’s way of working and hoping for the best is unlikely to succeed – with the reduction in expertise, your team will produce more bugs.

Your basic strategy should consist of two strands – to cope with the increased bug density, and to reduce that skills deficit. To cope with the bugs, use a suitably balanced combination of tactics:

detect bugs earlier in the lifecycle,
reduce the complexity of the bugs that are found,
reduce the cognitive load required to fix the bugs, and
reduce the impact of the bugs that do make it through your delivery process unnoticed

A word of caution on the reduction of skills deficit strand – it’s a much slower solution than introducing coping mechanisms for the increased number of bugs and cannot be relied on as the primary solution strategy for short-medium term improvements.

When developing your mitigation tactics, it is sensible to avoid as many options as possible that rely on individuals in teams “working harder” or working with “elevated skills” as those are unrealistic. The lever you can exert the most significant change with is team behaviour, specifically team ways of working. It would also be sensible to incorporate working patterns that boost individual learning, as that is an approach to (eventually) reducing that expertise gap.

Detect bugs earlier

All bugs are detected because of an incongruity between what is observed and what is expected from a model (regardless of whether or not this model is tangibly identified or implicitly part of the knowledge that your product owner / subject matter expert / developer / architect etc. has. Each person / role would have a different model representation and therefore would be able to detect different bugs.

One strategy for detecting bugs earlier, is to compare observations to as many of these mental models as soon as a possible, for example by having product owners or SMEs be actively embedded within your delivery teams, working alongside the developers daily. The most established strategy for increasing visibility of the work being done as early as humanly possible is pairing, especially pairing with different roles (e.g. developer and analyst, or analyst and tester). Pairing is also one of the most effective mechanisms available for reducing that skills deficit.

Another strategy for detecting bugs earlier, is to perform downstream activities sooner (for example production deployments). There are associated costs – for example the delivery strategy will need to be based on incremental development where thin slices of “complete” functionality are built, integrated and deployed. Organisations that are more sequential in nature (for example, organisations that have a difficult / scary / time consuming / manual “route-to-live” process) tend to get the biggest benefit from attempting this, but they’re also the organisations that are the most afraid to try.

Reducing the overall duration between creating the bug, detecting it, and fixing it will reduce the cognitive load required to fix the bug, as the team’s working memory will already be loaded with the appropriate context. Discovering a bug “a long time” after it was created will require significantly more mental preparation to re-gain the mental models in play at the time of creating the bug.

Reduce the complexity of bugs

Given that all bugs are coded, the only fundamentally viable strategy to reduce the complexity of bugs that are found is to write simpler bugs. I find Einstein’s original quote can be helpful to communicate this message:

“It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience”
Albert Einstein

A scientific approach to analysis can be helpful as it can help reduce the number of “implementation patterns” that exist in your IT solution. That may introduce learning curve challenges, e.g. if your delivery teams are unaccustomed with hypothesis driven development.

Structured techniques such as test driven development can also help, as they help manage the “thinking complexity” of software development, as well as have the side effect of producing tests to be able to continuously monitor your code quality over time (even more helpful when your team’s expertise has been lowered). But watch out for common problems in tests – e.g. https://www.yegor256.com/2018/12/11/unit-testing-anti-patterns.html

But the biggest strategy to use to help reduce the complexity (and number) of bugs in your system, is to write less code.

Reduce the cognitive load

Employing strategies that reduce the complexity of bugs also have the side effect of reducing the cognitive load needed to understand and fix the bug. Additional strategies can include:

Working in smaller blocks would also serve to act as a limiter for the amount of complexity that can possibly be present in each block. Work partitioning techniques such as user story decomposition can help.

Techniques that use both visual and auditory inputs are easier to process by people, as the two modes are processed by different channels and use different working memories. Techniques such as Rubber Duck Debugging are a form of a think aloud protocol where the auditory channel can help an individual formulate a hypothesis along a fundamentally different line to what they can see, thereby increasing their effective cognitive ability.

Working in larger groups (for example, see mob programming) can be an extremely effective technique for always maintaining a high degree of cognitive capacity consistently as the overall effect is to smooth the natural peaks and troughs in the cognitive abilities of the individuals (e.g. some people are morning people, others are night owls etc., but there’ll always be someone “firing on all cylinders”). Linus’ Law is a concise articulation – given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

Reduce the impact of bugs that escape

It’s inevitable that bugs will escape into production. The final dimension to consider is about recovery. The easier and faster it is to recover from a production incident, the less severe the effects of the problem. Recovery time is spent:

locating the root cause of the fault
fixing the root cause
delivering the fix

Locating the fault: there are two basic (and complementary if required) steps to take. Your triage and fault finding processes could determine if the bug was introduced as part of the last release, as well as where specifically in your solution the fault lies. The first piece of insight could take considerably less time than the second. If the fault was introduced as part of the last release, one possible early response could be to roll-back the release, which act to stop further failures from occurring. A robust fix can then be developed and a new release planned. This naturally comes with an “opportunity cost” associated with not having access to the rest of the functionality also present in the pulled release. This opportunity cost can be virtually eliminated, but it will require the ability to release every single change independently. Development and deployment strategies (e.g. using trunk based development and feature toggles) can greatly reduce the complexity associated with this.

Fixing the root cause: strategies outlined earlier to reduce the cognitive load and identify bugs earlier also help here.

Delivering the fix: This is inherently limited by the speed, flexibility, resilience and degree of automation of your route-to-live processes. The single biggest change you can make to drastically improve your delivery processes is to reduce the size of each release (get as close to release each minor change independently) and repeat the release processes constantly (I’ve experienced multiple releases a day into production, even in a public sector context). Attempting to do this will identify all of the sticking points and problems associated with your route-to-live processes, and will give you areas to target improvements. It is almost always helpful to decouple software deployments (technical, automated, controlled by delivery teams) from business releases (business triggered, business features are toggled, aligned with wider organisational change programmes) as you are then able to decouple automation improvements from business change readiness.

Final Thoughts

These are useful strategies for coping when your delivery teams have to compensate for a reduction in their base capabilities. However, there is nothing fundamentally preventing delivery organisations from just implementing these strategies to increase the effectiveness of the teams that they currently have. Is anything stopping you?

The Structure of a Coaching Intervention

Coaching is an act of leadership. The main purpose of coaching a team is to improve the overall effectiveness of that team. Three key dimensions in assessing this are:

Productive output that meets or exceeds the standards of quality/quantity/timeliness of the consumer
Social processes the team use that enhance the future capability of the members to work interdependently as a team
The group experience that contributes positively to the learning and personal wellbeing of the members

There is an additional factor, often classed as crucial to team effectiveness – the quality of personal relationships within the team. However, I’d class any work done with the team that directly addresses problems with personal relationships to be counselling in nature, and isn’t in scope for this post. In my experience, when the delivery effectiveness of a team improves, the morale boost in the team members has a side-effect of improving personal relationships.

The relative importance of these three dimensions will vary over time, but successful teams always make sure that they are all considered and balanced over time, never completely sacrificing one to optimise the other.

The effectiveness of a team at performing a task is influenced by these three key performance factors:

The effort a team expends
The appropriateness of the strategies and techniques that the team uses
The skills and knowledge that the team can bring to bear

Therefore, in order to have any sort of effect on a team’s performance (beyond the Hawthorne Effect), coaching will need to help one or more of these factors.

There are three important factors to consider when delivering a coaching intervention, and all three must be balanced in order for the intervention to be effective:

Content
Delivery approach
Timing

Coaching Content

The messages that are conveyed during a coaching intervention typically conform to one or more of these three main patterns:

Motivational: coaching that addresses effort, e.g. inspiring team members to increase effort, or minimising freewheeling
Consultative: coaching that addresses strategy choice, method selection, helps teams determine locally optimised methods
Educational: coaching that addresses skills and knowledge gaps

It is important to use the right content to address the specific challenges that the team has. For example, if the challenge is a shortfall in specialised skills needed for a task, providing a highly rousing motivational speech isn’t going to help.

Three Main Coaching Approaches (plus a fourth – “eclectic”)

The reality is that most coaching interventions will have aspects that originate from more than one of these three approaches.

Process Consultation: structured/clinical examination of interactions from a workflow perspective:
- between the team and external teams/stakeholders/etc
- internal to the team
Behavioural Models: feedback on individual and team behaviours, mainly focussing on relationships and how feedback is given and received; often involves operant conditioning
Development Coaching: identification of areas that need improvement, along with focussed time set aside for learning / training sessions
Eclectic interventions: ad hoc interventions, with no specific underlying theoretical model; most commonly limited to personal relationships when coaches aren’t familiar with the specifics of the work the team is doing

It is important to use the most appropriate coaching style / approach to suit the context, the audience and the message. For example, when working with an inexperienced team to improve the effectiveness of their in-flight process flow, it is better to use their real work and their real process as opposed to a classroom styled session with an abstract case study.

Intervention Points

Teams go through different phases as part of them starting, working on, and finally finishing, a piece of work. There are several broad model categories that attempt to describe the team and their approach to work temporally (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_development ). Two patterns that I’m broadly aware of are:

Incremental (or Linear) Models (e.g. Tuckman)
Punctuated Equilibrium Models (e.g. Gersick)

The interesting thing (for me) is that I’ve seen groups of people becoming teams display characteristics found in both. For example, I see teams regularly using retrospectives, but for the most part, the improvements are relatively narrow and focussed in effect. However, there are usually a small number of seismic shifts in ways of working – usually as a result of a significant “precipice” being felt. The most common precipice is the realisation by the team that they’re halfway through their estimated (or constrained) timeframe. These events are where coaching can deliver the most impactful benefits and are typically found at:

the beginning,
the midpoint, and
the end

A side-effect of teams splitting large blocks of work down into smaller pieces (e.g. Epics, Stories etc.) is that these events occur far more frequently – each user story has a beginning/midpoint/end set that could be used as opportunities for coaching interventions. I’ve rarely seen coaching interventions at user story boundary, but I have seen them at Epic or Feature level.

Other team processes that also create opportunities for beginning/midpoint/ending events to occur include the use of iterative (or sprint) based development, using a delivery lifecycle (such as DAD’s risk/value lifecycle) etc.

Designing a Coaching Intervention

The design and structure of a team has a significant effect on the effectiveness of coaching interventions. “Well designed” teams gain more value from a coaching intervention, even a poorly executed coaching intervention. “Poorly designed” teams can suffer negatively during a poorly executed coaching intervention. I’ll focus on team design in a separate post. For this post, I’ll assume no ability to fundamentally change the structure of a team to better match the workload.

Looking at the three performance factors, what are the underlying constraints? If a team has a constrained “strategy & technique” factor, then any attempts to change the execution strategy is likely to be met with frustration.

Once you have some clarity on the performance factor you can help improve, pay attention to when you introduce the intervention. Teams at the start of a piece of work are generally unwilling (or sometimes even unable) to have an informed discussion about what their optimum delivery strategy should be – it’s usually better to get started and then make an adjustment at the midpoint event (when they have some actual experience to base the decision on).

Target Performance Factor	Effective	Avoid
Effort	– Motivational Coaching – The beginning	– Consultative Coaching – Educational Coaching
Strategy & Technique	– Consultative Coaching – The midpoint	– The end
Skill & Knowledge	– Educational Coaching – The end	– Motivational Coaching – The beginning

Once you’ve got a sense of the target performance factor, the timing of the coaching intervention and the key messages that needs to be conveyed, the next step is the execution approach. It’s worth investing effort in explicitly designing coaching interventions (not to mention ensure sufficient variety to keep things interesting for you and your team). However, there are some natural alignments between the conceptual approaches and the content to be conveyed which could help get you started.

Coaching Content	Approach
Motivational	Behavioural Coaching – personal motivation, team camaraderie. Developmental Coaching – focussed time set aside for “kick off events” (such as an Inception workshop or a Visioning workshop).
Consultative	Process Coaching – clear understanding on pros and cons of alternative techniques so a mid-flow course correction can be made.
Educational	Development Coaching – periods of reflection and improvement via a team retrospective, knowledge transfer via lunch & learn sessions, skills acquisition sessions using learning katas.

Courageous Executives and the Permafrost

Last week I started to think about how different parts of an organisation have different views on what is important.

This is nothing new. Why should I keep reading?

I think the existence of that permafrost layer is problematic if want to be inventive or innovative. If you’re looking to evolve into a “courageous executive” then credibility associated with reducing that middle layer could be useful. However, to stand a chance of success when you “fight the machine”, you should pay attention to the basics, including:

the degree of effective support you’ll have,
the culture underpinning your sub-organisation, and
how different the “volumes” are when comparing your sub-organisation’s culture with the wider organisation’s culture.

In this context, “sub-organisation refers to the subset of the organisation under your sphere of influence, either formally via org chart or informally via your influence, credibility, relationships etc.

If you intend to create space for your organisation to innovate and experiment, then it’d be advantageous if it is more naturally innovative and experimental. That requires a different attitude to failure than when saving face is a preferred reaction to failure. To paraphrase, you’ve got to shrink that middle layer (conceptually).

A useful strategy that can reduce the size/significance of this middle layer is dealing with fear from a cultural standpoint. Something that can help the formulation of specific strategies is an understanding of how the Loss Aversion and Loss Attention cognitive biases manifest in the individuals that you identify as being significant anchor points in this middle layer.

Loss Aversion: It is better to not lose £10 than it is to find £10.
Loss Attention: Tasks that involve losses get more attention than tasks that do not.

A clue to something that seemed to help me is that bottom level. When this scenario was presented to delivery teams, they didn’t seem worried about saving face when faced with that hypothetical scenario. Digging further, it wasn’t that face/reputation was unimportant, it’s that they didn’t care all that much about what the “middle management types” thought about them (it’s how individuals seemed to interpret the scenario). That middle management group was not considered to be their judging community. They were far more concerned about their reputation amongst other delivery folks. For example, a developer might try and force a software library to work, applying workaround after workaround, instead of just accepting that the library was the wrong fit for what’s needed (because they wanted a reputation of being able to make anything work). However, that same developer might not be concerned if their boss’s peers don’t think much of them, if they don’t care about the office politics.

That got me thinking that perhaps one way of reducing that awkward middle layer, was to change their perceptions about what was important to the community that they considered was judging them. I think this is different to tackling their priorities head on, in that it’s less confrontational, so stands a better chance of working (at least partially). That middle layer would need to view organisationally significant things like money or time or customers etc. to be something that could be truly lost (so that their normal loss aversion and attention biases would influence them in ways that were beneficial, if you were indeed trying to grow into a courageous executive). They would also need to feel that personal reputation could not be lost in the same way.

Changes to that community can be as a result of external or internal pressures. Assuming you’re not “senior enough” to be able to enforce a new operating model the community must comply with, your more effective strategies would be the ones that originate from inside that community.

Potentially Useful Infiltration Techniques

Repeated Messaging: Humans are influenced by exposure. The first time something controversial is heard, it’s shocking. After the hundredth time, it barely registers consciously. Interestingly though, the subconscious still registers. In that way, people can be programmed. By repeating your message regularly into the target community (and with variations to keep it interesting), over time you’ll lower resistance to your ideas.
Let others get credit, even if the ideas are yours: Having others in the community get an endorphin rush when they share an idea influences them to repeat the behaviour. So it’s your idea really, so what? You’re aiming for something else. Besides, a few people will know anyway. That “inside knowledge” can be a powerful aide to your attempts at growing an organisational culture that has you as an executive – it creates a sense of belonging between you and them, which if nurtured can transform into loyalty.
Be seen to be visible to the next few power levels up: For the hierarchically minded, seeing you playing nicely with their boss and their boss’s boss, can signal that it’s more acceptable for them to align with what you’re saying. It has a secondary effect to help you gauge whether or not what you want to do is palatable to the next few levels up the power structure. If it is, then it can be an indicator that there is space for you to grow your leadership potential.

Save Money or Save Face – What would you choose?

Thought Experiment

You’re in charge of “A Thing” and are accountable for the successful execution of the objectives that the Thing has (e.g. you’re the CTO in charge of the IT Department, or you’re the Project Manager of a strategic project). Which of these scenarios is worse?

A decision you make results in a significant financial loss for the Thing. However, you do not suffer any loss of face (e.g. you can successfully employ the “circumstances outside my control” defence).
A decision you make results in the Thing avoiding a significant financial loss. However, it goes against the political winds and you suffer a significant loss of face.

Just what is important?

I’ve been trying understand how the notion of “what is important” varies in organisational structures. A pattern that seems to be emerging is that what is of primary importance falls into one of three zones.

The first zone values money, externally mandated timescales (e.g. legislation etc)
The second zone values their personal reputation, their personal “empire”
The third zone values their use of time – being able to spend it on valuable or meaningful work

These three zones look very similar to the zones in organisations when thinking about appetite for change (e.g. very senior leadership is the first zone, the delivery teams are the third zone and the “permafrost layer” are the second zone).

The thickness of each of the three zones/layers is an organisationally specific function, and seems to exist no matter what the scale (for example, I’ve even seen this sort of structure in project teams, for example when a product owner is too busy and a business analyst operates as a message passing proxy). The existence of this middle layer correlates with size, but is not caused by size. One factor that reinforces the middle layer is fear of failure, which is heavily influenced by the personal history of everyone concerned. Given any degree of employee churn, I think it’s impossible to have zero middle layer.

The important question for me, is so what? I’ll look at that next.

Building a Knowledge Sharing Community

Why am I trying to establish this?

Having an effective knowledge sharing strategy that my consultants and coaches use effectively can significantly boost the quality of their deliverables on engagements, as their access to knowledge and experiences will be richer. Richer knowledge leads to better decisions which lead to better outcomes blah blah blah.

No really, why?

The truth is far less grandiose. And much more personal. I want better relationships with my colleagues. And the main reason for that is selfish. When I’ve got something interesting/gnarly to solve, I’d MUCH rather solve it collaboratively with someone. I find the ideas that come out of a buzzing pair/trio are generally FAR superior (not just in terms of merit, but also the emotional responses – things like surprise, delight and even just pure joy) than anything I’d come up with on my own. A major contributor to that heightened emotional response is the fact that it’s a shared experience – this has a reinforcing effect on the individuals.

This topic is also related to my post on Courageous Executives – I think being able to create an environment where knowledge and help is shared freely and easily is helpful in establishing a progressive organisational culture.

Some things to consider

The first thing I need, is critical mass. I need enough colleagues with sufficient latent willingness to participate to increase the odds of interesting interactions to occur.

The second thing, is to recognise the reality of the group dynamic. I work for a consulting organisation, and like most others, they staff people on engagements. Those engagements have teams. Back at base though, I’m grouped with a set of similar people under the same line manager. That line manager’s “team” is not a team from a behavioural dynamics perspective, regardless of how the individuals describe themselves. Esther Derby is my go-to source for concise articulation of what it means to be a team.

The third fundamental aspect to consider, is how people participate. The “1/9/90” rule of thumb has been around for over a decade now, potentially longer. A quick recap: For online groups, there are three broad categories of interaction

1% of the population will initiate a discussion thread
9% of the population will actively contribute to discussion threads
90% of the population will lurk

I also reasoned that in order to sell what I wanted people to do, it needed to be more engaging/arresting than just these numbers (which no doubt many of my target audience would have heard already, so there’d be little impact). While daydreaming about how to go about launching this, an idea flitted across my mind, which amused me. I ran with it, just to see how far I could go. Fishing.

Lures: These would be the “1% and 9%” of the population. Their job is to make the environment interesting/appealing enough for the others to participate.
Fish: These are the 90% of the population who lurk. My objective is to convert them into lures by engaging them.

Above all else, the most important thing to remember was that knowledge management was all about people. We have to avoid the temptation to create yet-another-document-repository, as those end up generally being pointless (keeping a stack of documents current is a huge time investment, so very few people do – the documents become outdated quickly and users lose confidence in the repository as a source of relevant information).

How did we start?

The first step was to get a sense of that latent willingness that I needed. To avoid unnecessary confusion, I stuck to a typical technique – I ran a workshop. The stated objective was to understand the key topic areas / themes that as a collective, we had some self-professed expertise in. The exam question was

write down topics, regardless of scale, that you would be happy for a colleague to come to you if they needed some help

Approaching the audience in this way would nudge them into feeling valued from the outset (the alternative would be giving them a candidate set of themes and asking them to sign up. The list at the end of both approaches would be the same, but the first scenario would have far more engaged individuals as they’d own the list). This workshop also let me find co-conspirators.

Then what?

In a word, admin. We had to create a navigable map of the topics that the audience had supplied (it would help people find the right place to ask questions). In the end, we settled on a very basic two-level tree consisting of high-level themes and more detailed topics. That allowed the grouping of individuals to be based on themes with related topics. The main rationale was that as experience and knowledge changed over time, the specifics of the topics would evolve, but the main theme would remain constant. That allowed for stability of membership – and that membership stability is a significant factor in determining whether or not a theme would survive. The candidate themes also had candidate lures – they were the list of people who volunteered for the topics that were under that theme.

We had to sell the themes to the potential lures.

We also had to set some expectations about what being a lure entailed. By this point the term “Theme Guardian” had started to emerge as the role that was to be played. This is what we ended up with.

Guardians own their Theme
Guardians are responsible for the quality and integrity of the Theme’s content
Guardians should invest in PDCA cycles to improve the environment in the Theme.
Guardians need to evolve their vision and strategy for their Theme.
Have “something” to help new joiners understand your Theme.
- This doesn’t necessarily have to be a document. It could be quarterly intro sessions on WebEx (for example).
Set expectations of how you’d like the community to operate – and remind your community regularly

I find analogies very useful as abstraction models to help me understand a domain/problem. In the event that at least some of the candidate guardians operated in a similar manner, I picked a couple of potential models that they could use to refine their thinking about how they wished to operate:

Town Planners and Communal Spaces. What makes some public spaces incredibly successful, and others turn into ghost town?
Aboriginal Storytelling. In particular, explore the claims that the Dreamtime stories have remained intact for over 10,000 years without degrading, despite only having a verbal/pictorial, not written form.

Selling the concept

Now that we had a starting position (themes, candidate guardians, some guardian responsibilities), we needed to launch. To help that, we produced some general use guidance on themes:

People are at the core of any successful knowledge management strategy.
Information held in a person’s head is updated as a by-product of things that person does. Information stored in documents requires additional explicit effort.
For a Theme to be useful, knowledge needs to flow from person to person.
If a Theme’s only got one person who’s interested, it’s not a Theme.
When a question is asked, directly answer. Even if it’s been asked before. Never rely on a document (or link etc.) to answer for you. If necessary, end your answer with “this document/link/other goes further” (or words to that effect).
Think about what your “background radiation” looks like. Themes need to feel active otherwise you won’t get people stopping by and asking questions.
Have a variety in the complexity / subtlety / nuanced nature of the conversations and discussions. For example, if you only have very high brow discussions, you’re likely to put off the inexperienced. If you only have introductory content, then the experts may not participate.

Launch Day

These were our objectives

Start small: We picked one Theme that the co-conspirators were willing to act as Guardians or as participating members. We would attempt to orchestrate and create an active community for that theme.
Momentum: We wanted to create some observer habits in the wider community. With enough people checking in daily (for example), we’d greatly increase the chances that conversations would spark up. But we had to kick start the making-it-worth-everyone’s-time process.
Win over an influential sceptic: Having a known sceptic promote what we were trying to do would help persuade other sceptics that there may be some mileage in investing in this strategy.

What happens/happened next?

1 Week After Launch

There’s a smattering of interest from a handful of people. A few posts have been made and there has been some commenting on posts. Some of the early efforts from the co-conspirators have been around motivating and inspiring the community to participate. There is some optimism around that this approach feels different (probably because it isn’t tools oriented).

Predictions

It’s still early days, but these are my (current) predictions.

1 Month After Launch

The conversation topics broadly split into a handful of themes. Most of the themes appear to be consistent with what emerged from the initial workshop, but the actual topics discussed are quite different. There is some dissonance from the earlier adopters as there are multiple unrelated themes being discussed in the same “place”, causing confusion.

3 Months After Launch

Enough interest in different themes has triggered new spaces on the platform for the conversations about those themes to be segregated, to simplify the cognitive load on the users. There is some frustration from some members who are interested in multiple topics, most likely due to how the individuals have modelled the interactions mentally – e.g. why should two people who are talking about a range of subjects have to keep switching which “chatroom” they converse in. Relationships are still point-to-point.

6 Months After Launch

Most of the theme chatrooms are now dormant, most of the activity has gravitated towards one or two Themes. There’s some blurring between the competing mental models – relationships are person-to-person and person-to-community.

Analysing my predictions

One of the most significant challenges I’ve seen in Knowledge Management things is the belief (usually tacit) that it’s all about the content. I believe it’s all about the relationship, and the knowledge of who to talk to when a person needs to know something. My predictions have a base assumption that Knowledge can be structured and organised at a fine grain. I think that’s an assumption that’s also being made by the majority. I’m expecting this assumption to be proven to be false and that we will pivot back to trying to be more of a community than a knowledge repository. Looking at the population numbers, I don’t believe there’s any need for more than two or possibly three communities (eventually).

Are you limited by your Agile Coach Sourcing Strategy?

This is about a revolving door programme of hiring coaches. One of the things I’ve observed regularly, is that these kinds of hiring programmes create an implicit timeframe by which improvements must be “delivered”. In itself, that’s not necessarily a problem. What is a problem, is that the timeframes are nowhere near long enough (IMHO) if the aim is to change the culture.

How you measure your coaches also has an obvious effect on your outcomes. Procurement plays a big part here. I’ve seen a lot of coaches who have their success defined by some variation of how much effort they expend. Training courses run. Numbers of teams “coached”. Amount of collateral documented in a wiki/repository/etc. It’s even worse if that’s also what the coach genuinely believes is a measure of success.

It’s easy to buy the visible stuff. However, the visible stuff has no sustaining ability – that comes from the hidden stuff. Agile’s a culture, but how do you buy a culture? It’s much easier to buy a new set of processes, dress code, office layout, stationery, reporting templates etc.

By buying the visible stuff, you easily get to a set “maturity” of what-to-do (because your coach has implemented this a million times), but you might lose the learning-about-why and your ability to improve at some point comes to a crashing halt when your coach runs out of instructions to give you (or they leave). You’ve substituted thinking for doing what you’re told because an expert tells you.

One of the things that could lessen the likelihood of this happening to you is longevity. Although that does bring its own set of challenges. Longevity can come from humans, or guidance that’s respected enough to be followed (or at least attempted) – e.g. the guided continuous improvement advice from Disciplined Agile Delivery’s collateral.

Longevity can increase the chances that the underlying factors get some attention – beliefs, culture, mindset. But longevity is hard. When things go wrong (and lets face it, things always go wrong), it’s easy to blame the changes that are being attempted. I’ve often seen blame being thrown about as a precursor to the environment becoming more toxic. In those environments, unless there’s sufficient emotional investment, coaches leave.

In my view, the most effective counteracting force against that toxicity, is leadership. Your senior leadership must have the trust of the members of the organisation. However, trust doesn’t come from great speeches but from credibility. That means the senior leadership must also evolve and adopt a more collaborative/open/trusting/etc culture. They must behave differently. And they also need to provide regular, ongoing and consistent reassurance that the environment is safe so that teams can evolve to a more agile culture with no repercussions for steps that don’t quite make it on the first try. I think that works because humans emulate leaders. If the leaders are open and collaborative, then the teams are more likely to also become more open and collaborative.

Courageous Executives – Coping without one

The notion of a “Courageous Executive” is not a new one. However, what is changing, is the awareness of how significant this organisational pattern can be when it comes to disruption and innovation. Here’s a link from mid-2017 from one of my former employers on the topic.

Relying on a courageous executive to solve all of your “agile transformation” related problems only really stands a chance of working if they have enough authority/persuasiveness to be able to get their way in the CxO arena. That might be fine for forward thinking / dynamic / exciting / other-superlative organisations, but what if your organisation doesn’t have that open culture? Or you don’t have access to someone willing to stick their head over the parapet? What if (like a large percentage of the working population), you work for a late-majority or laggard organisation?

I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing recently. Mostly because many of the bigger problems I face in my work life these days are all around how my large bureaucratic clients can work effectively with large, bureaucratic suppliers and partners, when everyone states they want “to do agile” [sic] and yet are afraid to change anything about their operating or engagement models.

I’ve been trying to organise my thoughts around “difficult conversations that are simplified/made trivial if a courageous executive existed”. I’ve also been trying to organise any messaging I deliver to my clients to make it easier to convert an existing executive (perhaps with a courageous bias) into someone who can be labelled as a Courageous Executive [massive disclaimer: I’m in no way going anywhere near a formalised definition, just pushing the boundaries of what my gut feels like]. I’ll write up as I go and link to this post.

Agile Maturity – Getting past “Shu”

Why am I writing this? I read this post a little while ago and I wanted to revisit what I thought about Shu-Ha-Ri.

Context

My current employer (very large IT Consultancy) has gone through a significant sheep-dipping exercise. It’s an extremely large organisation (employee headcount isn’t that far away from the population of Edinburgh) and has placed an organisational big bet on “Agile”. So pretty much everyone is being trained by a combination of classroom and online learning modules, backed up by an internal certification scheme, with employee targets and financially significant objectives (e.g. a small part of the performance related pay element is only accessible with certification).

It’s had a degree of success. It’s certainly helped provide an air of confidence for the sales teams and a degree of comfort for potential clients (especially those categorised as Late Majority or Laggards, who are by nature sceptical of new things. And yes do have to stifle the odd smile or two whenever I use the word “new” to describe “Agile”).

The Problem

My problem with this, is it sort of misses the point of “agile” (this in itself is a poorly worded sentence, as agile was never really the point, but it’ll do for now).

What this sheep-dipping exercise seems to have done (from what I’ve been able to observe), is install a new set of practices to be employed religiously. Some of these new practices appear to be little more than a branded re-skin (my “favourite” example of this is the use of the User Story to contain all the requirements documentation, and must be written and signed off before it’s given to a development team to deliver).

If I’m being optimistic, the installation of new techniques (mostly the visible ones such as a stand-up) have increased the overall delivery quality by a small amount (I vaguely recall one presentation by Mark Lines that quoted a 6% improvement for teams that only adopted the mechanical aspects of Scrum, but I’m happy to be corrected).

If I’m being cynical, it’s the fight back of a hierarchical command and control culture against the invading collaborative and flat and open culture.

Not all bad news though

There are glimmers of hope though. There is more recognition of the need for greater levels of autonomy and empowerment, however limited the concessions may be. That is what the rest of this post will focus on.

Why “Shu Ha Ri”?

Simply because I found the “Learning to cook” analogy along with a catchy (ok, catchy is pushing it) slogan to be one of the more effective memory aids I’ve experienced. It also gave me an extremely lightweight structure on which I could help a “continuous learning” mentality to take hold.

Shu

This was clearly our starting position. As “Trainee Chefs”, the most favourable outcome from an intensive training programme, was the awareness of a lot of pieces of jargon, with perhaps the basic knowledge required to use a “standard configuration” of rules and practices.

One of the big “shorter term” goals for new recruits is to develop the equivalent of muscle memory – the imprinting of the basic rules and practices such that they can be performed without a great deal of cognitive effort (the cognitive effort would be reserved for the actual work being done). In food terms, these folk can now make a respectable standard lasagne.

In theory, as teams become more comfortable with the set of practices, they’ll begin to experiment, and vary some of the specifics, in an attempt to test the boundaries of their practices. In theory.

So what prevents nature from taking it’s course?

I think a big contributing factor is a belief, reinforced by authority (e.g. the hierarchy) thinking that the agile stuff is all about the work. Better quality software, more aligned with user needs etc. In other words, it’s about what you do.

That perspective misses (IMHO) a more valuable element of this agile culture. I think the stuff about the quality and alignment is valuable, but for me it’s a side effect of having an entity (i.e. the team) that is very adaptable and can adjust itself to be able to cope with any scenario it finds itself in. I think a key trait needed for adaptability is to always be curious about why you do something. And then do something with that insight.

At least, that what seems to be happening in pockets at my employer. Newly formed teams are given runbooks to operate (the what), but little in the way of support to help nurture the curiosity about why those techniques work, or even what the tradeoffs associated with those techniques are (all practices have tradeoffs, even the “blindingly obvious everyone should be doing this” sort). The vast majority of the coaching support accessible to the team is optimised to roll out the runbook and maintain compliance to said runbook.

Why? I think it’s a return-on-investment calculation made by authority figures. The biggest percentage gain per unit coaching effort is the gain that takes you from zero to non-zero. Installing some basic agile practices into a low maturity team will have a significant effect on their Velocity (story points per iteration) in a fairly small timeframe. A few coaching interventions later and their Velocity is likely to have improved significantly. But then the gains become harder to find. Improvements become more marginal. Sometimes a seismic shift is needed, but that would have short term detrimental effects on Velocity. And for environments that believe that output is the important thing, then getting less stuff per iteration is a BAD THING and must be avoided.

It’s also a pattern that can be reinforced by the having a revolving door policy on your agile coaches (IMHO. I think I’ll have a go at blogging about this, if nothing else to help me crystallise my thoughts on the topic).

Is there anything we can do?

Assuming there’s enough truth in the hypothesis to be worth doing something about it, what can/should we do about it?

The aim of whatever-we-do-to-improve-matters has got to be to increase the ability of a team to question why-it-does-something along with an intrinsic confidence to be able to invent a change to their process. The ability to invent will dramatically increase the self sufficiency of a team.

Both of these elements – asking “why” and being able to invent, require a team to have a significant degree of psychological safety. Creating the conditions for the degree of psychological safety to improve is a core function of leadership.

With sufficient psychological safety (a subjective term), comes the capability for changing. What it doesn’t guarantee, is whether or not change will occur, or whether the direction of change is a “viable” one or not. This is where additional support is helpful, potentially using some form of expert. Agile coaches can be helpful here, especially if they’re working in the open (e.g. via using some variation of a guided continuous improvement strategy).

Ha

Something a good Agile Coach is well placed to do, is help their team understand the underlying models that underpin the team’s ways of working. That would help the teams get to that deeper understanding of why their techniques work, the pros and cons etc. That can create the conditions for much more interesting process changes to be created by the team. These highly context specific and tailored techniques are likely to be more effective than more “generic” equivalents.

To me, that sounds like the beginnings of Ha.

Evolving beyond SAFe using the DAD toolkit

Intended Audience

So you’ve bought into the SAFe brand, adopted it pretty much wholesale. You might even have had some successes after the initial adoption. But at some point, you’ve hit a plateau (or a major problem that you simply can’t get past with just SAFe’s guidance). Perhaps you need a shorter time to market than a quarterly planning cycle gives you. What do you do?

The rest of this post is structured very loosely as a set of steps. They generally make sense as a progression, but the reality is that for even remotely complex contexts, if you attempted to follow this line through just once, you’re likely to end up with more pain. There are feedback loops all over the place, and artificially trimming them into a single line is a waterfall-esque strategy for complexity management, which is suboptimal.

Step 0 – Don’t Panic!

You’re already on a transformation journey (Before SAFe -> Adopting SAFe -> Using SAFe -> ?). This is just the next step.

Step 1 – Start where you are

There’s no sense ramping up the psychological harm by saying you were wrong. Elements such as the Prime Directive of Retrospectives also echo the underlying fact that at the time, you made the best decision possible given the data you had access to. Now that you have more (or perhaps just different) data, it’s time to make the best decision possible today.

Step 2 – Take Stock

Look at what you have (in this case, SAFe) and focus on the mindset, and principles, as those generally remain valid. What will change is the practices, techniques and strategies that you use in order to sustain that mindset and deliver value continuously. For example, “Alignment” is great. SAFe’s implementation strategy for achieving alignment is generally by starting from the Portfolio level and “working down”. Other strategies include starting from the team and “working outwards”. Changing the scale of programmes of work (e.g. by picking an architectural style that facilitates this) can change the relative importance of alignment from being a pre-requisite into more of a side-effect. Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) has an Enterprise Aware principle that can be used to facilitate a discussion about Alignment.

Step 3 – Visualise The Implicit

Visualise your Ways of Working. (WoW). If you’ve adopted SAFe, then the SAFe “Big Picture” is probably it, or very close to it. DAD has a Program Lifecycle, which bar some label changes is very similar. Once your WoW is visual, overlay it with DAD terminology. This is a form of gap analysis and it should help you turn implicit process knowledge into explicit knowledge. The biggest insights would come from the associated “Process Goals” for the practices you are using. That’s a big step towards understanding why a practice is used. SAFe’s guidance is very good at telling you what to do and has some coverage of why it’s worthwhile. What is lacking though, are alternative approaches for achieving the same objective. That’s where DAD can offer significant advantages.

Step 4 – Target Process Improvements

With a map of process goals, now it becomes possible to target improvements to struggling areas. The areas to target will be highly context specific, and it’s worth using some root-cause-analysis techniques (e.g. 5 Whys or Ishikawa diagrams) to find them. Using a process goal as an anchor, you are more easily able to explore alternative strategies to solve the problem you’ve got. For example, if your current processes struggle with effective delivery of complex non-functional-requirements, then something like http://disciplinedagiledelivery.com/strategies-for-verifying-non-functional-requirements/ could help.

Step 4A – Have Meaningful Conversations

An interesting side effect of making your process goals visible, is you can engage your teams and stakeholders in a more meaningful discussion about the approach to the work. This can create space for highly innovative and inventive strategies for problem solving and value delivery to emerge.

Or in other words, instead of only relying on your team to think-outside-the-box, you get to redefine-what-you-mean-by-box.

Step 5 – Rinse and Repeat – Ad Nauseum

Don’t forget one of the pillars of the (SAFe) House of Lean – Relentless Improvement. Your drive to improve shouldn’t end. One of the challenges with adopting SAFe (or in fact any other branded framework that has a relatively prescriptive nature) is the illusion that there’s an End State to reach, and once you get there, you win the game.

Looking at the Twitterverse, I’ve seen a few people talk about SAFe being potentially a good way to start getting some agility into your large scale programme delivery – mainly because can be perceived by senior-management-buyers as a Tangible Thing, which is easier to accept than a grass-roots-hearts-and-minds-campaign-led-by-developers. However, at some point, a continuously evolving organisation will evolve beyond it. That said, the subset of SAFe that’s Don Reinertson’s work on Economics and Flow will remain relevant long after the SAFe practices are abandoned for more lightweight alternatives.