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Book Review: Start with Why |
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 As we’ve mentioned in our description of the Leading/Coaching Agile Organizations Master Workshop:
- Why means understanding the values and the culture
- How drives the systems and structures of the organization
- What deals with the process, or behaviors of people and teams
Starting with why is the first step to affecting real and sustainable organizational change. In his book, Simon Sinek describes how leaders and organizations have failed in demonstrating the vision of their company, not only to their customers, but to their employees as well. This is the primary reason we start all of our client engagements with a cultural assessment and an awareness of how the organizational values align with agile values and what leadership can do to bridge the gap Most organizations seeking to be more agile start with their process, because this is the easiest area to see and impact. However, as soon as they implement a change to their processes, they run into organizational impediments - often within the structures and culture of the organization. Starting with why and aligning the structures of the organization to the goals of agility, provides an infrastructure for an agile process to succeed. By studying influential leaders around the world, Sinek describes that they each think, act, and communicate in exactly the same way and this becomes a framework on which organizations can be changed, movements can be lead, and people can be inspired. On the other hand, if neither the customers nor the employees understand the essence of the company and why they are doing what they do, it’s simply a failed model all around and unfortunately too many organizations, too many movements, and too many groups are failing by getting the why right.
In our Leading/Coaching Agile Organizations Master Workshop, we’ll dive into the unseen norms and values of your company to see why leaders act the way they do and create awareness to enable agile growth instead. |
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Introducing the Leading/Coaching Agile Organizations Master Workshop |
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As many of you know, my work for the past decade has focused entirely on client success through organizational and leadership agility, and the leadership and coaching competencies required to drive it. Today, I’m excited to introduce a new master workshop which brings these two areas in focus for leaders and coaches. But first, let me tell you a little about how it developed. How the idea got startedBack in 2007, Mike Cohn, the author of Succeeding with Agile, asked me to lead a new effort to develop a program designed to recognize the efforts of those who were making a difference through deeper client engagements, essentially those who were ‘transforming the world of work.’ Working with Roger Brown, and a handful of our peers, we researched and evaluated the critical success factors that lead clients to success with agility. Through this effort, we combined success criteria across different dimensions and created a superset “high-bar” as the criteria for defining the Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Coaching (CSC) Program – a bar set so high that some of us on the formation committee did not meet it. For the past four years, we have applied this criteria to over 120 coaches across the globe. While we remain committed to the belief that the evaluation criteria and the subsequent high-bar are set at an appropriate level, we are recognizing that many effective agile coaches are operating below that bar. How the program evolvedLyssa Adkin’s has emerged as a leading voice in the agile coaching world with her recent book, Coaching Agile Teams. Her work has recognized many of the agile coaching competencies in the “doing” and “being” of an agile coach involve mentoring, facilitating, problem-solving, and conflict navigating as necessary competencies. These are necessary competencies of an agile coach, and part of our critieria in evaluating CSC candidates. In our research, however, these competencies are not sufficient to drive client success – additional competencies are required. Inspiring effective organizational change requires an intimate awareness of and engagement with the culture, systems, and leadership within an organization – in essence, it requires a deeper knowledge of the organizational ecosystem and patterns to enact an organizational transformation. Thus, the CSC program was designed to evaluate a coach’s awareness of, and experience with, these dimensions. The Leading/Coaching Agile Organizations Master Workshop evolved out of our experiences incorporating these organizational dimensions and through our evaluation of the multitude of coaches engaged in organizational change around the globe. How the program is structuredLeading/Coaching Agile Organizations focuses on the coach as leader - and leader as coach - in engaging the leadership, system, and cultural layers of an organization. It leverages numerous models in each dimension and provides real corporate case studies to show how each has been applied in transition and growth of agility. |
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Scrum Coaching Retreat Invitation |
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As I returned from Agile 2011 and witnessed the founding fathers (yes, they were all men) return for their 10-year anniversary of the Agile Manifesto, I couldn’t help notice how it happened. Inspired by a couple of industry leaders – Bob Martin and Alistair Cockburn, a small group of smart innovative people spent 2 ½ days at a retreat in Snowbird, Utah discussing and collaborating to create a Manifesto. The rest is history, our shared history.
While some might say that our work is done, that agile has crossed the chasm and become mainstream, I believe our work is just beginning. I believe that while many companies are seeing benefits from agility, more companies are challenged with sustaining and growing agility, and others reverting back to more traditional leadership approaches and structured methods. |
 I am excited to introduce a new opportunity to change the world of work! I am working with the Scrum Alliance and other Scrum Coaches to create a new approach in collaborating with coaching peers to solve complex organizational and coaching challenges - A Scrum Coaching Retreat. December 7-9, 2011 we are going to be piloting a new retreat approach using Scrum as our principle framework. |
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Total Attorney's House Board |
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Total Attorney's, a Trail Ridge client, recently re-imagined their Scrum Task Board for their philanthropic Total Impact House. Check out the video and read their story below... New Impact House SCRUM Board from Total Attorneys on Vimeo. |
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Book Review: The Leader's Guide to Radical Management |
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 In this book, Steve Denning warns leaders that traditional management styles have not been able to resolve fundamental business problems or adapt to the way business is done in the 21st century. The balance of power has essentially shifted from the sales force and landed squarely on the customer/consumer. In a knowledge economy, where everyone has the ability create, evaluate, and trade knowledge, non agile businesses don’t stand a chance. To counter the problem, Denning describes seven inter-locking principles of continuous innovation, which is essential to a thriving business today. These principles comprise the new guiding force for an entire organization and they are 100% focused on empowering your teams and delighting your customers. When put together, the principles comprise a new radical model for management. To delight their customers, organizations must shift their focus from value to values, meaning a shift from a single-minded profit focus to generating a continuous stream of new, additional values for the customer. This means an entirely different role for organization managers and leaders: from the controller of people to the enablers of self-organizing teams, from a hierarchical bureaucracy to dynamic, client-driven response activities, and from command-and-control styles to peer-to-peer communication - exactly the kind of learning we’re currently promoting with our Leading/Coaching Agile Organizations Master Workshop. In this book, you will find many examples of companies who understand the changes that are necessary and many of those were guided by Trail Ridge Consulting. |
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As many of you already know, I am the program lead for the Certified Scrum Coaching (CSC) Program with the Scrum Alliance. As the program lead, it is my responsibility to facilitate the review process, review teams, and review application. While a relatively new program founded in 2007, our numbers are growing each year with now almost 50 Certified Coaches. However, we believe our potential and need in the industry is 10x that number. This article provides some understanding of the CSC Program and guidance for those who wish to apply. As one of the founders of the program, I am passionate about clients being successful with Scrum. It is my experience that success with Scrum requires education and coaching. Most difficulties in Scrum don't arise from learning the Scrum framework, rather they arise in applying the framework on an existing organizational structure and culture. This requires hands-on experienced guidance, and not just at the team-level, but at the leadership and organizational-level. |
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Agile 2011 Presentation - The Culture of Agility |
 I have just updated the slides from my talk at Agile 2011 on The Culture of Agility. View it as a presentation. |
 There are few people in our Scrum Community who know personally the power of video games to engage people, and even create addictions to them. There are even some who have applied Scrum to creating those addictive online video games. This article is not about applying Scrum to gaming applications; rather, it is about the similarities Scrum has to the gaming world in what makes them so addicting. Video gaming is one of the largest growing markets in the world at $50B this year and is on target to be three times the music industry by 2014. This year alone, there was $8B spent on virtual goods in online gaming systems - a true market indeed. We can learn a tremendous amount from the viral and exponential growth of the video gaming industry. What makes these video games so interesting, engaging and addicting; and what can we learn about them in making our organizations more interesting, engaging, and even addicting? |
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2009 State of Agility Results |
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Once again VersionOne has provided an excellent insight into the global state of agility with over 2,500 responses with a truly global reach of respondents from 88 countries. Here is a copy of the 4th Annual State of Agility Survey 2009. Overall, the most striking results from the survey were the broadness and distribution of adoption across varying company sizes, projects and numbers of teams. There does not appear to be a distinction any more regarding agile is for small companies/projects/teams - it is being effectively implemented across the board. Some of the key datapoints in the survey: - Scrum and Scrum/XP hybrid increased adoption to 74% of the responses
- Most important reason for adopting agile - time to market
- Most important benefit in adopting agile - managing changing priorities
- Largest barrier to adoption - management
- Greatest concern with adoption - lack of upfront planning
- Biggest cause of failure in agile - lack of experience (see chart above)
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In this book, Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs discuss current research that indicates leaders who are successful in turbulent organizational environments are known to exhibit a specific set of competencies. The leaders who are able to operate at the highest levels of agility deliver the best results, but few leaders (only around 10%) are able to master the ideal level of agility necessary for consistent effectiveness. 
