Coach Dan's Blog

In the spirit of growth and learning - I spend time every week exploring new ideas, reading and learning about agility and leadership.  I came across a report published by McKinsey and Company in October of 2018 entitled Leading agile transformation: The new capabilities leaders need to build 21st-century organizations .  It really resonated with me, so I'm shamelessly copying and pasting an excerpt to our blog.  If you want to read the full report, you can find it here - but I put the part that really stood out as relevant to me below.  It's absolutely worth a read, and perhaps some reflection time if you're serious about being an agile leader. Shifting from reactive to creative mind-sets Changing our mind-set—or adjusting it to the new context—is no easy task, but developing this “inner agility” is essential in releasing our potential to lead an agile transformation. It is clear from the work of Robert Kegan and many others that leaders of agile organizations must...

This agile coach was investing some time in himself this weekend and came across an article that warned of a topic he is aware of, and indeed himself has experienced- Zombie Agility!   Now I know what you're thinking - "He's really off into the deep end this time," but hear me out!  I can assure you, it's a real thing - you may have seen the symptoms of this horrible affliction before - Agile teams that are joyless and robotic - executing the events without really ever really connecting with the work (or talking about their customer) All of the boxes are checked and you're "doing" Agile - but not really seeing the business results Backlogs are still highly dependent on command and control approvals (you're still asking your Advisory Council for approval to move forward) Outside dependencies that cause constant reshuffling of team's priorities Teams are getting lackluster results and have disengaged people As Eric Cottrell  puts it -  Zombie ...

As we approach this holiday season (and despite the fact that my personal backlog keeps getting longer instead of shorter) I feel compelled to take a moment and share a list of things for which I'm most thankful.   (Cliché', I know - but deal with it... when it comes to Coach Dan, you take the corny with the good!)  So without farther preamble, I present to you -    Coach Dan's Top Five (agile-related) Things I'm Thankful For (in no particular order!)     Shared Values, Principles and Customer Focus  - I'm thankful to be able to partner with a group of people who share the same  values and principles .  Working with people who are equally focused on our customer  and  share our agile values and principles means that even when we disagree, we know where each other is coming from, and that our intent is to get to the same place.  Seeing people live those shared values and principles every day makes me feel like I'm part of a...

So first and foremost - kudos if you got past that horrible pun of a title.  I'm (obviously?) thinking about the concept of  command and control , and how as agile managers we can sometimes struggle with the voices in our head.  You know what I'm talking about - the ones that say "Failure is not an option!" or "It has to be perfect!" or "You can't manage without hard deadlines!"....  You know... those voices that try to convince us that we as managers know best and our job is to tell our people what to do!  Maybe you don't struggle with this, but I know I sure do sometimes.   It can be challenging to transition from a "command and control" structure (where orders come from on high, and we all flawlessly execute them, like a well-oiled machine) to a more agile, nimble, responsive environment where decision making is pushed closer to the data, and the customer.  Where we replace the desire for flawless execution with short feedback ...

  I hear the questions all the time - "How long will it take for us to be agile?" "How do we know when we are agile?" "When will we be done transforming to agile?" Honest coach's answer?  I don't know.  I really don't.  Does it mean that all of the people in your organization are on Scrum Teams?  Does it mean that everyone has taken the "Agile 101" course and has a MBO that says "Do Agile this year?"  Does it mean that we've done a bunch of stuff over the last year and someone with an important sounding title declares that we are 100% agile?  See where I'm going with this? As I've argued before, agile is a mindset.  How do you know when your organization has adopted a mindset?  How do you know when your teams are basing their decisions and behaviors on the Agile Values and Principles?  You know it when you see it!  You know it when  you  live it!   We recently challenged some of our agile marketing team members t...

Y esterday I was driving to meet a partner coach for coffee (yes I left my house...) and I heard a story on the radio that got me thinking about agile team metrics and how we use them.  To be fair, the story had nothing to do with agile, teamwork, business, customer value or anything like that.  It was about a study that highlighted a particularly unfavorable metric regarding police stops in a certain city.    Here's where my mind went -  "What will happen next is someone high up at the police department will inevitably not like these optics that these metrics show.  They are going to hate it so much they will convene a committee that will put new procedures in place for their rank and file officers.  The procedures will be a quota or something to that nature that will ensure the next time the metrics are reviewed, the ratios will look MUCH more favorable.  So favorable in fact, that people will eventually stop looking at that metric, a...

I received the best email from an agile marketer yesterday (if you want to see it, look to your right...)  It came at the perfect time and made me feel proud to be working with these marketing teams. Now I always knew that our Marketers are among the very best and most creative in the world, but I am really impressed that Nick Vaglio took it upon himself to reflect on his year-long agile journey and come up with his own personal definition.  Talk about an agile mindset! Of course we all know that the definition of an agile mindset can be found in our Agile Values and Principles!  But Nick's email got me to thinking about what my personal definition of agile is. Coach Dan's Personal Definition Of AGILE (for today) Well I'm going to start off with the word Aligned.  Agile teams and agile individual are absolutely aligned to a common goal - to provide the most valuable things to our customer, as quickly as possible.  That's an easy one - now on to G... Merriam-Webs...