Wading through the Swamp of Agile Mumbo Jumbo

Part two: Time for some Wicked Questions!

It’s Friday, 10 AM, and I’m meeting team Spaghetti for the ‘Post Mortem’ Kate scheduled us to have.

Kate and Jim won’t be joining. Thankfully. So it’s just the engineers (and me). I make brief eye contact with everyone and smile.

One unknown face pops out behind a laptop. This must be Brent. Aside from Brent, the group consists of Roberto, Alessandro, Giovanna, Gaurav, and Scott. Brent is singled out (by Jim) to work on the ‘Buglog’ from team BugBusters. Jim thought it was a good idea to single out the most experienced member of the team to fix the bugs.

I try to break the ice and lead everyone into the event. “How many Project Managers does it take to change the lightbulb?”

Brent smirks and answers my question. “How many? well, just one to get somebody else to do it, I guess?”

I smile and look around. Yes, this will be as awkward as I imagined it would be.

I begin framing the event, “Kate scheduled this ‘Post-Mortem’ for us. Fortunately for us, Kate is not here,” I take a deep breath, “Forget about the Post-Mortem. There is no point in looking the elephant in the ass. But let’s do talk about the elephants in the room.”

Brent closes his laptop, raises his eyebrows, and sits up straight attentively.

I continue: “I joined this company, what, three days ago. And, as it stands, I don't intend to stay here one day longer. This is not a joke.”

This sucked the air out of the room.

“This is not a joke. When I come home, and my lovely wife Marjon asks me how my first days are going, I just don’t know what to say… So far I experienced little to nothing here I can truly care about. Yet, I do care about you.”

Giovanna and Alessandro give each other a sideways glance. 👀

“So far... I just don’t get it. So, in the next fifty-seven minutes or so, I want to walk out knowing why you come into work each day, and what can possibly make it worthwhile going through the bullshit that you are currently experiencing. I feel this is disempowering you. And that is not okay for me.”

Roberto blows air from his nostrils as he nods his head furiously up and down. Scott is breathing fast and it looks like he is welling up. I breathe in slowly and deeply and then let out a big sigh.

Scapegoats

“Roberto, in a nutshell, how do you feel about the way this team is supported?” Roberto looks me in the eyes, briefly contemplating whether or not he should speak from the mind, heart, or not speak at all.

“What support?” Roberto snaps. “Seriously. Do they honestly think enforcing these Jira workflows and pre-staging stuff is supporting us?! It’s just slowing us down even more. And these stupid meetings, I’m sorry, but that’s how I feel about them, I don’t think they help, it hasn’t changed anything and nobody actually listens to us. They just blame us for the delays and problems and tell us to go faster. I…” Roberto restrains himself. He flushes.

I nod and appreciate him being so open and showing the courage to say this. The group seems to agree with him. “And how does that make you feel that you are not being listened to and nothing changed?” I ask.

“As an engineer, I think it’s bullshit. They just pretend. They don’t understand anything about software engin…” I hold out my hand and wave it down on the table as if to push the brake, and interject: “I actually mean, what does that mean for you as Roberto, the human being, not just as an engineer… that they are forcing these workflow policies, and pull you into meetings you don’t want to be in, where they blame you and your teammates?”

Roberto continues: “I’m angry. It’s like they don’t care about me or what I say and we are just scapegoats.”

I look around the room and ask: “Does anyone else feel the same way?”. Everyone nods, save Brent who is observing the reactions. I can tell this is not new to Brent.

“Thank you for being open and honest with me Roberto, that took courage.”

I lower my shoulders and ease into my chair comfortably. I look around the room and ask: “Brent… is the current situation okay for you?” Brent frowns, squeezes his lips, and shakes no, closing his eyes.

Wicked Questions

“Okay, now, let’s experiment with what’s called a ‘Liberating Structure’. We are brainstorming ‘Wicked Questions’.”

Wicked Questions make it possible to expose safely the tension between espoused strategies and on-the-ground circumstances and to discover the valuable strategies that lie deeply hidden in paradoxical waters. — Wicked Questions, Liberating Structure

I explain, “Together, we describe the messy reality while using our imagination to find a way to liberate us.”

We just write down questions. We don’t need to answer them. We use this format:

I provide them with an example: “How come we were supposed to have a Post-Mortem while the project is still going at the same time?”

I tell them it’s okay to relax and take their time, yet Roberto furiously grabs a marker and small notebooks and begins scribbling. Slowly but surely the rest follows suit.

These are the highlights. They did not hold back.

“How is it that we have to use staging environments while we don’t even have any production and not even any actual users at the same time?!” — Roberto
“How is it that we have to give our estimations, yet at the same time the roadmap is fixed?” — Giovanna
“How is it that we have so much overhead, while what we really need is more engineers at the same time.” — Brent
“How is it that we have to be more productive and spend time in these meetings at the same time?” — Roberto
“How is it that Jim says our Sprint is fixed for us, yet Jim does get to add stuff to it at the same time?” — Scott
“How is it that Perfect Pixels was two months late in finalizing their designs, and that we now have to work weekends and evenings in order to make up for the delay?!” — Alessandro
“How come we estimate in Story Points yet Jim just translates it back into workdays at the same time?” — Scott
“How is it that we are told what to build by Perfect Pixels, yet we get complaints from BugBusters when those features end up making no sense… at the same time?” — Gaurav
“How is it that we have to do time tracking while the other teams don’t have to do this at the same time?” — Giovanna
“How is it that we are supposed to be Agile yet we still work in silos at the same time?” — Scott

And the credit for the most Wicked Question of all goes to Giovanna:

“How is it that Jim and Kate are managers of this project yet they have no experience at all in software engineering at the same time?”

This group is dropping some nuclear truth bombs. I’m happy with the openness and courage this took. This is an intelligent group. I need to test their morale. I need to find a way forward that is both constructive and positive.

I call for a 5-minute break to move around, stretch and get the oxygen flowing. I imagine myself plunging into an icy pool to refresh my mind and spirit.

As the group resettles around the table Giovanna asks me “But, according to you, how many Project Managers does it take, to change the Lightbulb?!”

I smile and say “None!” I raise my eyebrows, “they are always in the dark!”

Thankfully they chuckled.

Magic Wand

“So, from what I gathered, you all shared what is slowing you down. You shared what is distracting you from doing what you are great at. What’s more, you are bearing the brunt.”

They all nod.

“So, I want to invite you to imagine your own wonderland. Imagine you have this magic wand. You can dream up a world of your own… what would it look like? What would you like to have happened?”

“I will step out. I’ll be back in 15 minutes, you can collaborate freely amongst yourself. Then we’ll run through your list together. Make it wonderful.”

Only 15-minutes later they presented the following list of magical changes. I’m stunned.

We deploy what’s done straight to production; it has no actual end-users yet anyway.
We no longer estimate or track our individual work on tasks level.
No more time-tracking! And no more stupid Story Points!
We clear the board first before we take on anything new.
NO MORE ROADMAP; instead, we will forecast based on real progress.
Jim and Kate back off. They can be there at the Sprint Review, but that’s it. And only if they bring actual users.
No more JIRA! We are all sick of Jira. We will just use the wall behind or desks to align our work. Jim is not allowed to touch it!
What we do, we do together. Either pair up or do a code review.
We would like Mike and Rajesh from Bug Busters and Irene from Perfect Pixels to work with us together as one team.
In our dream world, there would be no more Buglog. We all fix bugs, not just Brent.
No more Standups, at least not with anyone from outside the team. Not even you, sorry. We will check in with each other a few times a day instead.
No more overtime and weekends. In fact. We want a break. Hawaii sounds good.
We want time to refactor. We had to rush and make so many shortcuts. We want to be able to be proud of our code.
We want to change our team name. We don’t like it.

I ask how they ended up with such a dreadful name ‘Team Spaghetti’.

Giovanna explains, “We didn’t! Kate and Jim like to call us this because we have Italians in the team… and because someone said we write spaghetti code. We find it disrespectful.”

“We don’t want these things just to make us go faster. We want these things to make us work together better,” Alessandro added.

I sit for a moment in silence, contemplating.

“Well, you asked us what we want. So, now what?” Giovanna asked.

I scratch the back of my head. This doesn’t seem to be unreasonable at all, at least to me. I can only imagine how Kate and Jim would react and worry about how to coach and guide them.

“Nothing you shared is unreasonable to me. I know this will be hard, but I think we should just do it, let’s start with that team name, shall we? ” I respond, staring at six rabbits in the headlights.

Commentary

Niels Bohr once wrote: “How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”

As human beings, we are naturally adaptive and capable of resolving complex challenges. It is in our nature. It is not the individual that needs to become ‘Agile’, it is the system, the organization, which slowly but surely is robbing humans of that capability.

During this session, I exercised co-active coaching directed towards self-management, to meet them where they are at, to learn how to give them the support they need. I encourage them not to be victims and to become creators of their own wonderland.

Wonderful things can happen if the drive to change emerges from within us, intrinsically, rather than being enforced upon us.

The key to facilitating this event was to focus on the individuals. Learn what motivates (and demotivates) them. Learn what the environment could look like that they believe they need. They managed to create a real improvement plan.

Maybe not all voices were heard equally and maybe there was a bit of group thinking going on. I’m sure someone somewhere would manage this better than I did. That said, I got the outcome I was aiming for.

Essential for me was to break the ice, and see if I could succeed in making them feel heard, seen, and respected. I encouraged them to be open about the challenges and their needs. For that, I needed to be the one to open up first. There was plenty of awkwardness and there was plenty of tension. The lightbulb joke may or may not have been a good idea.

And for that, my friends, stay tuned! Discover how Kate and Jim will react. Learn how this team starts living the Scrum Values, becomes self-managing, cross-functional, and regains their confidence in Scrum…

Continue to part 3:

https://readmedium.com/breaking-through-the-agile-facade-e983a8cf8b2a

Thanks to Matt DiBerardino and -danny for their review.

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