12/05/2023
If you are a scrum master or team coach, you’ve probably felt the frustration of laying out a sound set of Agile practices only to find team members lack your enthusiasm for diving in.
With some people, it’s overt – questioning, challenging, complaining about the time spent planning vs coding; in others it’s more subtle – they go through the motions but don’t bring their full selves. They remain silent in planning and retrospectives, and give perfunctory updates in standups.
As coaches, we’ve seen this across all roles – developers, analysts, testers, even scrum masters.
All coaches have their own ways of dealing with these issues, and they vary a lot in both approach and effectiveness. Some rely on listening, in 1:1s and retros – some are more firm, laying down the law. Others seek to find common ground, modifying the practices to be more palatable.
All of these techniques can help address the specific concerns and lead the team to smoother operation, ensure the team data is current, improve readiness, quality and velocity.
What can be missed in this give-and-take alignment of people to the practices is the deeper work of helping a team – and the individuals that make it up – develop a truly Agile mindset. Through hard work, it’s possible to reach a point where you are hitting all the marks on your maturity assessments, without capturing the real power that brought Agile to the attention of the industry 20+ years ago.
We call this Agile without agility, and the reason it happens is not different than the reason certain pernicious software bugs persist despite attempts to fix them – the focus is usually on the visible aspect of the problem, without understanding the root cause of the issue.
We transcend this issue by taking a 4-Quadrant Perspective, which allows us to thoroughly understand what we are observing by building a picture from multiple perspectives, thus giving us a better chance to uncover root causes.
