Packing List for Your Agile Journey - Change

The Ten Speakers in the Series

Packing List

Today Gil Broza interviewed me about "embracing change", as the 9th interview out of ten hour long interviews in his series called: "Packing List for Your Agile Journey".
Subscribers get the ability to listen live or offline, access to transcripts. Gil asks each speaker to focus on one topic, so the overall series has a great balance of topics for listeners who want advice and ideas for starting or improving an agile implementation.
The topics are: Organizational support, enabling collaboration, feedback loops, whole product thinking, quality, technical excellence, get-to-done mentality, culture, change and values.

Some of the Things We Talked About

Gil asked me about change - how agile helps you deal with change, what types of change do we deal with or worry about, how did we (and still do) change an organization to become agile?
Some of the insights I can now recall without having a transcript of the call:

• People don't really resist change. They resist change that's imposed or seem arbitrary.
• Agile is designed to deal with changes in what you do, and encourage you to change how you do the work. It's less prescriptive about how to change to agile, which is essentially a cultural change
• Understanding and buying into the values and principles of Agile is much more essential than mastering a specific practice or ritual. Going through the rituals mechanically is equivalent to a "cargo cult", and will yield very little improvement, if any.
• Working in a large and distributed organization such as Software AG, there were a few observations:
• Sometimes a cultural difference is felt more after a merger/acquisition, than across geography and nation
• The challenges include quick integration of products, organizational changes (due to M&A), and building and maintaining trust when people are in different locations and timezones
• Having a senior manager who "gets it" and can point the direction and set priorities is invaluable 
• We have a "Change Agents" team who represented all locations, got together and got deep coaching and continued to function as a virtual team. This team was very helpful quickly getting the whole organization to learn the principles and coach people to start experimenting with the process. It also helped building trust across locations.
• We invested much in values, culture, lean principles and teamwork training - more than any specific practice
• Push back if you feel you are about to do something dumb
• A Responsibility stance (Avery) or Being Proactive (Covey) is essential to successfully dealing with change 

I'm likely to update this page after having the transcript to maybe reflect the content a bit more accurately.

More Questions

I'll be happy to get comments on this post from anyone in the audience who'd like to expand on anything I mentioned or ask more.

Software AG at Agile India 2014

On January 2013 I had the great experience of sharing in Israel some of what we learned at Software AG during our ongoing road to Lean and Agile, and I know of a couple of other colleagues who presented at other conferences.

Last week, Bangalore hosted the Agile India 2014 conference. Four days packed with speakers from all over India, and many international speakers. This time, my colleague Harish Krishnaswamy was presenting a very different perspective of our story. You can find the slides here, or read the full experience report which is packed with information and inspiring data of the significant impact of the transformation. I recommend to people interested in large scale transformations - read the report. Harish did a great job collecting information and interviewing many people in different roles regarding the journey. I'm sure people of Software AG would find it interesting to read a story they played a role in from a different, more holistic perspective.

An impressive amount of four more Software AG employees gave lightning talks: Amit Deshpande, Heartin Jacob, Chandan Ravishankar and Ramya Gopalakrishnan.

Amit spoke of Scrumban, a combination of Scrum and Kanban which can be used in those circumstances where you have a mix of feature development and technical debt/customer issues. In particular customer issues or unplanned events that could be disruptive to the planned work in a sprint.

Heartin blogged on the topic of his talk: what success means in Agile and how Agile helps us to be successful, highlighting the strong bond linking technical and organizational success with the personal success of individual contributors. 

Chandan asked why are you following Agile? The key point is that following the practices becomes an empty shell without being a part of the transition, caring and having personal engagement with the work you do (aligned with Heartin's theme). Another is the point that agile practices are designed to keep you honest about what you can deliver on a sustainable pace, and encourage you to aim higher based on the current reality and your history.

Ramya talked of using WIP limits to reduce Context Switching, sharing the specific context and behaviors the team adopted to deal with complexity, reduce stress and maximize learning and collaboration. I'm not sure how common it is to do an exercise with the audience demonstrating context switching in a five minute lightning talk and still have time to say something - wow!

Such evidence strengthens my belief that the transformation we're going through at Software AG runs deep - many individuals align with it and contribute well beyond their job description for the success of the organization, for technical excellence and in support of their own growth.

Christopher Avery's Leadership Gift Program

In some of my posts I referred to Avery's Responsibility Process. It's time to say some more, and let you know of a way to master it, if you're interested.

Background

I first encountered the model late 2009, when Software AG brought a consultant to help us learn and adopt lean and agile principles and methods. The funny thing, this guy talked about culture, mindset, emotions and psychology much more than process or technical skills or tools.
I had the opportunity to be part of a group that played a key role in learning and spreading the knowledge  in our R&D, across a good number of locations.

It would be ambitious to try to explain the Responsibility Process in a short blog post, when I usually take a three hour, experience rich, in-person workshop to give people a taste of it. What I can say, is it works for me. I use it on myself to choose my options in the face of problems, to keep myself engaged and caring about what I do and the people I work with. The people I work with know it, and it gives us a way to accept displays of blame, justifications, shame or obligation without taking it personally, helping each other out of those mindsets towards learning and resourceful action.

Christopher Avery teaches this model and more in his Leadership Gift Program, and the point of this post is to tell you about this opportunity. To be fair - I did not participate in it. First, because the timezone difference is demanding. But mostly because I was already underway on my own path: through the coaching I got at work, learning through audio recordings, teaching it over and over again, reading books and blogs, and attending Avery's workshop in Israel.

Opportunity

If you don't plan on taking such a path, here's another opportunity.

The Leadership Gift Program 2014 is a live, online, 17-week semester from November 2013 through February 2014 on which you learn this stuff and more with Christopher Avery. It's also a community of practitioners, supporting each other in mastering this stuff.

There's more to it. If you are interested, but not yet sure, here's what you can do next (until October 22nd):

• Go to www.ChristopherAvery.com/vip
• Enter your name, email and this VIP Code: LeanGuyVIP
• Take the time to join a free, content rich webinar, on either October 22 or 24 to hear more about it

What's with the VIP code?

If you use this code to register to the webinar and later choose to enroll to the program, you'll get a 100 USD rebate. There are different pricing options, the most common would typically cost 800 USD, so for you (being a reader of this blog) it will cost 700 USD.

Here are all my posts that have anything to do with Responsibility.

And here is the poster I translated to Hebrew:

Can you copy a culture? The NUMMI story

In 2010 I came across a brilliant radio show of This American Life - episode 403: NUMMI.
It tells a story that's taught in business schools, of a joint venture by General Motors and Toyota - in 1984 these competitors decided to build cars together, each for their own reasons. NUMMI is the name of the factory, it stands for "New United Motor Manufacturing Inc".



Act one tells the miraculous story of this GM factory in California - it was considered to have the worst work force, always striking, struggling against management, with no work discipline what-so-ever: drinking on the job, drugs, gambling. Then, Toyota stepped in and transformed this plant into a Japanese style plant, using the Toyota Production System (TPS) principles. The real miracle is that it worked - and that 85% of the work force was the same. This a truly inspiring story of human potential and how systems can be designed to bring the best or worst of of people.

Act two is a different story. GM was for decades losing ground to Toyota. It had every reason to want to learn whatever they could from NUMMI and improve their quality across their other plants. This didn't happen - at least not fast enough. In 2010 GM went bankrupt. This part reveals some of the reasons and dynamics that led to the tragic outcome.

I recommend investing an hour to listen to it. Act one tells you how to get it right, and it is really emotionally moving - the interviews with employees who went through the transition reveal NUMMI deeply changed the lives of many. It also describes some of the key aspects of the TPS and how it was successfully brought to the US.  Act two  is a handbook for nearly everything that can go wrong when you try to change an enterprise.

What I like about this radio show is that it demonstrates so well that the Toyota Production System is not a "business process", or "best practice" you can see and replicate. It is a culture, with it's own values. It is not something you can just perform, it is rather something you can choose to become.

Agile transformation often suffer from similar difficulties - you can follow the rituals, but if you don't get the underlying values and mindset, you just end up creating "cargo cults", or simply resistance.


I'd like to thank Elliot Holar who shared this episode with me soon after it was aired - aside from this specific episode, I became quite a fan of This American Life. They rock. Thanks, e.

Absolute Teamwork

I've been interviewing a number of candidates for our team recently. Almost every CV contains some pseudo-mandatory clause about great teamwork skills. I was wondering what teamwork meant for these people. So I asked. Too often, it doesn't sound much like a team.

My reference for the concept "teamwork" in the past year and a half is a team called "the Smurfs".  I was fortunate to have served as their scrum master for a few months when the team was forming after joining two teams together, and held a management role throughout the long project.

Things I love about Smurfs

Helpfulness

The team has a distinct culture of asking each other for help and being immediately available to provide help. It's essential for doing peer code reviews, for getting new team members on board and for knowledge sharing. A special role of an "on duty smurf", a fire fighter dealing with customer issues and test failures for a whole sprint, allowing the rest more focus, is  unlikely to have been possible without this helpful spirit. 

Respect

The team continuously demonstrated respect for each other. One aspect of it is that being passionate about the work led to passionate discussions. These were not ego driven, "my idea is better than yours" type of discussions, but rather real exchange that actually included listening. I could see it in technical design discussions, and in retrospectives alike.

Experimental Approach

A few examples:

• When I stepped down from being a scrum master, the team tried to distribute the SM role between team members despite the consistently ominous warnings by non other than Jim "Cope" Coplein. It was a grand failure, many lessons learned, and a quick and successful recovery by identifying their next SM
• The team kept trying out different new tools to support it's work - dashboards, testing techniques, clever code coverage measurements, experimental debugging techniques 
• Being in the context of an enterprise level R&D, other teams benefited from the team's knack for improving tooling - many improvements to the main issue tracking system were made based on their feedback, and a whole new tool was introduced that supports code reviews, especially for distributed teams
• A rich physical task-board (see prezi!) with many cool and useful ideas  
• Convinced the office management to bring down a wall for us, to have proper space for a daily standaup
• An evolutionary approach to discover how to deal with different types of work, specifically customer defects (described in my talk I gave at the Agile Practitioners 2013 conference)
• Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) - the whole way we define our stories was modified based on ideas a few team members brought from an Agile-Testing workshop 
• Working together - swarming on work, by priority, was yet another experiment early on, that turned into a habit

It all boils down to safety and trust. Without a sense of being trusted, people are less likely to help or ask for help, and to experiment individually and as a team.

Last, but not least: fantastic results!

Besides the dramatic improvement in the response time to customer issues, the improved test coverage (quantity and quality increased), and quality - a new and exciting set of features, nicely balancing highly sophisticated capabilities with a rather straight forward user experience.

Thanks

I'd like to acknowledge and thank the individuals who demonstrated to me what's teamwork.
The Smurfs team in this project are (in alphabetical order):
Dganit Keidar, Gad Salner, Ichai Luzon, Idan Zohar, Marwan Jaber, Michael Adada, Oded Nehama, Ofir Laviad, Ortal Balter, Rosalind Eidelheit and Yaniv Mualem.

Strongly affiliated and supportive of this team, locally: Assaf Appel who served as the Product Owner, Gadi Benedek, Asaf Broide and Lior Yaffe, together with a good number of people from the administrative staff. From Germany, we enjoyed the further support and collaboration with Andreas Goermer and Oguzhan Oezkut. And speaking of safety and trust, there's a big doubt if things would look the same without Christian Gengenbach, our VP.

The Smurfs continue to their next project in a different format. I'm certain they won't settle for anything less.

Re: Is it Safe to Fail?

Amr Elssamadisy (@samadisy) recently blogged, asking Is it Safe to Fail?

I strongly agree with his claim (and I paraphrase here) that the "skill of failing" is an essential factor in a team's ability to learn and improve. 

Interestingly, Amr identifies three categories in which this skill is cultivated: culture, individual human dynamics and agile practices:

1. Leaders create a culture that rewards small failures and the successes that come after them. They celebrate the successes and failures and lead by example.
2. Individuals understand that failure is a milestone the road to success. They have experienced it multiple times and are not intimidated by it.
3. Teams use software development practices that make failure SAFE.

While Amr elaborates on the third category, of practices (such as TDD, TDR/BDD), I want to explore a few options on the first category. What could be the elements that support such a culture? It seems to me that the second category emerges out of the other two over time.

Cultivating a Learning Oriented Culture

How can leaders cultivate a learning oriented culture, one that expects such failures?
Here are a few concepts that with proper teaching, coaching and leading by example, can serve as foundations to such work environments.

Responsibility Process - out of the Blame Game

Christopher Avery (@christopheraver) and others developed the Responsibility Process. In a nutshell (seriously, I can go on for weeks about it), this is a psychological model about how human beings deal with problems. Being aware of it, one can acknowledge the tendency to react out of a blaming mindset, and choose to hold on until a better, more effective, state of mind is reached. The model describes a number of distinct mental states that are normal for humans to have, but might not be ideal to be in when trying to take action. Responsibility is the desired mental state - in which one has learning capacity, resourcefulness, eagerness, energy and courage.
The model is a powerful tool for self awareness and mastery, but better yet - it can be a great way for a team familiar with it to have a shared language to make working agreements that support learning, trust and safety.

Nonviolent Communication

NVC is the brain-child of psychologist Marshall B. Rosenberg. It is aimed to show an alternative for the highly judgmental and competitive education most of us had.

During Agile Israel 2013, Bob Marshall explained violence using the acronym FOGS.
Violence is using or triggering one of the following emotions in others, to make them act in a certain way:

• Fear
• Obligation
• Guilt
• Shame

With this definition in mind, consider that many processes are violent due to their implementation. Why should we care? It might be the wrong way to reach our goals, to meet our needs.
Bob went on to describe NVC as a 4-step process, with a pre-requisite of empathy which is essential for diffusing a conflict situation. Try to understand the other side in an explicit way (or fake it...). The next steps are:

1. Observation - what are the facts
2. Feelings "how did it make you feel?" 
3. Needs - violence originates by needs not met. What needs that are not being met cause those feelings? (or needs that were met, for positive feelings)
4. Request - "would you be willing to..?"

A First Glance Comparison of the Two

I thought of introducing The Core Protocols as another culture hacking approach, but it suddenly hit me how similar NVC and the Responsibility Process are. I'd like to dwell on it for a moment.

Violence in Rosenberg's world is basically all that the "non-responsible" positions of mind are made to deal with. These are all coping mechanisms against the abundance of violence others emit. But this is poor protection - the aggressive party gets to "win" by triggering Shame or Obligation, forcing someone to action with fear. However, a person reacting out of Responsibility can distinguish between the stimulus (observation) and her own emotional state (feelings) and confront her own wants (needs) before picking a response.
The key difference (based on my very limited knowledge of NVC) is that while Avery's Responsibility is more about one's own state of mind, NVC is about dealing with others while dealing with ones own state of mind and creating an environment that supports the other to reach a Responsible state of mind.

Wait - How does it Relate to Safety?

Assuming the similarities I find between NVC and Responsibility aren't too far off, introducing such concepts (teaching, coaching and continuous practice and demonstration) to any community would raise the levels of trust and safety, and therefore of healthy, effective, honest and open communication. Roughly I'd say Responsibility is a tool for the individual to be more resilient and brave (inherently safer) while NVC is designed to reduce the levels of violence, therefore making it safer.

Thanks, Amr, for raising the topic of safety as an important factor for effective teamwork. It is also an ethical issue - there's little joy at work if you don't feel safe. But if you had to choose between implementing processes and practices that might generate some safety versus changing the culture - what would be more effective and long lasting?

Update: Amr recommended this blog post explaining Tech Safety - I love the concept, though the focus on the word safety might create an impression that it is not about quality, joy and respect for people. It is.

The Joy of Social Networks

In my post about the Agile Israel 2013 conference I mentioned Bob Marshal's keynote, and his principle of "Joy for All". I wanted to link it somewhere, but couldn't find more. So I found myself having the following twitter conversation with him:

1. 
   

   Guy Nachimson ‏@guynachimson18 May

   
   

   @flowchainsensei Did you ever blog of your "joy for all" guiding principle? I can't find reference to it as such

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2. Bob Marshall ‏@flowchainsensei19 May

   @guynachimson I don’t think so, directly. You can find the roots of it in e.g. Rosenberg’s spirituality of NVC http://www.cnvc.org/learn-online/spiritual-basis/spiritual-basis-nonviolent-communication …

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3. Guy Nachimson ‏@guynachimson19 May

   @flowchainsensei thx for the pointer. Not sure I relate to that as I did at #agileil13, but I'll give it a shot

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4. Bob Marshall ‏@flowchainsensei19 May

   @guynachimson I’ll take it under advisement for a future blog post :)

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5. 
   

   Guy Nachimson ‏@guynachimson19 May

   @flowchainsensei I'll stay tuned :)

Guess what?
Today, Bob posted: Hyper-joyful, quoting Ackoff, Seligman, Deming and Rosenberg to support his debate with the prevailing assumption that work isn't supposed to be fun. It's a call for focusing on Joy at work rather than productivity. A joyful environment underlies hyper-productive teams.
Culture trumps Process, right?