Knowledge Curse: Are you also affected by this Curse?

Have you come across Agile Pandits who knows so much about Agile but their own product developments are in Chaos!

I have come across many Agile Pandits, many of them completed reading many of the books, done all the certifications, attended many seminars. They can talk hours on the agile ways of functioning.

When I worked with them in their own products, they are not able to resolve the issues, their products are in turmoil.

The elegance of organizational agile transformation is, when you are driving this transformation you will come across many such use cases and personalities which you need to know how to handle them! 

Most of these Pandits will claim they have done many such transformations in their previous organization, but in the current assignment things are not getting right!!

If you challenge them, they can talk but while executing they are not capable to drive agile transformation properly.

They have enormous knowledge, which is not making them powerful. Thought Knowledge is Power!

They invariably consider it is someone else problem, not their. They are playing many roles, Product owners, Delivery lead, Agile leaders in the organization!

It is the less knowledgeable person who is higher adaptive and eager to explore and gain, but not the higher knowledgeable individual. The knowledgeable individual thinks, they have done it and it does not work!

Knowledge is dangerous. Once you know something, you can’t get rid of it. You have to carry it. Always. Samantha Shannon

I have observed many arrogant leaders, they consider they do not require to learn anything new as they have already learned. Their filter has become so thick over a period of time, their attitude has utterly altered.

“ Please do not try to explain me! I have accomplished all these 15 years back! "

A nice story to read....I know people will comment, yes I know this!

Once upon a time, there were four brothers. Three of them were highly educated. However, the fourth brother; who was also the youngest; was uneducated but was full of common sense.

Once they were passing through a jungle when they saw a carcass of some animal. The three educated brothers applied their knowledge to find out that the carcass belonged to which animal. They used various scientific theories to conclude that it was a lion’s carcass.

The eldest brother was an expert in studying skeletons of animals. He assembled the bones to make a complete skeleton of the lion. The second brother was an expert in the musculature of animals. He assembled the muscles and skin over the skeleton. Now, a complete lion was lying before them but it was still dead. The third brother was an expert in putting back life in a dead animal. He said that it was a great chance for him to prove his expertise.

The youngest brother requested them not to make the dead lion alive because it would kill all of them. But none of his brothers listened to him. He said that they could do whatever they wished to but before that, he would like to climb a tree to save his life. While the youngest brother was climbing the tree, his brothers laughed at him called him all sorts of names.

Finally, the lion sprang to life because of some strange magic. The three brothers were highly elated at seeing the success of their knowledge. But their happiness was short-lived because the lion immediately killed all of them. Fortunately, the youngest brother was alive because he did not know too much.

The moral of the story is, “Having knowledge is one thing but knowing appropriate purpose of your knowledge is another.”

Occasionally, you function better when you have no knowledge of how big the stakes are.

When we recruit team members generally people avoid such high knowledgeable individual with strong altitude, people look for humble right attitude individual with minimal knowledgeable.

What usually worked when we deal with them

Encourage them to listen( we have 2 ears and 1 mouth!)

Collaborate with them and take them in transformation initiatives

Share the benefit of a Humble person 

Charles Darwin observed over a century earlier, “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does the knowledge”. 

I also once cursed by this, now I have recovered from this curse!

Mastering Scrum Mastery: Why it cannot be a destination, but a journey

Context drives everything and that is a moving target.

Glance at these aspects showing up in the mind map.

Give it a thought.

Can we obtain complete Mastery of all these?

My friend is a Scrum Master for a Product company which is building a solution e.g. Online HR Reward card product. She was working for last one year and doing pretty well in this assignment. She is the go to a scrum master for this product. She has been exercising all these below skills and She is quite confident about these.

She is Master in this context as a Scrum Master.

She has achieved Mastery in this context.

Last year she has changed the company and joined a new startup company where they are building a product which is online car insurance product which automatically collect tax from credit card from the owner of the car when a car passes through different states in a country. She is the scrum master for that team who is building this solution.

Look into the below circles and levels. As a Scrum Master, She has to continue her journey from Level 1 to Level 5 in all these 8 skills.

She has been previously considered as an expert and recognized in the previous team, She might take less time to reach L5, but she has to take some time to reach mastery as the context has changed.

Her Business context has changed, Market where the product has changed, the Product Owner has changed, the Business dynamic has changed. All these skills have to set in the new context.

All these 8 skills also have to master and tested in the new context.

Every time you come across a new situation, you need to prove that you are not master in initial stages and it will take some time to complete this journey. 

To achieve Mastery in Scrum Master role it takes a journey map which leads to a Destination. Once path changes it takes another journey map to achieve Mastery.

E.g. Scrum Master is a Coach for the team, Look at this mind map, When you will achieve Mastery in all these areas? this is one example of Scrum Master Mastery

As a Master Scrum Master, You are the coach for a Scrum Team,

Look at these below aspects of the mind map, Maybe if you follow all these it will enable you to reduce your journey time and you achieve the destination faster. But destination will change again.

The soft skill building journey is never ending, as the world is evolving , context is also shifting, so we are learning always, on the way to achieve Mastery…

Try, Fail, Learn and Repeat! message for my Scrum Team

I have understood better from my disappointment. If you also experiment a disappointment, come and read below. It will benefit all of us.

I almost got laid off as a developer at 2004 early in my career. It took 3 years after graduation to obtain an adequate job for me!

I almost got laid off at Honeywell! at 2009, as a Program Manager.

I almost got laid off as a Project Manager at ABB in 2011

All these circumstances made me tougher, when I glance back I felt proud of those moments.

What I recognized, and now I consider for disappointment as learning is higher in failure than in success!

I have accomplished better in those stages which molded my personality better.

What I have picked up that failure is the trail that shows us towards ultimate realization. It forces us tougher as an individual and imparts several important life-lessons on us. If we choose to carry out the kind of success that lasts for a great while, we must tread the trail furnished with challenges and obstacles.

Attitude has a plenty to do with how we regard our disappointments. If we can establish by reviewing at each disappointment as a message, we are already ahead of the game. Failure is a wonderful means we can adopt to lay out a stronger course and hone our strategy. Usually, with some tweaks and adjustments to our game plan, we can dust off our trousers and bring back in the circle. Keep moving and we will get victory.

Failure teaches us what functions and what does not. We generally experience that learning is more powerful in failure than in success. Typically, failure shows us about causes so as to review inaccuracies and not to carry out the same mistakes in the forthcoming. Hence, investigating the roots of disappointment is essentially retrospective because it focuses on the past or the root cause of a failed event.

We gain better from failures because failures show more path connected to success. Success only teach us the particular avenue to carry out things works, failure, however, offer us better than that, it reveals us the route to disappointments and unknown.

Every failure is a hidden opportunity to understand, to progress, to reform, to expand. As the Japanese say failure is the mother of invention. Behind every great invention are a chain of disappointments and each failure is an opportunity to establish and innovate. From Edison to Wright brothers the ultimate product i.e. the bulb and the aeroplane are a labour of hundreds of failures.

“You might never fail on the scale I did. But it is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default.” The golden words of J.K. Rowling – the famous author of Harry Potter fame – who was a penniless and divorced single mother living on welfare not so long ago. Now, she is a billionaire and one of the richest people in England!

The industry considered Walt Disney incompetent to become a newspaper cartoonist, with one editor reportedly telling him that he "lacked imagination and had no good ideas." He then established a cartoon studio, which ended in bankruptcy.

Steve Jobs – the man that has made Apple into one of the most successful and richest companies in the world, the man behind the super-successful iPhone, iPod and the iPad, and the man who single-handedly revolutionized the tech industry as we knew it – was not only a fired tech executive and an unsuccessful businessman, he was also unceremoniously removed from Apple, the company he founded, when he was 30. This is what he said about his failure: “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”

" Failure is a great teacher, and I think when you make mistakes and you recover from them and you treat them as valuable learning experiences, then you’ve got something to share." – Steve Harvey

Bill Gates stated, “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”

W. E. Hickson coined the phrase, “If at first, you don’t succeed, try, try again.” No matter how hard you may work, failure can happen.

“Fail fast” and “embrace failure” are the top buzzwords in Silicon Valley.

" Failure is a great teacher, and I think when you make mistakes and you recover from them and you treat them as valuable learning experiences, then you've got something to share." Steve Harvey

Nothing strengthens us better than an emergency that we have struggled with but conquered. That capacity to withstand the miseries of life prepare us capable of functioning beyond competence.

Let us fail more , learn from it and share our story to the world.

I encourage leaders to become fail tolerant and do not inject fail fear in team! build a fear free environment for failure and eliminate fear paralysis.

Soft Skills in Scrum Teams

Soft Skills in Scrum Teams. A survey of the most valued to have by Product Owners and Scrum Masters.

This is a conference paper written by Gerardo Matturro, Carina Fontán and Florencia Raschetti in 2015.

Available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280944813_Soft_Skills_in_Scrum_Teams_A_survey_of_the_most_valued_to_have_by_Product_Owners_and_Scrum_Masters

A magnificent document.

To gather data for this study, they interviewed 25 software engineering practitioners with working experience in Scrum, from 8 software development companies in Uruguay.

They have asked 2 groups of the research question(RQ)

RQ. A: What are the most valued soft skills a Product Owner must have, from the point of view of:

A1: a Product Owner, A2: a Scrum Master, A3: a development team member

RQ: B: What are the most valued soft skills a Scrum Master must have, from the point of view of:

B1: a Product Owner, B2: a Scrum Master, B3: a development team member

What are their recommendations?

To perform the role of Scrum Master, the perspectives of the product owners, scrum masters, and team members interviewed are coincident in that Commitment, responsibility, communication skills, Interpersonal skills, Planning skills, and Teamwork are the most valued soft skills to perform this role.

How do we cultivate these skills? How do we build mastery in these skills?

In my research I have specifically looked into all these aspects and prescribed some of the improvement areas in my book.

Let us Develop Awesome Scrum Masters

India is a homeland of many impressive software product and service companies.

We are producing billions of dollars in software exports.

In an Agile way of building software there are enormous responsibilities on our scrum masters.

All the billion dollar exports, substantial assistance comes from our on floor scrum masters who are carrying out work with the team to deliver right quality software.

Business being the far away from the development team, Scrum Master carries an enormous responsibility.

Just 20 years back most of these responsibilities are on the shoulders of Project managers.

In Agile, Scrum Master to take care of most of these responsibilities.

We have to strengthen our scrum masters through Training, Coaching, and Mentoring.

Most of my Scrum Master interview I have noticed our scrum master has gained knowledge about scrum through certification and numerous conference and Meetup.

What I am finding, missing in Skills to execute real scrum mastery.

These skills can be strengthen by indulging into real-time challenges. or through Large scale complex product delivery. 

One of my friends was explained that in their organization they developed all these soft skills through Advance scrum mastery workshop where they discussed mainly 

a) People challenges around scrum master:- e.g.

How do I inspire my team members?

How do I motivate my team members?

How do I engage my team members?

How can I educate business about Product Backlog management?

b) Inter and Intra team alignment:- e.g.

How to do I facilitate multiple team collaboration?

How to do I bring several team members on one page?

What tool I should apply to bring all of them on the same page?

How do I take some initiative so that team members love to participate, contributes to scrum events?

c) Conflicting decision making:- e.g.

How to do I resolve the conflict among team members?

How to do I manage conflict among multiple PO whom I am working with?

How do I encourage people to experiment and shield team on failure?

How do I monitors, manages and escalates impediments, risks, and dependencies?

d) Leadership management:- e.g.

How do I help my senior leaders to buy-in an Agile way of working?

How do I help my project Managers to understand value-based delivery model?

How do I Create learning platforms and ensure by influencing self-learning with team learning?

How do I eradicate command and control style to servant leadership style?

e) High-performance team: e.g.

How do I understand the team dynamics?

How do I help my teams and team members to increase productivity?

How do I build a shared purpose?

How to build a Safe environment for the team?

How do I bring a lot of energies to the work and spread the same?

How do I foster team responsibility, self-accountability, transparency, and self-organization?

How can I act as a buffer between external distractions to minimize disruptions?

f) Large-scale facilitation and collaboration:- e.g.

How do I enable organizational impediments through the common meeting?

How do I minimize team dependency?

How do I prepare what guidelines to follow to minimize dependency?

How do I bring changes through impact full retrospection?

How can I able to work influentially with a wide range of colleagues and stakeholders across the various business?

g) Managing tough customer and business:- e.g.

How to do I deal with tough Product owners, Business?

How do I help them by bringing transparency?

How do I influences the organization in the removal of organizational impediments and development of healthy Agile practices?

What metrics to measure and why?

How do I enable Communication, Collaboration, and co-operation with Business?

h) I am a Passionate Scrum Coach: - e.g.

How do I become a better coach for my team?

How do I become Scrum Coach for the organization?

How do I know techniques how to protect the team from an external power pressure?

How can I Assess the Scrum Maturity of the team; organizes and coaches the team to higher levels of maturity at a sustainable/comfortable pace at certain intervals? 

i) Quality engineering:- e.g.

How do I inspire the team to follow XP and software engineering best practice?

How do I encourage and showcase team capabilities to other team members to follow the same?

How do I demonstrate strength in logical, creative problem-solving skills and excellent analytical skills?

How Can I Manage technical debt and prioritization of technical debt resolution without conflicting with business priorities?

How Can I Perform postmortem and root cause analysis to promote continuous improvement and maximizing productivity?

and many softer aspects which require to strengthen to drive critical product delivery. 

If scrum masters are not effective, we missed implementing being agile elements in the team. We missed making a high-performance team.

Applying Ladder of inference in Scrum events.

I have been handling with a scrum team where we are piloting Ladder of inference is a tool for all the Scrum events.

Why? the purpose was to - How to minimize conflicts in scrum events? we choose to identify the thought process from all the team members to take a certain decision or conclusion. Be it feature identification, story slicing or technical decision making, we as a whole team desire to identify the end to end rational process.

What happens most of the time?

Most of the team members share their conclusion but not the rationale that brought them there.

We skip to explain the rationale by considering that it is obvious.

When we get into conflicting dialogue, we do not demand to disclose further details. we become emotionally involved and start defending self.

We know Our beliefs have a significant effect on how we choose from reality and can force us to ignore the true facts altogether. Soon we are simply jumping to conclusions – by missing facts and skipping steps in the reasoning process.

We admitted as a whole team that we will adopt the Ladder of inference as a tool.

Few queries we asked:

1. Why have I preferred this course of action? Are there other actions I should have considered?

2. What belief lead to that action? Was it well-founded?

3. Why did I make that conclusion? is the conclusion sound?

4. What am I assuming, and why? Are my assumptions accurate?

5. What data have I chosen to use and why? Have I selected data correctly?

6. What are the absolute facts that I should be practicing? Are there other factors I should deal with?

7. Is this the “proper” outcome?

8. Why am I making these assumptions?

9. Why do I think this is the “correct” thing to look at?

10. Is this really based on all the data?

11. Why does he/she think that?

12. Why not explaining the reasoning behind their opinions?

What challenges we were facing as a team?

It takes time to work out this new tool as we are the slave of our habits, but once we consciously help each other, we slowly getting benefits

It creates a high-performance culture which helps us to learn mutually 

What we want to improve is ?

We insist that 

a) Team members reflects - Awareness of their own thinking and reasoning

b) Improve Advocacy - making their thinking and reasoning more visible to others

c) Inquire - Inquiring into others thinking and reasoning

Let us encourage each other to challenges our own views, own beliefs and assumptions. Publicly test those.