Experience report from the Kanban Coaching Exchange - Exploring Kanban through it's values

I enjoyed a great evening last night at the Kanban Coaching Exchange, hearing Mike Burrows explore Kanban via a value system. This post summarises my notes and observations from the evening.

Some sub-titles were:

• Kanban is "a humane start with what you do now approach to change"
• Kanban encourages "Leadership at every level"

We kicked of with some quick exercises to familiarise ourselves with the values (Mike's posted them on his blog). I enjoyed being part of a very like-minded group (including @drewpreston and @jose_casal), which finished the first exercise quickly and got full-marks :-) The beer and success must have gone to our heads though, as we missed 100% on the second :-(

The values were grouped into three Agendas:

1 - Sustainability

• Transparency
• Balance
• Collaboration

Collaboration is more than just "being nice to each other"; it's about creative relationships that, together, achieve something. Surprise, dissappointment or frustration in the team is often a sign that collaboration is missing or sub-optimal.

2 - Service Orientation

• Customer focus - how quickly does the team validate that they've met the customer's needs. Can they even do this (does the data exist and can they access it)?
• Flow
• Leadership (at every level)

3- Survivability

• Understanding
• Agreement
• Respect

These are disciplines (that take time and effort to do well), particularly relevant to making changes to a system/process. A related anti-pattern is "unsafe change", comprised of:

• Bravado (too fast)
• Complacency (too slow)
• Tampering (too random)

This was my first time at the meetup and I really enjoyed it. Great location, speaker, beer, pizza, discussion and people.

Team Safety

How safe is your team? Is team safety important?

My colleague raised these excellent questions in a recent interview we conducted for our Scrum-master vacancy. Then this week I was challenged by some uncomfortable, but important, questions. Unfortunately, this was before I read a thought-for-the-week article on how Jesus invited questions. All this got me thinking about why team safety is important, and how we can improve it.

http://iversonforest.com/safetyteam.html

Why is safety important?

When people feel safe in a team, they are not afraid to ask questions. These may be curious, or knowledge-seeking questions, or they may be challenging, uncomfortable questions. Either way, these kinds of questions benefit both the individuals and the team. Such questions help build and spread knowledge as well as improve artefacts, processes and behaviours.

Safety can also be viewed as the absence of fear. People tend to be afraid of making mistakes, of getting things wrong. But we often learn by our mistakes. It’s only in taking risks that we make new discoveries (think of Columbus, Neil Armstrong) and move things forward. When people feel safe in a team, they have the confidence to step out of their comfort zone and take a risk, even if it leads to failure. They know that their team-members will support them, whatever the outcome.

How can we improve team safety?

http://today.slac.stanford.edu/feature/2009/safe09-site-office.asp

It's got to be more than just issuing hard-hats and fluro-vests, or books and training courses.

People feel safe when they trust each other. People feel safe when they respect each other. The excellent book, Team Geek prefixes trust and respect with humility (HRT - spoken as “heart”), which is also a vital ingredient for a healthy team. If you work in an IT team and haven’t read Team Geek, I highly recommend it - we have several copies going round our office (I did say more than just books)!

I’ve been very challenged this year (already!) by how to live out these values, firstly for myself, and, secondly, to encourage them in the teams I lead and am part of (be they family, work or social). As a leader and manager of a software team, my goal (as put by the Agile Scout, Peter Saddington) is to love the team and inspire them. Inspiring the behaviour and values that increase team safety is quite a challenge, but a vital one to engage with.

I feel like it’s going to be a long year! Perhaps it’s time for a retrospective, starting with a Safety Check? This great technique provides a safe way for the team members to share their comfort/safety level, ahead of the team discussing potentially difficult, “touchy-feely” type subjects. Writing this blog post actually led me to the Safety Check article, so for me, this post has been very worthwhile, and I’m starting to feel just a tiny bit more confident already!

A systemic approach to coaching agile teams

Last week I was privileged enough to be part of Johanna Rothman's Coaching for Leaders Masterclass.

Four of us from NewVoiceMedia attended and we had a fantastic time. There was much to learn, take away and apply. For me particularly, I saw significant overlap between coaching principles and systemic practice, which my wife is currently studying.

Our first exercise used origami to explore coaching stances, through a very simple, but effective means.

The origami from our coaching session

We then progressed onto "speed-coaching", in triplets of coach, coachee and observer:

1. The coach coaches the coachee for seven minutes, whilst the observer, well, observes. 
2. The observer provides feedback to the coach, for three minutes. 
3. The three rotate roles and repeat.

The triplet I was part of found this massively useful, with each reaching a SMART action within the time set. The systemic links that then came out for me were circularity, curiosity, reflection and neutrality.

Circularity and curiosity

Part of the coach's role is to frame the problem or goal, provide context and explore options. In each case, we saw this being done through ever tightening circles of questions, answers and reflecting back, until the root of the problem or actual goal was established. The tightening of the circle was often achieved by the coach asking curious questions. This process to me fitted well with the principles of circularity and curiosity used by a systemic practitioner to explore a client's situation.

Reflection

It was my first experience of being observed as a coach, and not only did the observer provide great insights into improving my coaching technique, they also provided additional input to the coaching session itself. In fact, many observers in the room found it hard not to be drawn into helping with the coaching. This combination reminded me of the systemic concept of a reflecting team, who observe a therapist and client, then provide additional insights to both.

Neutrality

As the group shared their experiences of speed-coaching, the question came up of whether a coach must be an expert in the coachee's problem domain. Furthermore, what would the impact be if they were a negative expert (i.e. bad at the problem domain)? We concluded that there was a middle sweet spot, but the most important strength was in coaching itself. If the coach did have an opinion on the problem domain, then the concept of neutrality becomes very relevant. In systemic practice, the therapist endeavours to be concious of how their own background might be influencing the session. It's important that they don't inflict their own views or solutions on the client, but rather guide the client in discovering next steps or possible outcomes. This is achieved by practising neutrality.

What's next?

Johanna's fantastic workshop was a great encouragement to me and reinforced many of the good things we're doing at NVM. It's also made me keen to explore further how systemic practice could be applied to agile teams, so watch this space, I'll be posting more on this topic!