Jade Meskill:  Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Agile Weekly podcast. I’m Jade Meskill.

Roy van de Water:  I’m Roy van de Water.

Clayton Lengel‑Zigich:  And I’m Clayton Lengel‑Zigich.

Prescriptive Agile Coaching Trying a New Approach

Jade:  Clayton, you’re trying a new approach to coaching a team you are working with. We wanted to talk about that a little bit. Tell us a little bit about what you’re doing.

Clayton:  A little bit of background. The team is this collection, I wouldn’t say misfits, if you’ve seen the movie “Bad News Bears” it’s kind of like that.

Jade:  [laughs]

Roy:  Wow. I have not.

Jade:  [laughs] Imagine that you have.

Roy:  Is it like “Breakfast Club”?

[laughter]

Clayton:  In that there are people in the movie, yes. It’s the same thing.

Jade:  [laughs]

Roy:  Is it like any of the three “Star Wars” movies?

Jade:  [laughs]

Clayton:  OK. There’s this collection of misfits and the approach I have been taking was I wanted to be prescriptive about some things. I go back and forth between organic learning or being really prescriptive. I thought I want to be kind of prescriptive because I want to accelerate things, but I don’t want to be prescriptive about stuff like process. I don’t want to say like, “We have to do stand-ups” or “We have to do Scrum” or “We have to have a product owner.”

But I thought, “What if I’m prescriptive about the principles and the values?” As far as being prescriptive goes, that has actually gone pretty well. Things like being open about what we’re working on, visualizing the work, collaboration, and all those kind of things. Then the other approach I’ve been taking that’s actually probably had the most benefit there’s two things.

One is I’m pretending like they’re already an awesome team. When topics come up, rather than saying like, “I’ll ask a question about something like, “How would a team handle this?” Rather than saying like, “A high‑performing team would do X, Y, Z,” I’d say, “Oh, I think maybe if you guys did this, that would work.” They look around. The next part that comes in is “You can do anything you want.”

I always laugh when Jade does the, “You can do anything you want, but there are consequences.” I’ve been trying to get them to believe in this kind of fantasy land where they live in this reality where they’re already awesome, and they can do anything they want. Some of the things that I’ve done on accident that have helped a lot, we set up pairing stations. One of the things that I was being prescriptive about was collaboration.

Rather than trying to work on a bunch of these different projects all at once with a bunch of different people siloing, I said, “Hey, let’s set up a pairing station.” I actually did that for them and made it really easy to use them. It worked out in my favor that no one’s machine was set up to work on any of the projects, and the only machine that was was the pairing station. I just grab [indecipherable 2:27 ]

Jade:  This was a team that hadn’t paired before? They were not

Clayton:  Yeah, they’d had a little bit of exposure but not really.

Part of the pairing station problem that we had was the monitors were really bad. I went out one day, and I just bought new monitors. I came back and they were all like, “Wow. How did you get new monitors? You didn’t go through IT.” I’m like, “Yeah, I just went and bought them”. They are like “you can do that”? I wasn’t trying to make a case on this but I was like “Yes, I can, I’m an adult. I went to the store and I purchased them and there was this transaction and now we have new monitors”.

It was totally an accident but that was I think the first time they saw “Oh, wow, you really can do anything, there was this thing that I thought was impossible but then you did it”. All the conversations we have been having around actual code things or technical practices or what ever, I think the barrier of that’s impossible, I have never seen that before is widdled away at this point.

They are willing to pretend now, that they can do any of these things. Anything is possible.

If You Tolerate It, You Insist On It

Jade:  What are the results that you have seen so far from this experiment?

Clayton:  They are making good choices. One of the things that I have been trying to emphasize is that concept of if you see a problem it’s your problem now. If you tolerate it, you insist on it. If you see something that you think there is a better way of doing something, then go ahead and do it. Take ownership of it.

It started out where the board was disorganized and people were saying, “I don’t understand what the board means”. “OK, then make it better”. “Oh we can do that”? So they went and made it better.

The next day “I don’t understand how the board flows, I don’t understand what projects they are”. Then someone said “I think we should color code them”. Great, go color code them.

It seems like they are doing what ever they want, but they are really doing the things that are helping them being effective. I have seen a lot of collaboration. They actually are pairing on everything. It’s kind of by necessity.

There is not one person who knows everything, so they’ve gotten so much benefit out of collaborating on the work, I think they are falling in to that as just a habit. I don’t they trying to find a way out of it. They are not just doing that because they need to. I think they are enjoying it and having a lot of fun.

The other thing I have seen is at the end of the day, they look like they are mentally exhausted from pairing all day and they look like they are ready to go home. Where before there was a lot of idle time and board thumb twiddling. That is a status quote for that organization. These guys seem like they are really engaged the entire time.

Autonomy is Largely a Matter of Perception

Roy:  It’s interesting because you brought up the fact that, from your coaching experience it sounds like this is one teams you have been the most prescriptive with, yet they seem to have the impression that they can do what ever they want.

Clayton:  I heard a conversation that they were having with someone on their team where they said “It’s really awesome, we just get to do what ever we want”, which is really not the case. If they got to do what ever they wanted they would probably be doing something different, but because I am able to guide them along with their principals, if there is an idea and we’re using a decider, so everyone is trying to support the best idea.

So when something comes up they are in the habit of saying “OK, I have this idea.” Make a decider or proposal and it passes. If something maybe needs to get tweaked a little bit, we can just make a new decider, and alter it a little bit. Or we can investigate what that behavior is, and get their intention. One example that came up the other day was, they didn’t want to have a rule about [indecipherable 5:48 ] overproduction code.

I think maybe normal coaching stuff would be like, “This person wants to go off and do their own thing, because they [indecipherable 5:55 ] “ In reality it was, “I want to have more time to learn by myself. The best way to learn is to actually do the work.” “OK. That makes sense.”

They wanted to go home, and to do the work on their own to learn. Many other people in the team thought, “Hey, that takes away an opportunity for me to learn.” We were able to negotiate some way, to talk about how we can satisfy all those needs on the team.

It’s like the team is doing what they want, but they are still sticking to the principle of overproduction code is paired collaborative code.

What Happens If We Just Pretend

Jade:  What do think has been one of the most powerful ideas that you’ve tried out? You talked about pretending. What’s one of the other things that you’ve done, that you think has allowed this team to be able to enter into this new reality, and just accept it?

Clayton:  A couple other things that have been really powerful, we snapped them out of the current environment I guess. The very first day that we were a team, there was a lot of [indecipherable 6:55 ] about, “Why we had formed this as a new team?”

“What were doing here,” and “Why did I get picked to be on this team, and not these other people?” I said, “I’m going to go on an adventure, and go to Michael’s and buy some supplies to make a physical board. Who wants to come with me?” This was 9:30 or something.

There were two people that looked at me strangely like, “You are going to go where? But it’s work time?” We went, and it’s stuff like that. Like those little moments, where I’m just modeling that behavior of reinforcing that, “You can do whatever you want. You can make the workspace better or the work better, or how you are doing the work, better.”

Those are the kind of things that have the biggest wins.

Jade:  You took on the authority of, “We can just do this. We can go wherever we w