How to get deeper in agile transition to change your team members' ways of thinking together? How can you help them to be agile, not only to do it?

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Depth in Being Agile
Olga Kiss & Gabriella Peuker

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Doing agile vs. Being agile
“Being agile means you understand the principles which lead to true agile success.
It also means the team and organization are both constantly improving. When
you are being agile daily standup meetings and retrospectives are both very
important meetings which help the team be successful. Finally, being agile means
being unafraid of failure. Doing agile has none of these qualities because it is all
about doing the agile practices, not living the agile principles!”
- Bob Hartman, 2009 https://agileforall.com/agile-antipattern-doing-agile/
Is it possible to be agile - living the agile principles - without doing any of the
known practices? What do you think?

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Shu Ha Ri
“People who are learning and mastering new skills pass through three quite different stages of behavior: following, detaching, and
fluent.”(Cockburn, 2001 http://alistair.cockburn.us/Shu+Ha+Ri ) Ron Fox 1995, 2001 http://www.kendo-world.com/wordpress/shu-ha-
ri-revisted-part-i/
level Shu
Keep, protect,
maintain
Ha
Detach, learn new practices, go to
different schools/dojos
Ri
Go beyond, transcend
behaviour Follow, imitate detach Fluent, be in flow
Listening &
learning
explicit instructions Limitations of practices, rules,
comparison, personal compatibility
Informative situations,
transformative points
knowledge Doing only Understanding purpose,
comparison, reflection
Tacit, personal
knowledge, dancing in
the moment

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The route to being agile
The Hartman way:
“Once you understand the difference [between doing and being agile] you can start to rely on the process
to self-correct you toward being agile.”
- Bob Hartman, 2009 https://agileforall.com/agile-antipattern-doing-agile/
The Pragmatic Dave way:
“What to do:
● Find out where you are
● Take a small step towards your goal
● Adjust your understanding based on what you learned
● Repeat
How to do it:
● When faced with two or more alternatives that deliver roughly the same value, take the path that
makes future change easier.”
- Pragmatic Dave, 2014 https://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile.html )

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Self-reflection

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the f-word
“Hard facts are only part of the data. Feelings are at least half the story. Feelings
tell what’s important to people about the facts and about the team.”
- Derby & Larsen Agile Retrospectives. p.9.
“let people talk about how they experienced the iteration without using the F word
(“feelings”).”
- Esther Derby & Diana Larsen Agile Retrospectives. Making Good Teams Great. Group. The
Pragmatic Bookshelf. p.10
"In my experience, high-performance teams are fully capable of developing safe
ways to discuss the feelings and needs of each member."
- Norm Kerth: Project Retrospectives : A Handbook for Team Reviews p.41.

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intimate relationships
“...listen for the conversations that happen during a typical day on a healthy agile
team. You’ll hear talk about things like mammogram results, coping with elder
parents, frustrations with visiting in-laws, upcoming vacation plans, advice on
raising kids, and much more. On exceptionally healthy teams, you hear team
members talk to one another at an even deeper level of intimacy. They discuss
their fears about the upcoming performance evaluation cycle, whether they feel
valued on the team, and how their work on the team does or does not mesh with
their personal growth goals. Relationships on agile teams are intimate.”
-Lyssa Adkins: Coaching Agile Teams. p.221

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our concept of depth

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Purpose of deepening
Learn how to
● make a psychological contract to give the team safety and trust to deepen
relationships
● differentiate between facts and interpretations
● talk about facts without judgements
● see the values behind actions
● be able to talk about implicit assumptions
● clearly see your own emotions
● express complex emotions and feelings by words
● take responsibility for your emotions
● look behind emotions and see your own basic human needs
● express your needs clearly
● let the other person give freely from heart

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Deep Retro
1. Set the stage - the importance of framing and psychological contract
2. Gather data - the essential data of a deep retro:
a. feelings, emotions,
b. interpretations
c. go to the level of deepest human needs
to deepen data gathering: TA, CC/NVC 1st-3rd steps, ladder of inference, EQ
1. Generate insights
to deepen insights: CC/NVC 4th step, EQ
2. Decide what to do
keep your discussion on a deep level: Dialogue vs. debate
3. Close the retro - closing with supporting attitude

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values
Awareness. “Awareness means the capacity to see a coffeepot and hear the
birds sing in one's own way, and not the way one was taught….
Spontaneity. Spontaneity means option, the freedom to choose and express
one's feelings from the assortment available (Parent feelings, Adult Feelings and
Child feelings). It means liberation, liberation from the compulsion to play games
and have only the feelings one was taught to have.
Intimacy. Intimacy means the spontaneous, game-free candidness of an aware
person, the liberation of the eidetically perceptive, uncorrupted Child in all its
naivete living in the here and now.”(Berne: Games People Play, Ch 16, p.78-79).

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values
Attentive listening: listening for feelings and needs as well as thoughts
Taking responsibility
– for our emotions - emotional freedom
– for expressing our needs
Giving from the heart
Autonomy and let the other person stay autonomous
Compassion & empathy to ourselves and others
Presence

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Thank you for your attention!
Olga Kiss
olga.kiss@agilehuman.hu
Gabriella Peuker
gabriella.peuker@agilehuman.hu
http://agilehuman.eu/