Thanks Samuel. The next conversation teed up with Nigel Thurlow will also be very insightful. And we'll get a brief opinion from him as well on AI. That said, we'll definitely get Scott back on to delve in on his AI perspectives.
I appreciate that this conversation “looked over the rim at the vast landscape beyond team coaching” (to paraphrase). Many of the #agileisdead discussions fixate in the team-scape, failing to even acknowledge that the environment around the team as significant effect on the team’s ability to gain agility. One of you mentioned six-sigma and other organizational improvement libraries that were supposed to create great things but also “died.” I’d love for more of us to dive into the causes of those failures and whether or not agile hit on the same reasons for the current difficulties. Is it that the nature of how business is done eventually, successfully rejects changes to how business is done? Or, at best, changes to how business is done is so slow that we cannot see it, and cannot make it happen faster, and is difficult to make it last?
The lack of product management work or role at the beginning of technology products is a great point. That kind of work emerged as needful as the computer-based products became more complex and specialized. This points to the possibility that specialization in the agile coach work is also natural. We, coaches and customers of coaches, are not good at creating shared understanding about specializations.
Super important topic. I'm so glad that the NUMMI plant is something that happened. It shows that with the right leadership you can build a high performing culture in any organization, in any country. The collectivist, collaborative culture you need to build for Lean to exist requires you to support the people doing the work and to help them be successful. The key perspective shift is holding the belief that it's the people doing the work who are creating the value (because it is), so if we want to get more work done we have to help the people doing to work to make it easier for them to deliver value.
The center of value of Agile Coaches has shifted. I personally was pulled into this #NoSuchThing conversation because there were assertions around the book "Agile Coaching" from Pragmatic Bookshelf that claimed the two authors had advocated for "Life Coaching" and from that point things devolved over time. I was trying to go back to that point in time to have a conversation around the original intent of the authors who wrote the first book on Agile Coaching by the same name. You'll notice that they were very developer-centric and never became certified as "professional coaches". I find that interesting, so from my POV wanted to explore where the Agile Coaching "profession" jumped the shark or was "hijacked". More important than the historic background is exploring together "where is the new center of value for Agile Coaching?" The world has shifted, and the market is not whispering this...
Sometimes you need to build a fire. It is intended to get folks who believe that the basis of "agile coaching" founded on "professional coaching" to come to the table and bring some sanity back to the table. "agile coaching" was not founded on that premise, and to my point, requires "work domain" knowledge on the part of the coach. It's not the first time I written that down or described that. The problem is that whenever that subject gets brought up, people's "feelings" surface, rather than having a productive (bring the light!) conversation. See...you hit on something around the 9:40 mark, Matt. Jeff : 17:40...that is, in fact, is part of it.
Agile teams must have got the same inspiration of delaying the start (reduce demand) when they introduced the concept of cards. There are other things like reducing cycle times with sprints and delivering working code at regular intervals to increase the flow. After reading Steve's book it becomes so much clear as to what principles are inspiring a lot of these agile practices. The main reason agile is poorly adopted is because it does not emphasise the thinking behind its practices. Even then, agile practices are limited within the Engineering teams, whereas Steve extends the idea of Theory of Constraints even beyond that.
