The Trade Offs of Organic vs Prescriptive Agile Coaching Agile Weekly Podcast

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 b