The Amplio Insights Podcast Series Al Shalloway

Many Agile coaches complain about management’s lack of wanting to truly understand Agile. This topic is about how to talk to management in a way they will be interested in learning about the value of Agile. The trick is to talk to them from their perspective and to take advantage of what they know and care about.

Many in the Agile community criticize a company’s leadership for not understanding Agile. However, much of this lack of understanding is due to many agilists not talking to them in a manner that executives are interested in. Executives often don’t want to learn Flow, Lean, or the Theory of Constraints. I suggest a better way of communicating the value of Agile is by talking to them about value streams and value stream networks in a way that makes sense for them. This chapter presents an example of how to do this.

The prior topics provide us with an understanding of distinctions, the order in which they must be conveyed, and that we must undertake a discovery, not a debate. We can now use these to have a conversation with people who look to be belligerent but are really more open to learning than we might think.

When people know a useful concept, it is normal to try to convince other people of it. Even if this is done with good intentions, it feels uncomfortable to people. It reactivates times they have been talked down to by arrogant people.  Trying to convince people of something is not an effective way of creating new possibilities for people. 
Instead of debating, we need to have a discussion for discovery. The reality is that none of us are right all the time.

The order in which you present new concepts is important. People can only learn what they already almost know. Yet very often what they need to know is like the stick buried underneath a pile of things they don’t know. But at the top, is something they already almost know. The metaphor of how you take sticks from a pile can be used to determine the order in which you convey concepts to people.

Experts do not always have more experience or intelligence than those who are less competent. I suggest the biggest difference is what they look at and what they ignore. These “distinctions” provide them with insights on how to solve problems. For example, an expert skier will see many types of snow while I will just see dry, powder, wet, and good snowball-making snow.