What opportunity are you missing today?

There’s been something that’s been on my mind lately, and I can’t quite get my head wrapped around an answer. I figured at this point, instead of just puzzling over it – the best thing I can do is just ask y’all what you think.

So here goes…

What’s stopping you?

Seriously, what’s stopping you?

We’ve been working on this “agile thing” now for quite some time. People have been trained on the mindset. PowerPoint decks, and playbooks have been distributed. Workshops have been conducted. Scrum and Kanban has been installed. Teams have been formed and registered them in a database. Jira and confluence have been rolled out. Dashboards full of metrics have been published. That means we’re agile, right?

Maybe, I guess. But for those of you who have started your agile team journey together, let me ask you this… do you feel agile?

• Does it feel like you are closely connected to the customer and business problems that you’re helping to solve?
• Are you a part of crafting the solution? (…or are you given instructions on what to do, how to do it and when it needs to be done?)
• Are your daily huddles opportunities to partner with each other to solve problems and finish stories, that day? (…or are they a daily status update and list of meetings you’ll be attending?)
• Are your retrospectives opportunities to decide, as a team, to try something different so you can be more effective, efficient and engaged together?
• When you think of the word team, does it mean the group of humans, regardless of where they report, who are working together, day in and day out, to build solutions that your customers love? (…or does it mean your manager and their direct reports?)
• Does all of the work that you’re doing this week have a story on your team’s Kanban board? (…or do you still have side projects?)
• At the last sprint planning, were you able to say “I don’t think we’ll have time to finish that story in this next sprint, should we trade it for something we already committed to, or should we leave it to next sprint?”
• Are mistakes and failures shared and celebrated, so the whole team (and I mean cross-functional team here) can get a little smarter and better, together?

To be fair, there are days where even I can’t answer all of those questions with a brutally-honest “yes,” but that’s really not the point. Even on my worst days, I still feel “agile” (although sometimes I do have to dig pretty deep.) It’s not because of the job I have, or the team that I’m on. Do you want to know my secret?

I’ve decided that I want to take advantage of this opportunity.

We’ve seen some pretty impressive results from some of the teams that coaches and scrum masters and agile-minded leaders have been working with! Out of everything that is unique and different and special about those teams, there is one commonality that I would bet my morning coffee on, and that’s this…

Those people, on that team, decided that they wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to BE different. To BE agile. They started off with a commitment to each other that they would work together differently than they did before they formed up. They leaned into the chance to work outside of the normal command-and-control-org-chart-dominated way of working, and partner together to solve problems.

Did they get it perfect out of the gate? Nope! Did they (or even now, do they) do “perfect Scrum” (or Kanban.) Nope. Was it smooth sailing, with no problems at all from day 1? Not even close. Did they lean in with curiosity, and see this as an opportunity to overcome the things they all knew were impeding them from really delivering value, together? YES!

So now what?

Well, sadly, I don’t have any real easy answers for you, other than this – you have to decide.

• Are you going to put your energy into protecting what you know and what you have, or are you going to take advantage of this opportunity to learn, and grow, and experiment and do things differently?
• Are you going to take the opportunity to challenge yourself and your team (however it’s currently defined) with every sprint, to try and be closer to the definition of an agile team, and the values that they share?
• Will you take the opportunity to ask your team how you can be different, to help you all get a step closer to the vision of agile teams, or are you going to wait for everyone else to change first?
• Will you challenge your Product Owner, Manager, and others around your team to take advantage of this opportunity to learn and change?

What if you took that list of questions above, and had a conversation with your team at the next retrospective? I mean an honest conversation about how you are working together, and where maybe not everyone is feeling that way. What could you do, together as a team, with the answers to those questions? Could you use it to challenge yourselves to focus your energy on taking advantage of the opportunity this transformation promises?

I guess that’s up to you to decide.

We all win together!