Random agile thoughts — Our Inner Control Freak
My random thoughts on challenges faced by an agile coach working with software development organizations, week #25, 2019
I blog on the topic of challenges that I face in the capacity of an agile coach and this is a part of the series. Find the first post on the topic here where I also explain my motivation and ambition behind this series. The entire series is available from this publication called ‘Random Agile Thoughts’.
This week’s post is about our inner control freak that stands in the way of neutrality when we need it.
Random agile thought #5 — The challenges of attaining neutrality in coaching conversations caused by the predominance of our inner control freak
This week has had a lot of frustrating situations for me and then we had an interesting chat with my colleague Jan, who also happens to be an agile coach and he has been staying in our organization much longer than myself. And then he told me something — “Yuri, if you are an agile coach and you do not feel frustrated all the time, then you are doing something wrong.” I guess he was trying to cheer me up and basically point to the fact that frustration is the inherent part of what agile coaches are doing and it helped me. What an interesting thought.
Later in the week I met a peer agile coach while attending a 2 day course in story telling. We had a chat and I raised to him Jan’s quote with, I was curious to know his opinion. This guy, Erik, said he could easily recognize himself in that comment and he said that probably the frustration I was talking about was caused by the fact that agile coaches tend to be the ones that are the most advanced in the mindset they are trying to encourage in their organizations. It takes time to see the mindset picking up and of course you could feel frustrated losing your patience sometimes. And his advice was to be more patient and slow down. Again, interesting angle.
It got me thinking. I saw two perspectives in these two opinions so nicely pointed out by Jan and Erik. One about humility and acceptance of the fact things are not what you expect them to be, at least not their speed. Another about arrogance believing you are ahead of others, placing yourself somewhat above the rest. And then I remembered a quote suggested by my former manager, Anders, who liked the Danish philosopher Soeren Kierkegaard (the guy who is extremely popular among my Danish colleagues, you should check his ideas out). I do not remember it verbatim, but something like:
You should be humble helping other people. You do not impose your vision on them but you meet them where they are at the moment and then you help them to take it from there, you go the journey along with them, at their pace.
I kind of liked this idea. Something you could summarize like ‘humble confident’ — you understand your mission, but you do not allow your ego to take over. It is usually not what other people could appreciate after all. Most of the time, at least.
And darn it is hard. It is hard for me. How come it is so difficult? Is that an individual challenge only I face? I gave it some more thinking and the way I see it, the effect is caused by how nature built us. The thing we call ‘I’, our conscience, that piece inside of our head, looking at the world through our eyes, controlling every move. I call it the inner captain sailing our ship, this inner control freak. Do you have one? I do.
You live your entire live being in control of everything. Like when you decide whether to get up in the morning or not. When you send that email with exactly that message. When you push a stroller with your kid through the street. Naturally we transfer this style of control into all other aspects of our live and work. Telling kids what to do and pointing out a solution when asked a question by a team member.
And yes, there are coaching questions, open non-leading questions and all of that coaching stuff, I know. There is facilitation principles of staying neutral. I know. But think about this — when you are asking those non-leading questions and you think you maintain neutrality — are you really removing yourself completely from the situation? Aren’t those questions still driving your agenda even if you like to think the opposite? When guiding the group you coach through their particular situation, how do you make sure you are not applying the preferred way or direction you personally like? Are you completely sure? I am not.
Thoughts like these were circulating in my mind when I entered the 2 day training on visual storytelling also in this week. At the end of the 2nd day we were asked to come up with our own story and use it as a content for the final exercise. I applied the tricks of visual story telling to help myself frame my thinking and unexpectedly for myself I formulated some kind of an approach for removing yourself from your guiding suggestions. Here it is:
- Get a solid understanding of the situation at hand. For example by drawing a power field with relationship between people and events could help a lot. Here and here I suggest some simple tricks to visualize abstract situations. And here you can find more on getting up to speed with visualizing anything if you struggle with drawing.
- Try to locate yourself and your interests in the picture you drew. For example, think about things that you try to achieve with the situation. Where do you connect to the situation the most?
- And once you managed to find yourself and your interests in there, remove yourself physically from the model. Like scratching those things out, or even cutting your piece away if it makes more sense. What is left now is hopefully how the people in the situation see it, their interest and their aspirations.
- Now help them to get there by asking the right non-leading questions that you know how to ask as a coach.
I hope it makes sense to you.
Your reflections?
Okay, so you reached as far as this line. How about requesting a training in visual thinking from me?
