SERIOUS SCRUM CONVERSATIONS
Are You a Traditional Manager or an Agile Leader? Conversation with Willem-Jan Ageling
On Serious Scrum Community and Agile Leadership
Recently I had the pleasure to talk with Willem-Jan Ageling, a Senior Agile Coach at Worldline and the Co-Founder of the Serious Scrum Community. One of the most vibrant independent Scrum communities globally. We talk about how Serious Scrum came to be and what Agile Leadership really is.
Willem-Jan started as a Project Manager. Didn’t we all? I certainly did. His company went on a journey to adopt Scrum and even had Jeff Sutherland fly over to help with the first Agile transformation. Sadly, after a management change, the company was falling in and out in waterfall ways, though. Willem-Jan took part in the second Agile transformation and soon recognized that Agile and Scrum approaches were more in line with his mindset. As opposed to the pressing-for-results ways of Project Managers in a waterfall environment. So he started learning about Scrum and soon got his Professional Scrum Master certification from Scrum.org.
The history of Serious Scrum Community
It was then that he noticed there has been a lot of nonsense written about Scrum all over the internet. Therefore, he decided to write articles on his own. That’s how he met Sjoerd Nijland and together they decided to create a community for people who are serious about Scrum. “A place for sensible Scrum” or “The tsunami of sense” as they referred to it.
This is how the Serious Scrum Slack community started. It is formed by Scrum practitioners who like working in Scrum yet still have a critical eye and point out things that might not make sense or can be done differently than described in the Scrum Guide. This is a big perk of the community being independent of the official Scrum companies like Scrum.org or Scrum Alliance.
What the founders get from the community is, first of all, the credibility that’s created through all the combined articles.
We indeed are that independent community where Scrum practitioners can find verified Scrum information. And on top of it, we learn a lot from what we read, from helping people to create those articles. So it is also a learning experience for us.
Willem-Jan Ageling
People have an opportunity to grow their careers beyond the role of a Scrum Master or a Product Manager thanks to helping in the Serious Scrum Community. There have been examples of people like Maarten Dalmijn or Sjoerd Nyland who were able to start new careers thanks to the quality of their articles and the followers that they got on different channels.
We want to help people to grow, not only in Scrum knowledge but also in their writing skills.
Willem-Jan Ageling
Traditional Manager vs Agile Leader
When talking about the Scrum Master role, we tried to understand what it means to be an Agile Leader and how that differs from traditional management.
First, let’s take a look at the Cynefin framework and understand the environment we operate in. Many people consider that we operate in complicated environments and if we analyze well what needs to be done, we can expect fairly predictable results (sense — analyze — respond). That’s actually not true for most companies today, especially the ones working with technology. We operate in complex environments and here the way forward is by experimenting, by trial and error (probe-sense-respond). We have no way to predict the future, all we can do is conduct small experiments and move forward in small steps.
And that’s the main difference between the ways of work of a traditional manager that can work in clear and complicated environments and the need for an Agile leader for complex environments.
“A manager works best in an environment that is predictable, if I do this then five years from now that will happen. That’s not the situation in the world that we live in today. For any company that works in a complex environment — we don’t know what will happen three months from now and let alone a year.”
Willem-Jan Ageling
We need to make a mind shift among the leaders, not only in the Scrum teams:
Most people have been working in Scrum teams for many many years now. So they know the drill of working in Agile environments. It’s the management layer that now also needs to make that switch. They need to find their best way to proceed.
Willem-Jan Ageling
And it is not about letting go of control. It is about finding other ways to help the team to stay on track. And this has a lot to do with changing the mindset from looking at the outputs and making sure all deliverables are delivered on specific dates, to looking at the outcomes. Are we going in the right direction to meet our goals? These discussions could be happening at the Sprint Reviews if the leaders were present there.
Scrum Master as a Leader
Scrum Master is that kind of an Agile leader.
“It’s very important to help the team to grow to create the highest possible value. That’s what Scrum Master does and what a true leader should do.
Willem-Jan Ageling
However, the Scrum Master career path isn’t usually very clear in companies. Even though a Scrum Master’s role is a role of an Agile Leader, they are rarely considered for senior management roles. Due to the lack of technical knowledge or, rather, experience. The question is — how many middle and high leadership roles are composed of technical knowledge and how much of the company design, team structure, removing blockers, and fostering the teams to high performance? Isn’t that what Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches do? Maybe it’s time the Scrum Masters are considered to be in the leadership path of the companies.
You can listen to the whole interview also as a podcast here:
https://anchor.fm/maria-chec
Follow my YouTube channel — https://www.youtube.com/@AgileStateofMind
