This was topic of discussion for last week’s Agile Coaching Academy.
I stumbled across the quote somewhere, and now I cannot find it!
Ha – from Shu Ha Ri, a distillation of the path towards martial arts mastery.
守 – shu: learning the rules
破 – ha: make them your own
離 – ri: transcend the rules (mastery)
How reliant is the team on you (e.g. a coach / a team lead / a scrum master) to reach this ‘ha’ status? So that they can make the rules their own.
It was not something I had ever thought about.
Is it possible for a team to reach that status on their without somebody dedicated to guiding them?
I remember reading a post from Tobias Meyer about how a scrum master is a type of Product owner –
“The #scrummaster is a #productowner
What is a scrum master? Here’s a way of considering the role. The scrum master is the product owner for organisational change. When you introduce Scrum into an organisation, you are focused on the creation of two distinct things: new products and an improved organisation. New products have owners. The organisation itself also needs an owner, someone to manage the vast backlog of requests, to prioritise, and to collaborate with the cross-functional team of makers (in this case executives, managers, facilities folk, HR personnel, lawyers, and other decision makers) to deliver incremental value to its stakeholders (the employees and share holders).“
If that’s the case I should have started with a vision and a why and then we could start working towards it.
It never even occurred to me!
I had spent a lot of time and effort helping product owners to develop the vision for the product. But was there a vision for the team and how we work together? Does there need to be one?
I remember once seeing a tageline: build a great team, then build a great product.
Surely, if we have ceremonies for inspection and self-improvement, they have to be towards something.
A vision so compelling that everyone wants to achieve it.
By default we had inherrted this vision from the agile principles as the end state we wanted – or at least, I assumed we wanted. And we inherrted this vision of perfection from talks at conferences where speakers give us an insight into their slick, lean and high performance teams. (Even then, it’s just a thin slice of reality. A glimpse of the ‘best of’.)
And besides, would that vision even be applicable or achievable by our team? Let’s say the average person works in our team for at most two years – what then, are we able to achieve in terms of Ha status in that time (from a standing start). And did the other team members believe in that vision too? Did we have the same vision?
A vision so compelling that everyone knows it and wants to achieve it, through their own volution!
If someone could help co-create that team vision, step back and then support when needed, I reckon it’s possible for any team to achieve a Ha status on their own. If they had really wanted to achieve it and really understood why they were working towards it, of course they could!
This thinking has also refined my own purpose, and how I interface with a team.
As a cohort in the agile coaching academy, we talked about ways for the team to gradually become less dependent on us, including:
- deliberately being late for ceremonies to see how teams start and can continue without you,
- holding back (or waiting for seven seconds) before giving suggestions, allowing the team to come to these conclusions themselves,
- reminding yourself and the team that it’s your aim to make yourself redundent!
I’ve started applying some of the above and I am now actively starting to rethink about how to re-evoke that vision for the team. I’ll be referring to techniques that Jeremy Vey outlines in this post about how he facilitated a workshop to help a team find its its purpose.