In today’s rapidly evolving world, organizations are constantly seeking innovative solutions to stay ahead. While traditional approaches often emphasize conformity, a growing number of forward-thinking companies are recognizing the immense value of neurodiversity in driving creativity and pushing boundaries. Neurodiverse teams, comprised of individuals with different cognitive profiles like autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and dyspraxia, bring a unique blend of perspectives and problem-solving skills that can significantly enhance product and service development.
One of the key benefits of neurodiversity is the expanded range of thinking styles it brings to the table. Individuals with autism, for example, often possess exceptional attention to detail, pattern recognition abilities, and a logical approach to problem-solving, making them invaluable in identifying potential flaws and optimizing designs. Those with ADHD may exhibit hyperfocus on specific tasks, boundless energy for brainstorming, and a willingness to challenge conventional wisdom, leading to groundbreaking ideas. Dyslexic individuals, with their strength in visual-spatial reasoning and “thinking outside the box,” can offer fresh perspectives on user experience and design.
This diversity of thought fosters a more robust and creative innovation process. Neurodiverse teams are less likely to fall prey to groupthink, as individuals with different cognitive styles approach problems from unique angles. This leads to a wider exploration of possibilities, a greater likelihood of identifying unconventional solutions, and ultimately, more innovative products and services.
Furthermore, neurodiverse teams can improve an organization’s understanding of its customer base. By including individuals with lived experience of neurodiversity, companies gain valuable insights into the needs and preferences of a broader range of users, leading to more inclusive and accessible products and services.
Embracing neurodiversity isn’t just a matter of social responsibility; it’s a strategic advantage. Organisations that cultivate inclusive environments where neurodiverse individuals can thrive are better positioned to unlock their full potential, foster innovation, and achieve lasting success. By recognising and valuing the unique strengths of every team member, businesses can tap into a powerful source of creativity and drive the next wave of innovation.
Strengths of autistic team members
Autistic team members bring unique strengths that enrich the workplace. Their detail-oriented nature and strong analytical skills contribute to high-quality work and problem-solving. Often possessing exceptional focus and logical thinking, they excel in tasks requiring precision and pattern recognition. Their unique perspectives can challenge conventional thinking, leading to innovative solutions. While communication styles may differ, clear and direct communication creates a productive environment where autistic individuals thrive, contributing valuable insights and diverse viewpoints to the team. Embracing their talents fosters a more inclusive and innovative workplace.
ADHD team members bring a dynamic energy and unique perspectives to the workplace. Their ability to think outside the box and hyperfocus on tasks they’re passionate about can lead to innovative solutions and breakthroughs. Often highly creative and adaptable, they thrive in fast-paced environments and can be excellent at brainstorming and problem-solving under pressure. While organizational challenges may exist, clear communication and structured support can unlock their potential. Embracing their enthusiasm and diverse thinking styles fosters a more dynamic and creative team environment.
£89.00Original price was: £89.00.£49.00Current price is: £49.00. incl. VAT
Learn practical strategies and insights to help you navigate and contribute effectively in a diverse team environment.
This one-to-one coaching session empowers individuals to thrive in neurodiverse teams. It covers understanding neurodiversity, effective communication, building strong relationships, and navigating team dynamics. Participants gain personalized strategies to enhance their contributions and foster inclusion within their team.
Our Elephant in the Room exercise is a powerful tool for fostering open communication and team collaboration. By using a physical representation of a sensitive or taboo topic, this activity encourages participants to confront uncomfortable issues head-on. This interactive approach promotes a safe and supportive environment where team members can express their concerns and work together to find solutions.
This exercise brings the metaphor of ‘the elephant in the room’ to life by means of a large, stuffed toy elephant. Participants write ‘undiscussable’ topics on cards and pin them anonymously onto the elephant. At regular intervals, the group brings them up and talks them through.
What to Use It For
To make a statement that no topic is ‘off limits’
To allow the group to bring up difficult topics for discussion
How It Works
Step 1. Introduce the elephant as early as possible in the session and invite participants to write any difficult or unmentionable topic on an index card and pin the card onto the elephant.
Step 2. At some convenient interval – the end of a day is a good time – review the cards with the client sponsor and agree how to address them with the group.
Step 3. Hold a group dialogue on these topics.
Timing
Group dialogue timing varies from 10 minutes periodically to larger 30-40 minute conversations.
Keep in Mind
It is important to deal with every issue that gets pinned on the elephant and to avoid censoring difficult topics. To do so defeats the purpose of the exercise.
The bigger the physical elephant, the better!
Contact us
Do you like The Elephant in the Room activity and wish you could facilitate fun and engaging sessions like this? If you said yes, it’s time to get in touch.
Find out more
Break out of the blah and make a move to extraordinary change and transformation events for your team. Find out how we bring fun and creativity to your facilitated events. We call it the Easy Way*. You’ll encounter less resistance and get more decisions made when you rely less on heavy change-management processes and more on collaboration.
*Human change is hard. Process-led change programmes make it harder. We think there’s an easier way. Find out how we brought fun and creativity into an insurance client’s transformation programme to help people learn skills for the modern workplace.
Today’s episode of The Peaky Agilist Podcast is proudly sponsored by Emergence, the Journal of Business Agility, brought to you by the Business Agility Institute. This quarterly publication brings you inspiring stories from the most innovative companies and explores themes of new ways of working, reclaiming management and humanising business. Full details of how to subscribe and receive a 10% discount is available down below in the description.
So today I’m joined by a special guest, someone who I’ve worked with and we’ve been exchanging a few emails and thoughts around Agile coaching and coaching in general. It’s the amazing Laura Re Turner. Hey Laura, how are you doing?
Hi, I’m good thanks. I’m good when anybody calls me amazing. That’s a great start.
You are, you are. You’ve been a huge inspiration for me. It’s always nice to meet people that are so passionate, especially about helping others.
So for others that maybe don’t know about you, it’d be great if you could tell us in your own words a little bit about your background, about what you do.
Yeah, well, we could spend an hour on that. You know, I’m sure you could spend an hour with anybody on their background. And in fact, like most coaches, when I first start working with a coachee, spend the whole first session on background and how the person got to hear.
Yeah, how do I select? It’s really hard. Well, as you know, I got a chance to speak to the great group from Coaching Agile Journeys yesterday, and I found myself talking about my experience of driving across the country from New Jersey to San Francisco, where I accidentally landed in a dot-com in the early 1990s.
And it was just literally a case of right place at the right time. And I was supposed to be a writer and never expected to be learning programming. You know, I was all geared up towards, you know, being a journalist, and it never happened.
But this has been a lot of fun. So it started in the early 1990s. And I could have been a great software developer for the rest of my life, but something made me want to progress and move up and get promoted until I had a couple of program management roles in big software companies.
And one day, I said to my husband, that’s it, I have to do something else. You know, I really have to do something else. And he said to me, I see you as like a teacher or a trainer or something.
And I went, you’re absolutely out of your mind. There’s no way. And it’s really interesting that we’re talking today because I literally just started picking up the phone and calling companies that I thought I’d like to work for.”
And one of them was QA. And that was the start of my transition to helping others. And around the same time, I started my master’s degree in coaching at Henley Business School.
And so those two streams continued in 2014. And six years later, it’s still going. And when you speak to people about how hard it is to start a business, they say, are you profitable?
Are you still going? Are you still running after five years? And I go, yeah.
And they go, then it’s going fine. So here we are. And I suppose by that definition, it’s going really well.
But it’s an awful lot of responsibility running a business, whatever the size is. Every day, there’s nothing else on your mind. And I was just working with a coachee this morning who’s transitioning into a new business.
And so it’s a bit of career coaching, but very purposeful. What kind of purposeful business and purposeful life the person’s going to have. And I said, when you start a new business, it has to be something that you’re passionate about every second, every minute of the day, because you’re going to have to sustain yourself and keep yourself going all the time.
Sometimes there’s nobody else, your spouse, kids, which we don’t have any kids, but parents, best friends, nobody else is going to be as passionate about it as you are. So I suppose that’s a very long introduction, but you did call me passionate. So there you go.
Oh, no, that’s great. And yeah, absolutely. There seems to be a wealth of experience there and you’ve sort of really done it from the ground up as a software engineer, sort of really living and breathing, building those sort of software products.
And then as you mentioned, you sort of moved more into program management and now coaching. So that’s an interesting sort of transition, I guess, as well. And the other thing I was going to ask you is you’re now based in the UK.
So what’s the story about you coming all the way from the US over to here?
Yeah, when I was with the guys from Coaching Agile Journeys yesterday, of course, a lot of them are Americans. It was wonderful to meet lots of non-Americans as well. I didn’t realize how big their community was.
But every time I get with an American audience, I feel a little bit nostalgic for home. I grew up in New Jersey. And when I graduated from college, when I left uni, I moved to San Francisco.
Good stuff. So we talked a little bit about coaching and I know coaching is a big passion of yours. So and coaching has really become, I would say, a pretty critical service for many professionals out there.
But if there’s anyone who maybe hasn’t had the opportunity to be coached or is thinking about it, what are some of the benefits that coaching can provide?
Yeah, yeah, wonderful. Well, I mean, I think the listeners of your podcast are coming from an agile development perspective, people who are looking to create change and transformation in organizations. And a lot of the work that I do is in that context.
And certainly, the book that’s coming out on June 8th is set in that context. I mean, for me, it’s about I describe it as creating sustainable change. You can bring a consultant in who blankets the place with new processes and tools.
And things seem to have a short-term improvement, maybe a little bit of a productivity boost and a little bit of a morale boost and the feeling that things are going to finally start to move in the right direction. But unless people can think for themselves and understand the meaning behind the rules and processes and how to tailor the approaches, then it doesn’t last. And so I use the word sustainable in this context to mean that people can think for themselves and keep adapting and tailoring the approaches to be fit for purpose for the people, the types of products and services that they build so that they can keep using it and think for themselves longer term.
I think good coaching helps people think for themselves, that the transformation even goes on long after the work is done.
Got it. Yeah. No, I think especially that element of thinking for yourself and I guess making mistakes as well and allowing you to make those mistakes in a safe way.
I think one of the things I do hear a lot of when I speak to some of my network of coaches, they say often the organization is really looking for a consultant, but they label it as an agile coach. You turn up and unless you’re giving answers, many clients will almost expect you to go into solution mode. Is that something that you’re seeing much as well?
Thank you for that question. You know me and you know the answer to that question is emphatically yes. In fact, I think a lot of the work I’ve done recently on building my own company brand with my own products and services and the book are about trying to break away from that consulting approach.
And there’s a place for consulting and there’s a place for best practices. And this is what great looks like in this sector and this type of business and solutions to problems. I think there’s a place for that.
When we’re asking people to think for themselves and learn how to take the tools and know what’s the right mix and how to tailor and now how to deal with the complex world where every problem isn’t fitting a template, then true coaching is the solution. And years ago when I was working as a trainer at QA and then as freelance, I was applying for roles. I was applying for agile coaching roles.
By that point, I’d already started my master’s in coaching, which has nothing to do with the agile world, at least not explicit, at least not with a capital A. And I thought, why am I not getting these roles? I’m not putting the right keywords in or something’s wrong.
And then I realized they weren’t looking for someone like me. They were looking for someone to, I don’t know what, teach them user stories or something, not to be dismissive about user stories. They’re a great tool that help people stay minded on your customer.
But for me, change and transformation are about a lot more than that. So I didn’t fit the mold. You can’t blame the buyers of agile coaching too much because perhaps that’s their understanding.
Scrum Master is to them the new word for project manager. So maybe agile coach is the new word for a consultant.
Yeah, that’s an interesting one.
Yeah. Well, yeah, we can go down that rabbit hole as well about project management and Scrum as well. But I know that’s not why we’re here.
But maybe the buyers of coaching are just writing the role descriptions in the way that they think they are supposed to. But it doesn’t help me because I don’t fit the mold. Because I think what organizations need is something else.
So it’s been a bit of an uphill battle for me over the last few years to get those two things to join up.
So I know you and I were just talking about things offline at one point, and you were talking about the book is structured around the six lenses. So could you tell us more about the book generally, and then also what are those six lenses?
Yeah, wonderful. When I did my masters, we had a day with a very inspirational leader in the professional coaching world named Peter Hawkins. He’s pretty well known to us here in the UK, if anybody works as a coach here.”
And I don’t think many people in the Agile space know about him. He tends to come through a lot of the coaching programs and universities. And he’s also currently the president, but outgoing president of my coaching association where I have my accreditation, which is called Apecs.
And I’ve also done some additional training with him on systemic team coaching, of which the six lenses is only one very small part, actually. But for me, even though it’s small and doesn’t really describe an entire engagement approach for systemic team coaching, I found it useful for helping to raise awareness of seeing the entire system, especially in an Agile context where so many Agile coaches tend to focus in on the team and just the team and how to shift work from left to right, be more productive. When actually when we start to drill down under some of the things that become visible on the on the Kanban board, we realize that the root causes are in leadership style or stakeholders outside the team who are expecting perhaps different things.”
And the amount of change taking place on the on the requirements on the work to be done based on the macro or external business factors, you know, the political and economic arena and so on. And new legislation and I felt it was important to raise awareness of the whole system. I don’t claim that the Six Lenses represents all of the systemic team coaching approach because it really, really doesn’t.
But it’s a starting point for kind of opening up and widening people’s idea of the wide angle lens that we need to have in order to really address all of the things that need to be addressed to create change.
Got it, got it. And would you say the book is aimed at particular types of agile coaches? Could they be enterprise agile coaches?
Or is it pretty much for anyone who’s interested in agile coaching?”
Yeah, it has a real natural fit with enterprise agile coaching. And this year I created a course which I branded systemic agile coaching to set it apart from the other enterprise agile coaching courses that are on the market to emphasize the systemic coaching element that is grounded in perhaps different approaches and methods than my competitors. But in fact, the book is aimed at professional coaches who don’t have the agile development background, even though I know that there’s hopefully going to be a huge amount of interest from both professional coaches who have only heard the word agile and think it’s a good thing, as well as people who identify as agile coaches and want to increase their professional coaching skills, but also internal leaders who see a coaching style of leadership as being valuable and now want to bring in some of the tools to support their teams and other stakeholders.
So I’m really optimistic that these different audiences are going to gravitate to the book and find value in it. However, I say in the introduction to the book that it’s aimed at professional coaches because what I don’t do and there wasn’t space in the book for is a discussion of professional practice and coaching supervision and ethics and contracting with clients. And that’s a piece that professional coaches, hopefully, you never know, but we’ll assume, we’ll safely assume that they know that they need to do.
And the idea of an ethical code is just starting to germinate in the agile coaching community. But so to get around that discussion, I said the book is aimed at professional coaches. So I think that’s a really important kind of disclaimer.
Yeah, no, thank you for that. Absolutely. I think, you know, there is, it’s not a regulated profession, I guess.
So it’s tough to know, you know, if everyone is following a consistent approach and contracting in the ethical side is actually really, really interesting. I know IC Agile have been doing a lot of work in that space at the moment. Shane Hasty has sort of been looking at that, hasn’t he?
So that will be really interesting to see how that sort of pans out for the agile community. And so…
Thank you. I’m sorry to interrupt you. It’s important to say that even professional coaching isn’t regulated.
So we have very similar issues. And all of the kinds of issues about do I get accredited or not? Do I follow an ethical code?
And how do I contract with my clients? And professional coaching are just magnified among agile coaches. So I’m sorry to interrupt you, but I think it was important to say that.
You said agile coaching isn’t regulated, but actually professional coaching isn’t either.”
Yeah, great point. Great point. And so in terms of the six lenses then, Laura, would you say there’s one or two that are particularly more important than the others or are they all of equal importance?
Oh, they’re of equal importance because one looks at leaders, two looks at teams. One looks at stakeholder interfaces. You have the external business environment.
They’re all relevant. They’re all because at any given point in a day, if you observe a team, they’re going to be making decisions and trade-offs and agreeing to things based on lots of factors in the business environment. And so the lenses is simply a way to help us think about the complexity.
This is really about complex adaptive systems, isn’t it? And about, you know, being asked to do a particular item of work from someone who’s measured in a different way to how perhaps that person over there is measured. And they’re all important.
They’re all important. Yeah.
Got it. Got it. Thank you for that.”
And I want to know a little bit about maybe the sort of lead up to the book. So what was your sort of big motivation? Why was this a particular topic of interest for you?
Yeah. Yeah. What a good question.
Well, how did it start actually? I was doing some voluntary work for a local careers charity. And as part of that, they offered coaching.
And I offered pro bono coaching through them for a few years, actually. We got a supervisor who recommended that there was a terrific workshop that we all attend. If we wanted to and could afford it because there wasn’t budget to send us.
So I self-funded myself on a course with Julia Vaughn Smith and Jenny Rogers on understanding how life trauma shows up in people’s agency and ability to make decisions and progress with their life. And it’s something that normally shows up in therapy. But Julia Von Smith identified that this also shows up in people and coaching.”
And at least if we can identify and know how to respond appropriately as coaches with our level of training, that that would be a valuable part of our practice. And so I mean, I know this is a podcast for Agilists, and so this really feels like it’s going out on a limb a little bit. And I hope I haven’t lost all of your listeners by this point.
But perhaps it’s also interesting for people to recognize that the amount of training and my lens on how I work with people is very, very wide and well outside of the Agile space. Anyway, I went to that workshop and found it mind-blowing. And Julia had just had a book published by Open University Press.
And of course, Jenny Rogers is a series editor for the coaching book series at Open University Press. And they had invited one of the Open University Press editors who I was chatting to over a coffee. And she said, you should write a book for us.
And that was a few years ago. So it was a workshop I didn’t need to attend. That was probably a little at the time a little bit fringe to what I needed to be able to do my pro bono work.
And I tell you, Patty, it was one of the very few times in my life where I feel I was rewarded for doing the right thing. You know, it wasn’t a networking meeting. It wasn’t about looking for work.
I wasn’t pitching anything. It was just serendipity over a coffee. And that led to obviously more conversations and, you know, the process of contracting for and writing a book can be a long one.
So that was a few years ago. So this has been a few years of work, a few years in the making.
Wow. I always have so much respect for anyone that publishes a book. I mean, I can’t again imagine the number of hours, the pain, the research, you know, all the different dilemmas you must go through.”
I mean, I was looking at your cover of your book. I’m sure even choosing the cover is a big decision. So it’s always amazing to hear people’s stories about how they arrived at, you know, picking that particular idea and even sort of deciding to do this crazy thing, which is to write a book, which is no easy feat.
But that’s awesome. It was meant to be, Laura. Sounds like it was meant to be.
I hope you’re right. Yeah, the publishing date was pushed out by about a week. So it’s now the 8th of June.
And the really amazing people, I know I’m saying this again from Coaching Agile Journeys, who I met yesterday. What a great session that was. Lots and lots of people went to my landing page to go ahead and order the book.
And yeah, it’s going to be an exciting time. And yeah, it’s wonderful.
Oh, super. And actually, let’s pick up on the cover then. So can you tell us the story behind the image that you chose?”
Were there other sort of options that you were looking at or was this your favourite throughout?
Oh, I wish I had an inspirational story there, Patty. It’s a pretty boring one. I shouldn’t say that because what’s boring to me may not be to other people.
But when I finished the main work on the manuscript last year and submitted it, you know, by my submission deadline, I’d met a milestone, even though the publisher hadn’t officially read it and accepted it. Between you and me, we know when we’ve done the work and we haven’t. And I wasn’t worried.
So I’d submitted it and I went out and bought myself a new iPhone and doing lots of photography. I like lots of nature and trees and I like the post-production and Adobe Lightroom and I like doing all that stuff. And I submitted a couple of photos to them for the cover and they went, we’ve got tons of covers that look like this.
Nice try, but no. And then they offered a couple of ideas and this was the one I picked. So no, the really smart people at the publisher knew what was right.
They gave me a few options and I picked.
Awesome. And so what would be great is if we could maybe look at one of those lenses and if you could maybe break it down a little bit. So if someone is wondering, I understand at a high level that there are these different almost stances or as you mentioned, they are lenses.
But how do I bring that to life a little bit for the listeners? So is there one that you could pick and then maybe we could go a little bit deeper into that?
Brilliant. And I’ve got some notes on that actually that I think would be helpful. Well, let’s see.
Why don’t we start with lens one? Because what I’m doing is encouraging organizations to start down this approach with me by first working with individual leaders one-to-one. And I know lots of agile coaching is about team coaching, but I love the individual coaching and it’s often a great place to start because there’s a little bit more intimacy where individuals through trust and explicit confidentiality agreement are happy to talk about some of the real thorny challenges and I think you get to a lot of the problems quite quickly.
But I think that’s a great place to go because I think there are a lot of leaders struggling with how do I now transform into someone who really has empowered teams where I’m really a facilitated leader and I’m trusting the team and where I can give them enough slack and space to allow them to do that creative knowledge work that everybody talks about but without me getting my wrist slapped for not being on top of things and not catching problems and all of this. It’s really difficult for individual leaders, especially in the agile space, because so many people came from software development roles and they were technical architects and they had some interpersonal skills or some maturity in certain areas and now are in leadership roles where being the expert is no longer what’s needed. But out of history and habits and what got me here, they continue to work in that way.”
But really paradoxically, we need people to do exactly the opposite now. How do you create that behavioral change to being a networking leader and someone who helps your team find resources and admitting you don’t have all the answers so that your team members can admit they don’t have the answers and ask for help when they need it, and really empower the team by giving them permission to make mistakes and try different things? It’s revolutionary for a lot of people, especially in technology.
And so what I did in Lens 1, which is the individual lens, is I mapped coaching approaches from professional coaching that I think are relevant to leaders in this domain. And so there are things like critical thinking, evaluating options, being able to look at pros and cons, getting input into understanding better decision making through critical thinking. And I mapped some coaching techniques to that competency in the book for Lens 1.
And I’m actually looking at my notes here as well while we talk. The other thing I included in that chapter for Lens 1 is an acceptance of not knowing. We say in coaching, not knowing, not knowing the answer”
People like Brene Brown have done a great job at describing this as vulnerability of saying, yeah, actually, that’s something that I don’t know either, of not having all the answers. Also in that chapter, I wrote about resilience and adaptability and where resilience comes from. And really, Carol Pemberton, who is a terrific executive coach and also another author from Open University Press, really gets the credit for that because I contributed some of my own material.
But I had to read her book quickly to understand the essence of it and summarize the bits that I thought were relevant in this domain. So Carol Pemberton really gets all the credit for that. And managing stress.
Yeah, you and I both understand about stress. And we started the session today with talking about four or five different competing priorities in any given day and just ways to manage stress. Of course, there’s so much more to working with individuals in coaching.”
A lot of those techniques are global and they’re relevant to any human. But I think these are the ones that are particularly needed in this domain. In which we work in the so-called VUCA domains, you know, the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.
And that mnemonic is used a lot to describe environments that are subject to lots and lots of uncertainty and change. In other words, any organization that would choose to use an agile approach in order to respond to change is a VUCA environment. And I don’t think that that link is also understood clearly.
That so many organizations think, well, we’re going to do agile here, which usually means scrum, ignoring the fact that there’s a half a dozen other approaches, without being consciously aware of why. Maybe it’s to make the company look more attractive to sell. Maybe they’re looking to find a buyer.”
Or maybe it’s because they think to attract the best talents, they need to say, agile, agile, agile. But the reason for selecting an iterative approach to developing any products and services, whether it’s software or not, is to be able to respond to change as a way of reducing the risk of getting hit inside by something that changes in the external business environment, the market, legislation that we didn’t plan on and don’t want to have to deal with. But nevertheless, if we want to stay in business, we have to respond to change.
So I think hot on the heels of Lens 1, working with individuals, for me, it’s Lens 6. It’s the macro lens. That’s the one that I go to over and over and over again because the writing is on the wall.
I mean, we have so much news about the developments of technology, AI, the environmental changes that are coming up and the number of companies that are getting behind the carbon reduction targets and making real commitments in that area and looking for solutions by becoming B Corps and signing up to business declares and all the other initiatives that are available. The writing is on the wall. If we took our heads up from the day-to-day stress and tuned into some of those trends that are coming, not far on the horizon, we could do more than just respond to change.
We could anticipate and take advantage of some of the terrific, exciting changes that are on the horizon. For me, it’s Lens 1 and Lens 6, and everything in between is the how-to. I guess I’m just realizing that now, talking through it with you.
Awesome. Great example of coaching. Not that I was coaching you in any way, but it sometimes just helps to talk things through, and then all of a sudden you start to sort of put the pieces together and shape them, but no, that’s really nice, Laura.
Thank you for that. I mean, there is so much goodness in there. We could probably spend another hour just talking about that one lens, because those elements that you mentioned about leadership, like I have to hold up my hand when I’m running Agile training.
I give the leaders a really hard time. It’s always their fault. Every report you look at is why did Agile fail or what is the biggest challenge?
It is because of leadership, and I just think leaders are under so much pressure right now to sort of, I guess, demonstrate these approaches, these values. For example, Bill Joiner’s Leadership Agility, it’s a phenomenal book that I often turn to, and it’s that sort of catalyst leader. Sounds great on paper, but how do you actually get to be like that?”
That’s a really tough ask. So I think any tools, techniques that we can offer that help people to get closer to that can only be a good thing. So I’m really pleased to see that your book’s actually got a big element of that included.
So I can’t wait to read it.
Thank you. And I make reference to Bill Joiner’s work in the book as well. And I summarized the competencies of an agile leader in the book because it’s so important.
It’s so important.
Awesome. So I guess then looking forward at the sort of the future of agile coaching, I guess, what would you say would be the way that you would want the role to evolve? We’ve talked a little bit about sort of some of our gripes about agile coaching around, you know, people expecting them to be consultants.
But how would you like the role to further evolve?
Yeah, what a great question. I’d like to see more stakeholders get involved in helping to define how it evolves, in fact. And I attended a session with Shane, hosted by Agility Lab in Copenhagen, who is having me as a guest speaker very soon, actually.
That’s a terrific community. They’ve had some incredible speakers, but they hosted Shane a few months ago. Where he talked about the draft Code of Ethics.
Of course, he does lots of work with IC Agile, but IC Agile is about the curricula and training standards. They felt it wasn’t the right home of the Code of Ethics. They chose to ask Agile Alliance to be the custodian of it, where you can go and look for the working draft.
I’ve also blogged about it, and I linked to it from our website, the Future Focus Coaching website. I’d like to see Agile Alliance build a community around evolving that and standards for Agile coaching. I think we need more input and hopefully an international community as well.
I think Agile Alliance, in theory, is the right place. I don’t know what resources they have to do it. That’s really a question and in no way a criticism.
I genuinely don’t know, but if anyone from Agile Alliance is listening, I’m offering to help.
Awesome. Oh, no, that’s great. Yeah, that would be really interesting.
I’ve got to talk, actually tomorrow I’m doing, I’m going to talk to a bunch of professional coaches to introduce them to Agile coaching because there’s some interest. I was sort of looking through the State of Agile coaching report that came out recently. It’s really interesting to see just how the profession is now starting to formalize because it hasn’t really been formalized for that long, if you think about it.
If I think about Lisa Adkins’ book, Coaching Agile Teams, was probably my first reference point. It’s a profession. It’s actually a thing rather than it just being someone making up this job title.
It’s good to see it mature, I think, in the right direction. That sounds great.
It’s not just coaching. It’s mentoring, facilitation and teaching. It’s important to be pretty good at all four of them and to know when to switch to be in service to your client.
I’m running a mentoring program now for Agile Coaches, which just kicked off in April. We’re just seeing what kinds of issues and needs emerge from the cohort. We’re going through the competencies now and just filling in the gaps.
I want to do more of that. That mentoring for Agile Coaches program is really great not just for Agile Coaches, but for anybody who’s in a change and transformation role. If your role is called project manager, if you’re change manager, if you’re a team leader, and you in some way need to facilitate change in an Agile way, I really hope some of your listeners get in touch because I think that fills a really important gap in the market.
I conceived it as a way to pick up on people’s training on either the Agile coaching track or the enterprise Agile coaching track from IC Agile. But there are inevitably people joined who didn’t take the course, but had the basic knowledge and now want to raise their game. I don’t know of anything like it on the market and that’s my shameless plug for that program, which has just got off the ground and I think is going to fill a really important role.
I hope it catches on.
Awesome. If you can send me the link, we’ll include that in the show notes so people can get signposted to that. It sounds really, really awesome though.
I think, again, as the role is maturing, there’s needs for all of these services. I’m sure lots of people will be really, really interested in that. We’re going to wrap up now.
Laura, we’re almost at the end of time. Let’s get a few words of wisdom from you. If you could give your younger self some advice, what might that be?”
Oh, goodness. You said you were going to ask me this. Of course, I didn’t think about it at all.
Once you look backward. You did it. You asked it.
I can’t complain because you warned me. You warned me.
I would say take chances sooner and earlier that there’s no point in waiting for some point in time where we, you know, I think when I, I hope I’m making sense. When I was younger, I had the sense that somehow I would get older and there would be a point in time at which I would have enough experience that I could make great decisions all the time and I would be really successful. And then I realized at some point in my life recently, you know, sort of after 40, I think it was that that’s never ever going to happen.
That I’m always going to have moments where I fall on my face and you’re always going to have moments where you look stupid and not just because you’ve had too many cocktails, but because you screw up. And I wish I’d known that much, much, much earlier in life to go ahead and take risks and don’t be afraid of looking stupid. When I did my master’s degree, I’ll never forget a few of us had a session with the amazing tutor, Nigel Spinks from Henley Business School, who taught us how to do research at the master’s level.
And we got into a room and I just asked loads of questions. And what about this? And tell me more about that.
And I thought, boy, I feel really stupid asking all these questions. And a member of our cohort later on said to me, wow, look at you, riffing with the professor. And I went, no way.
It’s just that I’m not afraid to ask lots of stupid questions. And I wish I had done that much, much, much sooner in my life. I really do.
Oh, wow. No, I think a lot of that resonates with me as well. So I’m sure there’s others out there that would probably be saying, hey, I wish I had done the same because, yeah, there’s always things that I look back on as well where I think I should have just done it.
I should have just tried it way back. Like even the podcast, it was an idea I had for a while. And I just wouldn’t sort of just do it because I kept thinking it’s not the right time yet or I need to prepare myself mentally.
But then as soon as I put the first episode out there, it’s just naturally flowed out. I’ve got like a few episodes in the pipeline I haven’t even published yet. So hopefully we’ll get this one out quicker than some of those.
But it’s just one of those things, isn’t it? You’ll learn as you go along and you’ll figure things out. So yeah, really nice advice.
So final question, what have you got lined up for the future? Any particular projects that you’d like to share with us? I know you mentioned a couple of initiatives that you’re working on, but anything else that you’ve got planned for the upcoming future?
Yeah, thank you for asking. It’s really about getting the word out more and more and more about systemic agile coaching and how important it is for sustainable change in an organization that says we want to adopt agile ways of working in order to adapt and get on the front foot of unplanned change. And to understand the value of that approach, obviously to reach more of our audience in that way.
But another big part of our work is on climate coaching, and that’s been a pet project of mine for some time. And we now have an innovation for sustainable business coaching offer that’s come together very iteratively since last year through feedback from the market. And it is very unique.
I think it’s unique. At least I don’t know of any other offers like this. But it’s about bringing together some of the agile approaches for creating innovation and about the mindset around creating business purpose, identifying purpose, and developing a business model that includes all of your stakeholders and not just the ones that are shareholders and not just the loudest voices.
But business that’s good for the planet and for society as well. So I’m looking for ways actively through all of my networks to do more of that. And it’s too early really to talk about it, but in one of my networks, one of my communities, I’m working on something to be able to reach more of the mid to large size enterprises to be able to launch that.
So if there’s anybody listening who has ideas on that or wants to partner up with that, we’re in the early stages of doing that. And guess what? All the tools are the same as the systemic agile coaching.
All the six lenses, the ways of looking at the system, of including all the stakeholders, the tools are exactly the same, but the content is different. So that’s something I’m working on.
What a lovely way to finish off there, Laura. It’s such a worthwhile initiative, I think, and it sounds really, really interesting. So good luck with that.
I think that’s definitely going to make a change in the world for the better. So thank you so much. Yeah, I just want to thank you for today’s podcast.
It’s been amazing, as always, speaking to you. Really lovely insights. And yeah, I can’t wait for the book to come out.
So thank you once again.
Thank you. Me too. Can’t wait for the book to come out.
From The Peaky Agilist Podcast – Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Business Agility, Coaching, Visual Thinking: Coaching Behavioural Change for Business Results with Laura Re Turner, 6 Nov 2021 https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/coaching-behavioural-change-for-business-results-with/id1506412904?i=1000540980687 This material may be protected by copyright.
In this 2021 conversation for the Women in Agile podcast, Leslie Morse of Scrum.org spoke to Laura about the ways agilists can bring systems thinking and an overall systemic view into their work with people, teams and organizations.
Transcript
Embracing Systemic Thinking when Agile Coaching – Laura Re Turner | 2307
(first 30 minutes)
The Women in Agile podcast series amplifies voices of outstanding women in the Agile community. We’re dedicated to sharing the wisdom and inspiration our community has to offer by telling our stories, being thought leaders, and having open conversations with our allies. This series is brought to you in partnership from the Women in Agile organization and Scrum.org. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Women in Agile podcast.
I’m your host Leslie Morse and in today’s episode you’ll hear me speaking with Laura Re Turner. She is an accredited coach, trainer, and facilitator who works with leaders and teams to develop an agile mindset, behaviors, and the skills to thrive through change. Before becoming a coach, Laura delivered enterprise software projects as a project and program manager, technology consultant, and software developer.
She is the founder and managing director of Future Focus Coaching. In this episode you’ll hear Laura and I explore all things related to systemic coaching, the six lenses of systemic coaching, and how we as agilists can bring systems thinking and an overall systemic view into the ways that we work with people, teams, and organizations. Enjoy the episode.
Hello Laura. Hello Leslie. Thank you for joining me for an episode of the series today.
I really appreciate it. Oh it’s my pleasure entirely. I’m so happy to be here with you today and have this conversation.
Yeah, yeah you’re welcome. Before we ground our listeners and a little bit of your background, I just kind of want to unzip a little bit about the very end of our conversation that we had as we were preparing to record today. I asked you the question, what kind of aura or feeling do we want to bring in to our discussion? And you talked about like mountains and open spaces and fresh air.
What about that sort of metaphor and that environment do you think is important for setting the context for how we’re going to explore systemic coaching and this idea of becoming agile today? Oh what an interesting question. Well I’ve always had a real keen sense for the natural environment and a respect for nature and I met my husband in a mountaineering club, so we’re both keen on kayaking, hiking, climbing, cycling. For a time we even tried tennis, but it’s the mountains and the sea and the rivers that really turn us on.
And I suppose it’s this sense of, you know, wanting to tune into something that’s much greater than me, that I really care about, which also informs my coaching. And so I know we talked a little bit about my book and the scaffolding that I chose to frame the coaching approaches for my book and it’s a systemic approach. So I don’t think that was an accident because it’s very close to my values and beliefs and how I like to be in the world.
So thank you for asking about that. You’re welcome and I think you’re spot-on there because I think that it’s a great primer for everybody as they’re getting ready to listen to us talk today of, you know, we are part of a whole. Even as a single human being we are systemic in our own nature and the multifaceted aspects of us as even an individual and how we link together for others in relationship and organizational relationships and global relationships.
It’s a really interesting backdrop for everybody just to think about how they fit into the big picture as we get into this today. So thank you. Thank you.
Yeah. Let’s standard opening question for all of the guests. Yeah.
Right. Tell us kind of your Agile story. Oftentimes I hear from people that Agile found them versus they found Agile but I’m not sure exactly what your Agile path exactly was.
So tell us a little bit about that origin story. Yeah. Thank you for asking about that.
I mean I started as a software developer in the 1990s when looking back on it Scrum was just an idea in Jeff Sutherland’s mind and I had no idea what Scrum was at the time. In fact I think I started as a software developer the same year he presented the first paper on Scrum. But I worked as a software developer and a technology consultant, project manager, program manager for the last well for 20 years up to 2014.
And for a lot of that you know I wouldn’t say that I was I was doing Agile but but in hindsight I was being Agile. I just I just didn’t know it and Agile as a brand wasn’t a thing for quite a long time during my career in technology. But I remember one day realizing I had to go on a Scrum course because working as a contractor you know you have to keep up your own certifications and knowledge and skills.
I remember going on this course and you know being a project manager I think I wore a nice blazer and I tried to look professional for the thing. And someone on the course turned to me and said you know you look like them but you sound like us. Meaning the way you speak about how important collaboration is and people and openness is very Agile.
So I suppose that was the epiphany on my first Scrum course as a delegate. I realized that you know this was for me. At the time I couldn’t have foreseen that I would be changing career tracks and leaving my very well-paid and very stressful job as a program manager and going into training and coaching.
But it was one of those things Leslie where one day I realized it’s not the job it’s me. I don’t want to be doing this anymore. And my husband who I would hope knows me better than most people said to me I see you as a teacher or a trainer or coach or something like that.
I mean you’ve got to be kidding me. But anyway I listened to him and that started my journey as a trainer and a coach and what a great decision it was. That’s great and it’s the it’s interesting how you know those moments in our career was like oh the thing I’m doing and what I make up about it is is like this thing I’m doing I’ve suddenly realized it’s not aligned with actually my higher calling and mission in life.
And the the freedom that comes with that sort of realization but also the scariness of it and making those kind of changes. Is there anything about that shift that might be useful for you to share with us? Because I really as I think about our listeners right as they have those sort of awakening moments where it’s like ooh I need to make this change. Hearing how other people navigated those shifts is often fantastic advice and mentorship.
Wow what a good question. Well you say scary and I suppose making a big change like that is a little bit scary but there’s something that’s even stronger than the fear. It’s the the space and the freedom and the excitement of knowing exactly what you want to do.
And the fear is more excitement and opportunity than terror or panic I would say. So for anybody including coaches who I work with who start to experience that freedom and openness and and the lift the buoyancy of knowing that you’re doing the right thing for your work and life. It’s an incredible feeling and you don’t want to let go of it.
You just want to keep doing more and more and more of it. So this is where the woman I was working with this morning in coaching said to me this is the first time I’ve wanted to work until 11 o’clock at night. In fact I didn’t even realize it was 11 o’clock at night.
And she realized all of a sudden that you know she’s been struggling with some health issues but that actually the problem wasn’t always a physical problem it was the work. It was the work itself and now that she’s chosen to do different work she feels really buoyant. And that’s how I felt.
Less stress, well a different kind of stress I suppose but I really dug in when I moved into training. And I wasn’t great at it in the beginning. I just really dug in and I was lucky that I had support from colleagues and just kept kept bashing away at it until I got good at it.
That’s great. I love the use the word buoyant. That’s such a wonderful evocative word like how how how might we feel buoyant in our lives and in our work.
So thank you for offering that as sort of a thing to contemplate. I love also that your background is in the technical aspects of having been an engineer and a developer and there in the early days of Scrum because you’re gonna have a really unique perspective on how you have not only navigated your career through the emergence of Agile but also observed the role of women in the global Agile community as it’s grown and began to flourish. So what commentary can you offer us for that? Oh goodness yeah that’s really topical.
The number of times I do a course on you know Agile Project Management or one of one of the various flavors of Agile development and somebody says to me why were there no women at the meeting in Utah in 2001? And you know I have a group this week where we met Monday, Tuesday and then again tomorrow, Thursday and it’s all women and they’re not from IT. They want to learn Agile project management and they are in health care and they said to me where are all the women? You know where are all the women? And the best answer I could come up with was technology has been male-dominated for a long time and in 2001 that was probably pretty representative of the number of women in technology. I mean there there were some there was me you know and there’s there are some really well-known women who’ve made big contributions to our field like Mary Poppendieck who’s just amazing if I could have one mentor in life it would be her.
But I really want to know what to do about that Leslie. I’m going to be volunteering soon for a charity here in the UK called Ignite Hubs which is about getting girls and non-white boys and girls into technology jobs by teaching them how to code and it’s a project that was started by a woman who just does it using any space that she can get after school teaching all kinds of kids how to code and that’s the best what I’ve figured out so far to help rebalance this and yeah more and more we need to have diversity in technology because we’re going to have people writing the algorithms and the AIs of the future that automate loads and loads of stuff for us so we need to have different people writing code so that’s that’s the the best solution I’ve managed to come up with so far. Yeah I love that and I think it’s it’s such a great opportunity and I’ll seize it to really remind people of the mission and why Women in Agile is here right to create a sense of global community to know that those of us that are you know women or right I guess I’ll call it non-male to some extent right because it’s not we don’t want it to just be about women but it’s how do we bring about that greater diversity and for those of us that are already part of this community we’re not alone and how do we make these connections because right I guarantee there’s a listener here that’s gonna hear what you just said Laura and be like ooh I can go do something like that too because there’s that balance of how we as Women in Agile serve each other while we are here in this moment and what we do to come together as a global community to pay it forward so that the generations after us have the privilege of having barriers torn down and greater opportunity and everything so I love that you have that giving back angle to your thoughts there thank you.
Thank you I learned it from Lyssa Adkins who probably gets a hundred requests a week to speak at things and you know must must be a great problem to have but if she’s certainly you know earned earned that that place as you know a spokesperson through her hard work but when I reached out to her for an interview for my book she came back and said yes because I want to pay it forward because I want to support great women and boy was that humbling and a very interesting conversation so interesting that when I had it transcribed it ended up in the book almost word-for-word so yeah I’m grateful to her because she said this to me she said I really want to support great women and help bring them with me so well I have the chills actually thinking about it. I do too and it’s it is it is the why we are here it is why this podcast series exists and in really your reference to Lisa there that was that is what path or paved the pathway for us connecting for this conversation and so you get you’ve given me a perfect segue so you’ve got this new book
Becoming Agile – what was your inspiration for writing it and how did you bring it to the world? Oh man how much time do you have you know writing a book and getting it published is not an agile process yeah yeah it was a few years ago I was doing some CPD I joined a workshop and CPD is sorry continuing professional development thank you thank you and I was in a workshop with some some great coaches at Julia Vaughan Smith and Jenny Rogers who put on a workshop about understanding trauma and how to detect and work with it as much as we can as coaches with our clients and what an interesting workshop that was but this wasn’t an agile community event in fact it was was people who knew nothing about the word or what it meant and so I just happened to be talking to one of the the workshop delegates over a coffee and she said you do what and your dissertation for your master’s degree was on what Wow she said I work for Open University Press and I’d like to talk to you about writing a book for us and Leslie it was like the the time and place wasn’t what you would expect you know in terms of an opportunity to come up you know to write a book about becoming agile but there it was and so of course I nodded and said yes yes yes yes let’s speak about it that was over two years ago and so the book is published by Open University Press which is really exciting because the I’m coaching psychology book series has some incredible authors and just to be alongside some of these people like Carol Pemberton and Julia von Smith who’s also an Open University Press author is is also incredibly humbling I’d like to think that I had some things to say because they were very happy with the manuscript that I submitted the first time without asking for any changes actually which is incredible in itself and so the book brings together professional coaching approaches with some of the well-known approaches that we know from the agile world in order to create a comprehensive picture of how to work with leaders and teams and stakeholders to really create sustainable change in organizations and when I say sustainable I mean long-lasting where we really are are working with people at different levels as opposed to just consulting with them yeah and so I felt that was really important because we’ve been seeing people trying hard to apply scaling frameworks and put in new quote-unquote best practices which of course are best practice for one organization but not for all of them and so I just thought there was a better way to attack this yeah and I’m quite proud of the book quite proud of the result. And you should be.
Thank you. Yeah yeah the you’ve you’re bringing forward a lot of ideas that I want us to figure out how to unpack and before we get into that the I just want to give a couple definitions I think most people and most of our listeners especially because of the coaching agile teams mini-series we did over 12 episodes with Lisa Adkins earlier this year really talk a lot about professional coaching and how professional coaching influences the agile industry as a whole and kind of that stance of agile coach. So I don’t want to necessarily define professional coaching but I do want to define sort of systemic coaching and how that is sort of part of professional coaching and what that what that really means so we can ground people in a little bit of the foundation.
Yeah sure. Writing a book is interesting because you’re writing everything down in in a permanent way and it forces you to go back and reconfirm everything you thought you knew so that was a moment during the writing of the book where I said to myself do I really know what systems thinking is and there are a lot of branches of system systems thinking so it doesn’t really mean one thing in terms of coaching for me systemic coaching really refers to working with holes and using approaches from systems thinking in order to examine situations that are messy that need to be addressed by groups in order to do the work that that needs to be done to create change. Yeah.
So I really embraced systemic team coaching which was created by a top leadership coach here in the UK named Peter Hawkins together with the Academy of Executive Coaching and it’s a relational approach that really asks coaches to think about all the stakeholders in a system which is usually an organization but there are also stakeholders like customers and other people impacted by businesses that are often ignored and but I I just I like the way he asks coaches to to consider people on an individual level and interpersonal level team relationships and team tasks whether the team purpose is clearly articulated the systemic context in terms of the macro environment you know for example the political economic social environmental and legal aspects of the macro environment but also other stakeholders in an organization that sit around the team and can help a team be successful or not in producing great products and services. So I really took that approach and embraced it because for me it was easy to understand and if it’s easy to understand then it’s easy to use with my clients and I use that really as scaffolding for two-thirds of my book really is a gentle reminder of of where to put our attention as coaches. Yeah I think there’s something sorry go ahead.
I would say there’s something so relevant about this because listening to you talk it’s like you’re describing all of the complexity of the dynamics that we as agilists have to live in every single day. So if we’re truly going to be applying professional coaching in the agile context looking to systemic ways of working and thinking would seem sort of like common sense in some ways but I think it’s also it’s a big leap to be prepared and be capable of doing this kind of work. So is it is the way you broke this down into six different lenses around systemic team coaching is that part of what helps people really get their their mind around what it means to coach and think and operate in these ways? Well I think there are lots of tools that come from systems thinking that are relevant.
I think there are ways of being and recognizing your influence on the people you’re working with just by being there. There are lots of different ways of looking at this but you know today I think we’re talking about the six lenses of systemic team coaching which is one model in the entire approach. If we had more time I prepared slides for your listeners.
I think you know I could do a seminar in fact get in touch with me I’m absolutely joking. You know I want to be sure that you know that I’ve articulated something as well that your listeners are going to find useful and so you know ask me another question where do you think they’d like me to go with this? Yeah well I think there’s so many ways. I just you know in prep for us today ideas and models that are around something like six lenses like okay I can take this really big body of work and start to orient myself to it through these different dimensions or use the words lenses.
I think it’s a great way of introducing people to a new topic and shifting our ways of thinking and so we can start getting curious in different ways. So I think spending some time there I think would be really great and then maybe like wow how do I actually learn about this more can be where we go next. So you’ve got six of them individual, interpersonal, team dynamics, team tasks, purpose, and objectives, stakeholder interfaces, and then just the wider systemic context.
How did you derive these six? Why are they important and maybe like what are two of the areas that people might look to first if they really want to start orienting themselves to it? Yeah the six lenses were defined by Peter Hawkins with the Academy of Executive Coaching so I don’t take any credit for that but when I was learning systemic team coaching what helped to bring it to life for me was a short case study that was an example that helped to bring it to life and I was reading this and I was also thinking about Gene Kim’s book you know that brings to life DevOps and I thought oh you know I need to write a case study that brings this to life in an agile context because so many professional coaches ask me what is agile all about and the agile coaches ask me about my experience as a professional coach and how that you know helps to to make agile teams more successful. So I started to frame everything that I thought was relevant in an agile coaching really good agile coaching in terms of these six lenses and thought back to a client engagement where I was observing and working with people in the organization and and viewing the the people and their relationships in different ways in order to help them move forward. So what I did really was I thought about some of the most important coaching approaches that I use with people one-to-one so in terms of the individual lens there’s things like helping leaders with critical thinking skills and resilience which is super important for people working in fast-changing uncertain environments which are the ones where you would use an agile framework.
Managing stress and really important I thought was including the idea of not knowing the acceptance of not having all the answers and sometimes not knowing and not being sure and so I I kind of filled up that lens from an agile perspective with these approaches which I thought were all relevant when working with people one-to-one and when thinking about the second lens the interpersonal lens I mean I thought about it in terms of the relationships the interpersonal relationships and things like the impact on team members when project managers and other leaders have a facilitative style or servant leadership as opposed to command and control and very directive. Also I towards the end of my writing of the book I realized that remote working was going to need to be addressed because this was during the pandemic and so I addressed that a little bit and there’s a terrific interview with Judy Reese and a case study about her and her work in the book and also a little bit about face-to-face communication and I I did a lot of research and reading while I was doing my MSc and coaching a few years ago. An MSC? Yeah a master’s degree.
Okay just yeah global listeners want to make sure we’re catching all the acronyms so thank you for letting me get you there. Yeah no worries in coaching which I did it at Henley Business School here in the United Kingdom and while I was doing my research there for my dissertation I did a kind of a mini literature review on face-to-face communication because I wanted to understand what the psychology literature said about whether or not face-to-face communication is really important so I also addressed that in the book. And then you know Lens 3 really some of the kind of classic agile tools there about how to identify purpose and create focus and commitment and I’m thinking about the scrum values now.
Yeah team dynamic yeah team dynamics can be such a tricky place for us when we look to working with agile teams in this act of coaching. So you were thinking you said you mentioned scrum values and some other things like can how do you even just define what the boundaries of what team dynamics is because it can almost be a bottomless pit in my mind. Well I think I’d want to understand the context a little bit more to to answer that that question.
But to me there’s a quality of the type of communication that they’re able to have. Are they listening in order to confirm or disconfirm what they already know? This is what Otto Scharmer calls downloading in theory you which it’s something I’m using these days in my coaching. Or are they listening in order to generate new ideas and create dialogue? And to me you know that’s something that I look for all the time in groups is what’s the quality of their attention to each other, the quality of listening, how they communicate and show respect and are they able to create dialogue and build new ideas? Or is it just like tennis you know I think about just lobbing a ball back and forth and seeing how hard you can hit it.
In her book Becoming Agile, Laura Re Turner delves into the success factors of Agile methods and their transformative impact on organisations.
In Chapter 5, she underscores the transformative power of Agile and the importance of team collaboration to become agile in more than name only. By embracing change, fostering collaboration, and leveraging technology, organisations can unlock their true potential and achieve remarkable results.
Agile is not merely a set of tools or practices. It’s a mindset shift that permeates every aspect of an organisation. Embracing Agile methods requires a willingness to challenge traditional hierarchies and embrace change as a constant companion. This transformation demands a shift from individual silos to cross-functional teams that collaborate seamlessly.
The book explores the meaning of true teams in an Agile context. Agile teams are cross-functional and operate as self-organising units, fostering innovation and adaptability. Empowered by shared ownership and accountability, they are able to break down barriers and streamline decision-making.
Effective communication is the cornerstone of successful collaboration. Laura highlights the importance of establishing clear and concise communication channels, ensuring that all team members are kept informed and engaged. Regular feedback loops and transparent information sharing are essential for fostering trust and building a cohesive team culture.
Agile is not merely a set of tools or practices. It’s a mindset shift that permeates every aspect of an organisation.
— Becoming Agile: Coaching Behavioural Change for Business Results
To further enhance collaboration, she advocates for the adoption of collaborative tools and practices. These tools, ranging from project management platforms to real-time communication channels, facilitate seamless information sharing and task management, enabling teams to work together effectively even when physically dispersed.
As organizations embark on their Agile journeys, Laura reminds them that change is inevitable and resistance is often encountered. Addressing these challenges requires a commitment to understanding the underlying reasons for resistance and addressing them head-on. Engaging stakeholders, providing comprehensive training, and celebrating successes are all critical steps in fostering acceptance and building a culture of Agile adoption.
Laura Re Turner explores the crucial role of coaching in facilitating behavioral change and achieving organisational agility.
By empowering individuals and teams to adopt agile behaviors, organizations can reap the rewards of increased flexibility, responsiveness, and innovation.
In Becoming Agile: Coaching Behavioural Change for Business Results, Laura Re Turner delves into the first lens of systemic team coaching, which focuses on the individual mindset. She emphasises the importance of understanding and addressing the individual’s beliefs, attitudes, and values as they relate to agility.
Self-awareness
Coach self-awareness is the foundation of our ability to foster an agile mindset in others. Individuals need to recognise their own assumptions, biases, and limiting beliefs that may hinder their ability to embrace agility. She encourages coaches to work through reflective exercises and self-assessment tools to uncover these underlying factors, then use their reflective skills to support their clients’ development.
Psychological safety
She also explores the concept of psychological safety, which Turner defines as ‘a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.’ She explains that psychological safety is essential for fostering an agile environment where individuals feel comfortable expressing ideas, asking questions, and admitting mistakes without fear of judgment or repercussions.
Principles for effective coaching
Turner outlines four key principles for effective coaching:
Focus on the coachee’s needs and priorities. Coaching is not about imposing the coach’s agenda onto the coachee. Instead, it’s about understanding the coachee’s specific challenges and aspirations, and tailoring the coaching approach accordingly.
Help the coachee develop self-awareness. Agile behaviors stem from a deep understanding of oneself, one’s strengths, weaknesses, and motivations. Coaching can help coachees uncover their core values, identify their emotional triggers, and recognize their habitual patterns.
Promote active experimentation. Agility thrives in an environment of continuous learning and improvement. Coaching can encourage coachees to step outside their comfort zones, experiment with new approaches, and embrace feedback as a source of growth.
Create a safe and supportive environment. Trust and psychological safety are essential for effective coaching. Coaches should foster a sense of mutual respect, openness, and confidentiality, allowing coachees to feel comfortable exploring their vulnerabilities and learning from their mistakes.
Some practical strategies for coaches to promote psychological safety including establishing clear expectations, encouraging open communication, and valuing diversity of thought. It’s important for coaches and leaders to model these behaviors themselves to set a positive example for the team.
By focusing on the individual mindset, coaches can lay the groundwork for a team that is adaptable, collaborative, and resilient in the face of change.
Becoming agile: coaching behavioural change for business results
Emotional intelligence
In addition to self-awareness and psychological safety, Turner discusses the role of emotional intelligence in developing an agile mindset. Emotional intelligence refers to the ability to understand, manage, and express emotions effectively. Turner explains that emotionally intelligent individuals are better equipped to handle the challenges and uncertainties inherent in agile environments.
She encourages coaches to help individuals develop their emotional intelligence through training, coaching, and feedback. By focusing on the individual mindset, coaches can lay the groundwork for a team that is adaptable, collaborative, and resilient in the face of change.
Staying on top of the latest management thinking is proving to be a challenge for all leaders. Strategic Intelligence, curated by the World Economic Forum, provides an easy drill-down to current and credible sources of information on six areas of Behavioural Sciences including Business and Behaviour. Create a free account on the World Economic Forum website to use the tool.
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Transcript of Create an Agile Culture, from the Free Webinar Series to Create an Agile Organisation, on 21st October 2019.Presented by Laura Re Turner, Director, Future Focus Coaching, and Phil Summerfield, Executive Coach.
Welcome – from Laura Re Turner and Phil Summerfield
Most of you know me, Laura Re Turner, I’m an accredited Executive Coach, certified Agile Coach and a Trainer. I help leaders and their teams develop an agile mindset, behaviours and skills to succeed in the very complex and uncertain business environments that we’re operating in today. I’m also very happy today to have my friend and colleague and fellow coach Phil Summerfield with us today; he’ll be co-presenting.
Introduction
The topic of today’s webinar was inspired by questions that we’ve heard so many times from our clients:
“What beliefs and mindset do we really need to have here in order to be successful with agile methods?“
“If we’re going to be successful with Scrum, what is it that we really need to do at the most fundamental level?”
”How do we change the mindset of others?”
“How do we get other people to come along with us and how should we measure success?”
What is organisational culture?
So what is organisational culture? It’s such a big topic and when looking into it we found out that most organisations think about culture as how we get things done around here. That’s the definition that’s given most often. In fact, when we really read the literature on organisational culture specifically Edgar Schein, we found out that “how we get things done around here” typically only points to the visible signs of culture. For example, a leaders reorganise teams into squads or Scrum teams. We’ve also seen many times that a leader gets the team to use a team board or Kanban board and points to that as an example of things changing, becoming more agile. It’s an indication that something is changing but it really doesn’t get right to the heart of the organisation’s culture.
Also things that we can observe are things like in team meetings, the team leader tends to do most of the talking. We don’t know why, we don’t know the reasoning behind some of these action plans or artefacts or visible things that organisations. They start to indicate a certain culture but they don’t tell the whole story — just the tip of the iceberg. Schein describes another level of culture which isn’t as obvious as things like putting our work on a Kanban board. He calls this ‘level two: espoused values and beliefs’. Or, ‘what we say when asked what’s important to us here.’ The trouble is that these things may not be true all the time in practice.
I have a few examples in an Agile context, and I think everyone can relate to some of these. For example, we believe in transparency here. We probably do believe in transparency but we may not have transparency all the time. We believe in the values and principles of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, but we still micro-manage the team by asking project manager to track technical tasks. Our company values are printed on the wall of every one of our meeting rooms, but nobody remembers what they are.
Schein says that company culture is really influenced by the unconscious beliefs and assumptions that we have about the best ways to work here, the ways of working that have helped us succeed in the past and therefore are taken for granted unquestioned even though some of these ways of working may no longer be useful. And the technical description for that is tacit assumptions.
Here are a few examples:
We develop a comprehensive business case and detailed product requirements before starting any product development work [because that’s what we’ve always done here].
We provide a workplace that allows human beings to work in comfort and safety because that’s important to us, it’s what we value — a workplace that’s physically comfortable and safe for work.
All decisions about whether to release a major version of the platform must go through the Change Advisory Board for approval because releases of new functionality to the production environment are risky.
Uncertain and changing business environment
What we want to have a look at next is the influence of change coming from the external business environment. This is where I would love to hand over to Phil. He’ll talk to you about the PESTLE model and the uncertain and changing business environment.
The PESTLE model helps us think about the different sources of change:
Political
Economic
Social
Technological
Legal
Environmental.
I’m going to use the UK and Apple as examples. What I suggest you might want to do is just note down any thoughts about your own organisation while we’re going through this.
Political– a current one, I won’t go into any detail, changes in our regional trade agreements. You may have your own views on those and using Apple as an example more global how they’re operating in China and the factors that are changing for them there.
Economic– are new tariffs on goods imported into the UK or there could be for a company like Capo as China which does a lot of its development most of it as the society increases or improves rather, the labour costs will increase. How will that affect their business? That’s a massive impact on them there.
Social– the different working expectations of the younger generations these days it’s really starting to have an impact on business because it’s not a job for life anymore so people think and behave in different ways and have different expectations. In the case of Apple, they’re looking at third world use of technology. Is that a dramatically big new market for them or maybe they’re not so interested in it.
Technological– that’s a big thing these days. The disruption caused by new innovations, new ways of working and very relevant to what we’re talking about today. With a company like Apple, well that could flip itself over because my phone it’s also a computer; nearly everyone’s these days. It can be as good as my Laptop or notepad. Does that mean that Apple will start selling far less as more and more the different products look very similar?
Legal changes– how those affect your business national local laws or global laws. In the case of Apple, they’re moving heavily into automotive, how does that affect their insurance and regulatory costs and what happens if my Apple based Satnav directs me in the wrong place? Who do I sue? Do I sue Apple for that? So the question they’re facing there.
Environmental– that’s manufacturing processes are changing, government laws environmental laws are saying some materials we’ve used in the past are no longer acceptable because they’re a danger to society. In the case of a company like Apple, disposal of lithium batteries for instance very, very expensive. So there’s another way of looking the thermal fuse the PESTLE example here. You can also look at some new acronym of hookah, which is volatile uncertain complex and ambiguous. I guess you probably all recognise that as the business world of today.
Handy’s Culture Model
So here we’re looking at organisational culture. This was developed by an Irishman called Charles Handy who you probably all heard of; he’s written lots of books on organisational development. He identified four different cultural behaviours that organisations he looked at exhibited.
Power, which is centralised top-down power and influence.
The role culture and this is bureaucratic run by strict procedures and very narrowly define both roles and powers.
Task-based, this is small teams results based and results-oriented and it’s narrowed by flexibility adaptability and empowerment.
Person culture, which is based on the individual. It’s the people are the most important thing and even the behaviours and processes are geared towards individual success.
So just looking in a bit more detail about those going back to person. It’s really a cluster of stars successful people and the individual is the focal point. If there is any structure there, it’s only there to serve and assist individuals so it’s all about the individual here.
Task-based the emphasis here, well the focus is on the individual expertise and it’s highly, highly valued. The emphasis is getting the job done and the culture brings together the right resources, people and at the right level and at the right time to actually get the success they want which could be completing a project or a program quite common here these days. It depends totally on teamwork – totally. The teams can be formed and then reformed or abandoned where the team can decide to abandon it. So the point there is that the team has the power; they don’t need to go upstairs to actually get decisions about what they’re doing.
Role-based, this is really focusing on the allocation of work within roles. It’s really focused on very stable environments where the markets steady, predictable or controllable or perceived to be. So a good example here would have been the bank’s I guess and insurance companies very slow to change and very slow to see the need to change and they’re having major problems these days because they are role-based.
And finally the power-based organisations. This can be very successful but maybe these days for the wrong reasons. They are very successful because somebody at the centre of power like a spider in a web controls everything. The closer you are to the sense of the web the more power you’ve got and if this can feel sometimes quite unpleasant for the people working within it tough and abrasive and lead to low morale and high turnover.
Mckinsey 7S Framework
Just to carry on from that a little bit, I’d like to expand now our thinking about culture and about agile culture in particular using a model that I use quite a lot in my coaching and consulting work called McKinsey 7S. As you probably figured out it has 7 aspects in each of them starts with an “S”.
Strategy
Staff
Skills
Systems
Structure
Style
Shared values.
A group of McKinsey consultants in 1980 decided that they were leading so many organisational change programs, that there needed to be a holistic way of approaching change and they found that most organisations wanted to focus on the so-called hard aspects of organisational culture more than the others. So of these I think we can guess which of the hard aspects strategy, structure and systems and people wanted to look at these aspects, the more visible or hard aspects of culture in order to make the changes that were required to help a company move forward.
It is probably no surprise by now those of you who know me and my company’s work and the focus of the webinar so far that in order to be successful with any kind of culture change we need to also focus on the softer aspects and those are of course staff, leadership style and shared values. So in order to broaden our idea of what an agile culture means I’d like to take each of these aspects of the 7S framework one by one. I’d like to give you the vanilla definition from the McKinsey Consultants from 1980 and then also give you an example of what we mean by an agile culture for each of those.
Strategy – the plan devised to maintain and build competitive advantage corporate strategy and an agile adaptation of that would look like a long-term strategy is created and can be revised, should be revised based on anything that we learn about the market as we go. In other words because of the change in external business environment our strategy doesn’t stay static. We’re learning as we go.
Staff – the employees and their general capabilities and what that means for us in an agile environment is that employees are trusted and empowered to get the job done according to their own judgment. That also means they self-organise and take on the roles that they need to in a task culture based on a specific project work or product development work that they have.
Skills – the actual skills and competencies of the employees working for the company. They self-organised to build solutions that create knowledge sharing networks as needed based on the current challenges and problems and opportunities that they’re working on in order to increase their capability. So learning is a huge part of organisations where there’s lots of uncertainty.
Shared values – the core values of the company today that are evidenced in the corporate culture and the general work ethic. Examples from the Scrum framework which are very well-known, openness, commitment to respect, courage and focus. We could quite easily point two values and any of the other Agile Frameworks because in Agile we know that values are important but Scrum is probably the best known example of those.
Systems – the daily activities and procedures that staff members engage in to get the job done. So anyone who’s been on a course with me and I think that’s a few of you, know that iterative and incremental development is the heart of all that frameworks, whether it’s Scrum or DSDM or Extreme Programming. Teams’ work iteratively seeking feedback in short development iterations, short cycles to improve the product and the teams’ internal capabilities through retrospectives.
Structure – the way the organisation is structured and who reports to whom. We tend to have flatter organisations with cross-functional teams that are formed to address specific project or initiative.
Leadership style – facilitative leadership rather than command and control. Some people also describe servant leadership, which is certainly one of the definitions of the Scrum master and Scrum. A coaching culture to support employees’ ability to think for themselves. So empowering people to think for themselves and moving away from this hub-and-spoke type of management environment to allow people to be able to work more tightly with each other rather than reporting to a single manager.
Success factors
There are a couple success factors for changing culture. Number one, definitely challenge your organisation’s tacit assumptions, the level 3, the unconscious, ways that we work that have worked for us in the past which may no longer work for us going forward in the future. Remember to think about those unconscious culture like we put all the work on a Kanban board, why haven’t we changed the culture? And second examine all aspects of an organisation not just the organisational structure. This is why the McKinsey S7 framework is so useful for this to help us stay on track.
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