Women in Agile podcast: How to bring a systemic view into organisational change

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.