Tuesday At Agile2010

If yesterday was towards the middle of the technical spectrum, today was closer to the far end of it. Things opened with Dave Thomas’ keynote, “An Unplugged Retrospective on the Agile Decade.” It was a fun, fast, shotgun overview of what we’ve doing for the last ten years, with some suggestions about where we should look for the next ten. After that was my first brush with an Open Jam1. Esther Derby wanted to film a short movie on retrospectives that she could put up on YouTube, so she put out the call and a dozen or so of us answers. We improvised a “retrospective from Hell,” after which we talked about a structure to avoid them.2 At the end, we shared a few success stories.3 Esther said she was pleased with the raw footage, and I’m interested to see what the final results looks like after editing.

After lunch, I had two sessions with two of Esther’s co-authors. The first was “Trust, Authenticity, and Forgiveness” with Diana Larsen. Diana focused on trust as the key differentiator between teams and workgroups, on why trust was essential for high-performing teams, and on what we can do to build (and rebuild) trust in the workplace.4 The second was “Agile Managers: The Essence of Leadership” with Johanna Rothman.5 Johanna asked the question, what do Agile managers do, given that most managers’ traditional functions should be subsumed by Agile teams. In it’s simplest form, the answer is “act strategically, rather than tactically.” Managers should set strategy by managing the project portfolio, remove organizational obstacles, foster trusting relationship, lead hiring decisions, and build the capacity of the organization.

That both of these two sessions talked about trust as an essential component of Agile teams, and that both presented the same four-step framework6 for offering feedback surprised me, though it shouldn’t have. When we talk about valuing people over processes, we’re inherently acknowledging the need for trust. People build software, and we need to treat them like people, not processes.

1 Open Jams are self-organizing events that occur semi-spontaneously during the conference. They had four spaces set aside for these, and they were organized using a whiteboard and Post-Its, plus a wiki and Twitter.

2 This is the structure Esther and Diana Larsen present in Agile Retrospectives, which we’ve been using for several iterations now and which has given us great results.

3 As well as a few of what might be called “opportunities for learning.”

4 Her working definition of trust came from Roy Lewicki: “An individual’s belief in and willingness to act on the basis of the words, actions, and decisions of another.”

5 Who wrote Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management with Esther.

6 Create an opening – describe the behavior – state the impact – make a request. I’ve seen this somewhere before, but I don’t remember where.