Agile Development Blog

This is #3 in a Series on the Culture of Innovation with guest blogger Lee Devin.

Plan to do what you want. Prepare to do what you must.

Don’t get us wrong, we value planning: it’s important and highly creative work. But in the Culture of Innovation preparation means much more.  In a world that defines success as a result and failure as a step along the way , we plan regularly as we adjust to results, outside stimulus, and feedback.  Preparation marches us up the stairs faster and ensures that we’ll arrive someplace new and valuable.

Planning is an exercise for imagination and not spreadsheets.

In planning we figure out what we need to accomplish this task.  It‘s a process of creative thinking, dialogue, narrowing to convergence, healthy skepticism, and risk mitigation.  In planning we need to treat difficulties as a challenge; to resolve a creative tension between reality and what we want.  Teams brush away perceived limits as they press toward understanding by asking WHY?  Thinking in the 5 Why’s of Fishbone diagrams, these teams do not simply work with WHAT and HOW.  Once done and aligned, the plan becomes a communication of intent and result and NOT a goal or commitment.   Dependable results come from a focus on the limits to throughput, sources of failure, and lack of preparation.

In our experience with Agile teams, we see advanced Scrum teams begin to let go of some planning practices as their expertise grows. The benefits of pull-based planning and smooth flow delivery create new space for them in the market.  As a result of their growing confidence, they increase their ownership of their process, a key step on the way to a culture of innovation.   That culture creates, not just one off innovations, but an environment ready to take advantage of opportunities and happy accidents.   A big part of creating that environment comes from a focus on preparation.

Let’s consider preparation. Teams and managers must learn and practice a set of skills that taken together can help them create a culture of innovation. These skills often seem off the subject, not to the point, and therefore difficult for teams and managers to make time for. We think of preparation in three main categories: for collaboration and leadership; for comfort in ambiguity; and for daily productivity. In this brief introduction we won’t suggest a detailed program. Instead, we’ll outline an abstract of the culture, seen through the lens of preparation.

Collaboration and leadership

You can prepare for collaboration (innovative team work) and leadership (team direction and support) by learning and practicing release and concentration. Teams and their leaders need release from tension, as a way to increase available energy and flexibility; and release from inhibition and vanity for freedom, to include the work of others in their own and to regard the success of the team as their own success.

Take a look at athletes for good examples of release from tension; at actors in a play or movie for good examples of release from inhibition.

Watch Sharapova’s face as she looks up at the ball she’s about to whack; see the pitcher take a big breath and whoosh it out before he throws the ball. Look at a still photo of what the pitcher does to his arm in the delivery: it’s not hard to imagine what would happen to those muscles if they weren’t completely released, free of any kind of tension. Look at Paul Newman’s famous eyes blaze with rage (as Harry Manning, dumped in the river: Where the Money Is) or fear (Buffalo Bill astride a fractious horse: Buffalo Bill and the Indians).

We’ll use a story to illustrate what we mean by concentration. Once upon a time two students of Zen walked along the lake shore. They spoke as follows:

First Student: “I have the world’s most amazing Master.”
Second Student: “Have you?”

First Student: “He performs miraculous deeds. The other day he walked right out on this lake and spoke to us, standing on the surface of the water. Then he walked back, and his shoes weren’t even damp.”
Second Student: “That’s certainly amazing. I congratulate you. My master, however, can do something much more important and amazing.”

First Student: “No way.”
Second Student: “Yes way. My master can do one thing at a time.”

Who among us can do one thing at a time?

As you plan your week next Monday, think about these questions.

• What is the #1 Thing you have to get done right this week? Be clear about that to yourself and with your team and put your best time and focus on this one item.
• What preparation or practice can you do to release tensions with regards to this item?
• Who can you collaborate with to make this an outstanding result?
• What can you do to celebrate the results of this effort?

What might you do to prepare to execute these choices? What kinds of practice might you build into your daily, weekly, monthly, routine?

Comfort in ambiguity

Accident, serendipity, new things. Innovation confronts the team with all of these sources of ambiguity. What’s gonna happen? What should I do? What on earth is this thing? How do we know when it’s complete?

How does preparation contribute to comfort in ambiguity? It gives us grounds for confidence in our ability to manage the new, the surprising, the unpredicted. We don’t need to dread the uncertainty of innovation because we know that we can make good use of whatever comes up.

Teams and managers who do innovation find ways to live with uncertainty about the outcomes of their work. They know that outcomes will be unexpected and surprising. If they could anticipate them, how new could they be? Preparation will involve getting free of the reflexive invocation of the past: “That isn’t how we do things here”; and embracing the uncertain future: “Let’s see what happens when we do this.”

Preparation will sometimes replace planning.

Of course we plan, so that we can do what we need to do. We plan to have the materials we need, space to work in, the right people on the team, to make an efficient schedule. Planning creates sequential progress toward a known goal. Preparation, on the other hand, aims at collaborative iteration toward an emergent outcome. No one can predict the results of a true collaboration. We prepare to cope with whatever happens. In a culture of innovation, whatever happens is likely to be new. It will elude any kind of sequential progress toward a known goal. When an outcome doesn’t seem to have any immediate value, we recognize that nothing is lost: we set it aside (Might come in handy some day.) and press on.

The notion of emergent design conditions any serious innovation.  At Rally Software, we do a number of things in the context of Agile software development to keep from planning too much and to hold space for reaction to ambiguity.  First, we acknowledge multiple levels of planning with less precision as the time frame goes out.  Second, we insert free time into our schedule in the form of slack and programmed innovation time.  Third, we work “sets” of designs through a narrowing process to keep from choosing the design before we learn.  Finally, we do not plan until after we have closed the last cycle: We check the results of that last cycle and consciously review our goals.  We “Plan to get lucky” and provide room for that to affect our next cycle.

We took a young engineer to visit an acting class at People’s Light, the theatre we know best. A bunch of teenagers were practicing improvisation. One sat on a bench in the park. Another passed by, stopped to talk. A story began to develop. Suddenly from the class a third jumped up and walked into the park, joining the two. This newcomer brought an entirely new slant to the story. After a moment the first actor remembered an appointment and left the other two. Someone else from the class joined in. And so on. The story grew, got elaborate, got simple, got turned inside out: the kids never repeated themselves, never stopped. No one ever refused the new material offered by an other. The engineer turned to us and whispered: “This is exactly what my guys need to learn how to do.”

This kind of practice fairly closely resembles the desired skills. Engineers like to look for an answer in the back of the book; they need practice in making up answers out of the available material. The kind of preparation we’ll call exercise strays from the skills it prepares for; it’s off subject, away from the actual work. Athletes exemplify this kind of preparation. “The champ,” goes the saying, “is always in the gym.” Larry Byrd was famous for staying in the gym after practice. Why? To shoot 100 free throws. To build a reflexive confidence that supports the hectic innovations of the game. What’s more, the champ has decided, has made the choice, to like being in the gym; how could he do the work otherwise?

As you plan your week next Monday, think about these ways of practicing or preparing for emergent innovations:

• Schedule some creative time into your schedule to spend in a creative place and time.
• Step back from your #1 item for the week and ask yourself a question about its value: What other things could I do to deliver even more of this value?
• Find one example of yourself closing down to new solutions based on the concept that “This is the way we always do it.” Can you release that constraint?
• Ask yourself: What is the most important thing I have to do this month or quarter?  Not urgent. Important. Do I have enough time, support, and space to do this right?  Try removing less important or merely urgent things from your calendar to make room for this.

Daily productivity

In a culture of innovation, everyone chooses a professional obligation to work happily, enthusiastically and at maximum energy.

Artists and athletes again serve as models. Neither group can do what they do unless they’re totally fired up. High morale and physical readiness are basic conditions of their work and they must learn how to create and maintain them, no matter what. An actor arrives at the theatre well before the half hour call (On time is already late.), and begins the day’s work with an extensive warm up. Vocal exercises, calisthenics, stretches, lines; actors have routines they follow religiously.

An actor we know told us this story. He used the 30 minute drive to the theatre as his time for vocal warm up. One night, distracted by some domestic emergency, he only got through part of his routine by the time he arrived at the theatre. In rehearsal he had discovered a way of saying one of the lines in the 2^nd act that every one liked a lot: his voice got deep and sexy, very nice moment. On this night the performance went very well, in spite of the truncated warm up. Until that deep sexy part. He said that line exactly as he had done dozens of times before. But instead of deep sexiness, what came out of his mouth was tired little squeakiness. The audience were too embarrassed even to laugh. You can bet that actor never missed another warm up.

In software development, this is akin to doing some manual work outside the scope of your automated build, deploy, test cycle.  It can seem quicker to do a simple, one-off integration or system test outside that environment, but unintended consequences always catch-up .  In our experience, cutting the preparation corners usually costs 10X more in the whole lifecycle than it saves in the short-term. Beyond the interrupts of customer-impacting defects, the team loses a bit of the pride and belief necessary for the Culture of Innovation

Team work demands a no less total performance than acting or tennis playing. It needs, but rarely gets, the preparation of a warm-up. A basketball team combines individual warm ups (stretches, shooting around) with group work (lay up and passing drills). Why should knowledge work be any different? Imagine the energy available if your morning stand up included a vigorous warm up led by a different person each day. Jump back!

As teams and organizations reach an Innovate level of Agile adoption or Ri , they take ownership of their process and environment.  Their improved throughput, collaboration, and preparation have brought them to a place where many of the vanilla iteration, planning, and estimating practices of Scrum and XP stop serving them.  These structures helped the incremental transition down a path of increasing agility, but in a Culture of Innovation, where smooth, continuous flow of one thing at a time is the goal, the focus moves from planning to preparation.

Next up in our series – Options, Fall-back and Design Sets

About the Authors: Ryan Martens is a goat cheese maker,  founding board member of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and Founder and CTO at Rally Software Development.

Lee Devin is a dramaturg at the People’s Light and Theatre, a Senior Research Scholar at Swarthmore College and a senior consultant with the Cutter Consortium. These activities often interfere with his fishing, and cause him to neglect his grandchildren.

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I’ve noticed a piece of advice repeated in many Agile blogs, articles, and books.

Seeing it makes me roll my eyes until it hurts. (Why I would hurt myself on purpose will be the subject of another post, on a blog reserved for psychotherapists.)

Even my very most favorite Agile book, “Scaling Lean & Agile Development” by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde, has a section in there with this advice.

I saw it in Jim Highsmith’s new book, too, although by the time he’s done discussing it he does make a couple of good points. It’s an old piece of advice that pre-dates Agile.

What is this old chestnut? Here it is:

Hire the best.

I mean, come on. Is this supposed to be a big lightbulb moment? Where do they find stuff like this, in the “Journal of the Totally Obvious?” Am I supposed to leap out of my chair, smack my forehead and exclaim “Eureka! All I have to do is hire the best! Why didn’t I think of that?”

Is this really good advice? Is it actually possible, or necessary in an Agile world? Is this sensible, if trite, piece of advice useful at all? Talk amongst yourselves while I blather on for a bit.

The problem with “Hire the Best” as an operational principle is that:

a) it immediately excludes most of us, and
b) it’s extremely difficult to do.

What’s the best? The top 5%? 10%? Certainly no more than 20%.

So what about the rest of us? What are we supposed to do? Are things hopeless for us? Should 80% of companies worldwide just give up and shut down because the top 20% of people are taken? What about big companies and the Law of Large Numbers? Can you really hire only the best when you’re hiring 10,000 or 20,000 people?

Something that makes much more sense to me, and which has much more power, is this idea:

Hire well, and develop people.

Check it out! Everybody can do this. “Develop People” is one of the two pillars of Lean, while “Hire the Best” is not. So far, those Lean folks have been right about pretty much everything, so why not this, too? Why would I need to develop people if I only hired the best? Why not save the money so I can pour it into my “Hire the Best” employment initiative?

The Agile Principles say something like […find motivated people and trust them…], and I believe in Agile. So I cannot find in the bedrock of either of my professional beacons, Lean and Agile, any indication that I should “Hire the Best”.

My common sense and experience tell me that it is incredibly hard to actually hire the best, and I like that it might not be absolutely necessary for success. How cool would it be to hire the ‘pretty good’ and then kick the butt of some company that thought it was hiring the best? Is that possible? Yes.

“Hire the Best” is really hard to do.

I’ve worked as a full time hiring manager at more than a dozen companies, all of which thought they hired the best and only one of which actually did. That company really worked hard at hiring the best. At that company, one rule of the hiring thumb was that you only hired people onto your team who would immediately place in the upper 50th percentile.

In other words, when you were on an interviewing team in that company, you were expected to vote to hire somebody who was better than half the people on your team. You think that’s easy? You think that isn’t scary? Try it sometime.

What I’m really really really interested in is something that can take my average team (and let’s face it, Ms. Wishful Hiring Manager, it is overwhelmingly likely that our team is average, for some value of average) and make it better or improve its ability to deliver value to my customers. That’s worth some effort to achieve because it is worth money to my business. If I believe in “The Art of the Possible” then I like this better, because it’s a lot more possible than simply hiring the best.

Anybody can embark on a long, expensive and likely unachievable quest to only hire the best, but if Agile were really valuable,  it would help me to take my team of competent professionals and make them significantly more effective than they were. It might even make them more effective than a gaggle of “the best” somewhere else.

The Agile Principles talk about motivated people, but they don’t actually mention “the best”.  I view this as a good thing because I strongly believe that the best teams are not built from a homogeneous mix of the smartest, fastest, bestest people.

Teams work best when they are diverse and when the power of the team can be unleashed by empowerment and self-organization. I also know from bitter experience how hard, and frankly scary, it can be to really hire the best. (Sorry if I harp on that, but I have scars…)

What I want is what I think both Lean and Agile offer to me as a businessperson. They offer me a way to take solid professionals and then ignite their passion and professionalism within a framework of continuous learning in a way that allows them each to contribute to the fullest extent possible.

That’s something that make Lean and Agile worthwhile to me, and not some lazy idea about hiring the very best (somehow) and then automatically winning.

About the Author: Alan Atlas is a Soul Musician, Certified Scrum Trainer, and Agile Coach at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.

Recently, I was working on an introductory presentation about Kanban. A “thorough” Google search revealed how drawn out and convoluted many Kanban explanations can be. Was there one true answer I was missing? Something nice and succinct like, say, a tweet on twitter?

Acting on this and laziness, I decided to pose the following question to twitter:

I was so surprised by the number of great responses that I’ve decided to compile and share them with you here:

• 

  giff24: #kanban 130 chrctrs? PLS!!! I dnt hve time or patience 2 rd that much

• 

  erwilleke: #kanban combines systems thinking with a work-limited pull system to allow rapid maturation of teams and delivery of software.

• 

  neontapir: Kanban uses visual signals to track and optimize work delivery through key stages in its lifecycle.

I like the commonalities around value, visualization, limited WIP, pull systems, cadence, and flow. This tells me that Kanban is speaking a common and useful language to a lot of us. And, its value can be articulated in a tweet.

But my quest goes on!

I encourage you to add to this list by submitting your own 130 character Kanban definition either as a comment to this post or as a tweet to me (@jeantabaka and use #kanban in your answer.)

In April, I’m attending the Lean SSC conference in Atlanta. There will be a lot of discussion about Kanban.  I’ll personally carry all comments and tweets to the conference for inclusion in the discussion. If you’re able to attend, let’s stretch the envelope and go beyond 130 characters on Kanban.

About the Author: Jean Tabaka is a wine enthusiast, author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.

Looking for the perfect trend article to pass on to your executives about Agile development? Check out Dan Woods‘ well-researched, executive-level article “Why Lean and Agile Go Together” on Forbes.com Jargon Spy.

Dan describes how the Agile impact in software is similar to the Lean impact in manufacturing of the 90’s.  I initially struggled with the analogy until I realized he is not saying that software development is like manufacturing. He is saying that the concepts and techniques applied in Lean manufacturing are coming to large-scale software development.

I completely agree and believe the model of how we build software is changing just like Dan describes.  Using the model from the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, the change looks like this:

Lean Software Concept

That was a great decade – I see much of the last decade of improvement coming from a real effort to take responsibility for how we perform our craft.  The ground up work in Agile, Scrum, XP and Lean has increased velocity, increased quality and increased the quality of life for many in our industry.  I am personally in a much better working environment; how about you?

So what’s ahead for 2010?- With Agile software development hitting the mainstream, the guiding ideas on how to design and deploy software is changing for most software driven organizations.  As more teams and organization make the transition to the Agile/Lean triangle, I see us increasing our investments in skills training, teaching, experimenting and innovating with an increasing number of new tools, techniques and methods.  As a result,  I see this decade moving us past the Lean models of Toyota to something uniquely our own.  I am really excited about the improvement this decade could bring to our industry and all the industries that we impact with our software.

About the Author: Ryan Martens is a goat cheese maker,  founding board member of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and Founder and CTO at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.

For 2010, lets find ways to focus on teaching our craft and growing the world of skilled software development professionals instead of trying to figure out who is “right.”

I believe much of the “Escalation” that Jean is seeing was correctly titled by Regina Mullen as a battle to be “right.” (see and read Escalation is Killing Agile – Can We Please Stop It? and Escalation is Killing our Healthy Conflict in Agile). That behavior focuses on carving up the pie instead of growing the pie.   There has been so much added to the field of software development methods, tools and techniques from the guiding ideas of Agile.  Now is not the time to stop and eat.

For me, 2010 is about continuing to grow the Agile software development pie’s reach and innovations.

I believe one of the key fixes to the problem of escalation can be found through increased professionalism and certification in Agile. By raising the bar through “difficult and skills-based certification,” as Brian Marick and the board at the Agile Alliance described, we can advance the Agile discourse through :

• a defined a bar that is deep in skill, knowledge and practice
• a significant enough bar to engage College and University study and examination
• research and curriculum that explore the tough questions in a scientific method
• development of more flexible or “T” shaped individuals that can see and work beyond silo roles.

With this back-drop, I am motivated by the notion of creating a  A Community of Thinkers,:

I am a member of a community of thinkers and I believe that communities exist as homes for professionals to learn, teach, and reflect on their work.

A Community of Thinkers creates more leadership in our profession. I see the expanding certification efforts in 2010 as great steps in these directions:

• Lean Software and System Professional – new certification emerging
• Agile Developer Certification – that is also emerging
• Certified Scrum Practitioner – especially as it intertwines with the PMI’s Agile Community of Practice

I encourage everyone in our community to figure out how to put energy toward one or more of these efforts.  The benefit of actively learning, teaching and reflecting on our work should lead us all to expanding civil dialogue that works to understand all points of view and keep expanding our thinking.  Thus broader education and difficult certification helps create a “Community of Thinkers.”  And, a Community of Thinkers will create a virtuous cycle of win/win and thus a larger pie for all.

That is my hope for 2010 in our profession.

About the Author: Ryan Martens is a happy father,  founding board member of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and Founder and CTO at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.

As a Scotsman living in the US I take more than my fair share of trips through Heathrow airport.

There are many things I enjoy about being back in the UK but Heathrow airport is certainly not one of them. For a while HSBC bank tried valiantly to cheer us up, and as we trudged wearily from terminal to terminal, our journey was made more colorful by the many posters from their What’s Your Point of View campaign.

Here is an example of one of their posters:

Looking at these posters made me reflect on my own work as an Agile Coach and how I am often confronted by different points of view.

If I am speaking to a group and criticize waterfall development there is a chance someone will feel I am disparaging their team or their efforts. Sometimes use of the word agile does not serve a good purpose. Many have negative perceptions of Agile and believe it to be chaotic, undisciplined and unpredictable.

As a coach, I don’t like to spend time fixing negative perceptions of Agile. My passion is making teams and organizations successful. I like to steer away from the waterfall vs. agile discussion.

Instead, I focus on sharing what I see happening in high performance teams and organizations:

• Without knowing what value really is we can’t reduce waste. A focus on customer value answers two key questions: (1) Who am I building this for? and (2) Why am I building this? Once we have a keen sense of what value is we can then prioritize our work to deliver the highest value first.

• By delivering early and often we give ourselves the best opportunity to beat the competition to market, realize revenue and discover insights that we can help us improve.

• One of the biggest impediments to delivering early and often is the inability to reduce batch size and many teams struggle with this. This is a battle worth fighting.

• Another impediment to delivering value is not pull testing forward. If we don’t complete our work as we iterate then we are creating technical debt that will affect our ability to release.

• Successful teams know it is best to take small incremental steps towards improvement and to establish a rhythm of continuous improvement. We don’t try to define the perfect process, we don’t set the bar too high and we continuously inspect and adapt.

• As Émile Chartrier once said “nothing is more dangerous than an idea when you only have one”. Successful teams and organizations know that to survive long-term they need to create a collaborative culture that fosters innovation and shared commitment.

Are these are agile principles or lean principles? Some like to draw an ideological line between the two but like Wille Faler I don’t believe that’s a bottom-line discussion. Call them waterfall if you like, so long as you’re successful.

You might not like my list and that’s fine too. Make your own list but don’t just pull it out of a book. Visit the gemba and come up with something visceral that your team can identify with.

About the Author: Ken Clyne is a 26.2 finisher, Certified ScrumMaster and Agile Coach at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.

I had the fine fortune of spending a day with Liz Keogh and Eric Willeke in Boulder last week.

What a wonderful experience! The three of us gathered with the goal of producing something for the Lean and Kanban software community. We didn’t know what that would be. We just knew we felt strongly that we should give something to the community.

We were heavily influenced by past conversations with Chris Matts, his call for “fewer leaders, more leadership”, and a desire to see the Lean Software and Systems Consortium (LSSC) learn from some of the trials that other communities and community-leading organizations have undergone. Ryan Martens, the CTO and a founder of Rally, also provided thoughtful input to our discussions during the day.

As we talked, we discovered something. We were all keenly interested in the general notion of “community”. We became less convinced that the LSSC needed a challenge from us, and more convinced that it was applicable to software communities generally. For me, this was a deeply personal statement and commitment.  It played heavily into my recent blog posts on “Escalation”. And yet, together, Liz and Eric and I found the same deep conviction.  So as you look at the statement I provide below, if it’s exactly the same as the copies on Liz or Eric’s sites, it’s only because their arguments were equally sound and convincing.

Because of that personal nature, we wanted to avoid putting our statement up as some kind of manifesto that people can sign. If you feel strongly enough about this statement that you would want to sign up, copy it. Post it on your own site. Attribute it to wherever you got your copy from – the act of sharing is more important to us than the act of creation – and feel free to change it so that it reflects your own values. I don’t think that any statement like this can ever be perfect, nor will we perfectly live up to it.

I am a member of a community of thinkers. So are you.

”A Community of Thinkers” by Liz Keogh, Jean Tabaka and Eric Willeke is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Please attribute to the distributor of your copy or derivative.

About the Author: Jean Tabaka is a wine enthusiast, author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.

In my last post I discussed the awesome workshop I attended called Leading and Learning for Sustainability and why I think it was so beneficial.  It changed me.  This post is about how it changed me.

While at the workshop, I learned from deep reflection that I get things done by example.  I also learned that I like to work with my team and my customers.   In other words, my strategy for leadership is “walking the talk” and sharing it.  (It only took me a year of blogging to figure out why I blog and to whom I am writing.  I feel my best posts are the ones written to my team and customers that are based on my own personal experiences.)

As a result, I have learned to articulate my strategic roadmap toward sustainability and restorative economies in these steps:

1. Get Rally and our customers effective at Flow, Service and Lean in software and product development
2. Get myself and my family to a zero carbon footprint lifestyle
3. Mature the software & hardware development practices as a highly valuable, joyful, respectful and humane profession
4. Get Rally to a zero carbon footprint
5. Get our High Technology industry to a 80% carbon reduction in total footprint
6. Grow High Technology as a leading sustainable industry and critical enabler of green technologies and as an 80% carbon reduction in other industries

Step 1. Back in 2002 when I was working on the initial concepts for Rally, it was Paul Hawkin’s Natural Capitalism book that really shaped my long-term vision for Rally. We basically committed to to bring service and flow, and lean to the high technology industry. I would declare our first 6 years as a success. We have succeeded at introducing the concepts of Flow, Lean and Service into the software and hardware development industries.  In addition, we have made many of the worldwide leaders in this space very successful by realizing the benefits of enterprise agile software development.

New Baby Goats this Spring

Framed Greenhouse on Barn

Step 2. We have been incrementally investing in solar-based solutions to make our personal life more sustainable.  It was PV’s, hybrids, chickens, goats, an e-bike and now this year a new in-ground greenhouse.  A solar hot-water and pre-heater is up next in 2010. (Hopefully, I will even get a cool Tendril home monitor from one of our customers for Chirstmas!.)  I think our home life will be over 80% of the way to zero carbon footprint by 2011 with the final addition of electric vehicles.

As a well paid worker in the executive in the High Technology field, I figure it is my role to help these new green technologies move down the marginal cost curves.  In addition to actually doing something about this problem, I am learning about living in close-loop, sustainable value chains. (I will tell you there is something very grounding and joyful about starting the day by feeding animals who provide for you.  Even on a day like today that was -1 F outside.)

Step 3. Through our 1% volunteering model, folks at Rally have been involved as members, volunteers, speakers, sponsors and board roles at the Scrum Alliance, Agile Alliance, Agile Product Leadership Network and the Project Management Institute.  Our work in growing this industry is just beginning.  In 2009, we hit our 1% goal with 2,800 hours of volunteer time and won the Best Company to work for in Colorado and a top 10 ranking from Outside magazine. In early 2010, we hope to announce a number of clear steps at helping to grow our industry though more educational partnerships in Agile and Lean.

Step 4. In 2006, we started a green team with the help of Boulder’s Be Climate Smart audit team.  In the last three years, we have continued to benchmark our climate impact as well as the community impact of our volunteering hours.  We know that our SaaS application currently puts 8 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere per year for every 100 users. More importantly, we know where that carbon comes from and we are conscious of the impact and thus the opportunities to curb this for Rally and our industry.

Step 5- 6.  These steps will come as we share our experiences based on our own relentless pursuits of steps 1-4.  Right now I learn a bunch from work shared by Interface carpet’s mission zero, Google.org’s RE<C and as a member of NRDC’s E2 program.

It was as a direct result of this workshop that I learned enough to articulate my choices, what to conserve, what to let go of, my leadership approach, who I need to do this with and ways to bridge the creative tension between my personal vision and reality. It was a very powerful workshop.

In closing, I would like to share two of my favorite quotes:

• Edward Deming: “The prime requirement for achievement of any aim including quality is joy in work.”

• Humberto Maturana: “Emotion is the bedrock of all that we do and love is the only emotion that expands intelligence.”

Thank you again Peter Senge, Sherry Immediato, Darcy Winslow and all the other great folks who attended the SOL workshop on Leading and Learning for Sustainability in DC.

About the Author: Ryan Martens is a trail runner,  founding board member of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and Founder and CTO at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.

Climate Change due to the increase of carbon from human activity is a “Global problem,” thus it has a couple of unique attributes compared with other world problems:

It affects everyone

You can act on it anywhere

I choose to act on this problem at home and at work.  As part of this action,  Tim and I chose to attend the Society of Organizational Learning’s (SoL) workshop based on Peter Senge’s book Necessary Revolution.

This three-day workshop leveraged long-time SoL content on leadership and mastery into the context of the global climate change.  It was a fantastic workshop that I highly recommend – as it has changed me and my mental models.

Tim, our CEO, Peter and myself at the end of day three

Living in Boulder Colorado with tons of the worlds best climate scientist and a University that helps you Lean More About Climate, I am familiar with much of the science behind climate change.  But, in this workshop we got to take our understanding up to the larger system level through system archetypes, multi-player games and simulations.

On the third day, we played with and did mock negotiations using the climate change system simulators that were built for negotiating teams going to Copenhagen in the next two weeks.   The systems dynamics models baked into the C-Lean simulator are made more apparent in the Seed Simulator on Carbon flows. (It is a simple bath tub model of how carbon flows through the natural system.)

For your information, the answer to the simulation puzzle of putting climate change in check and keeping average global temperature from rising more that 2 degrees involves three things:

1. have all countries in the world (un-developed, developing and developed) reduce there carbon output by 80% from 2005 levels by 2030
2. stop deforestation efforts
3. maximize reforestation efforts

To do this, the world will have to cross the threshold to a new game;  an infinite game of win/win behaviors that measures success based on ecological restoration and social well-being.  Finite game behaviors coming from zero-sum game thinking and patterns of shifting the burden and escalation will have to stop.  I like to think of this an maturation of our species from wildly growing adolescents to young adults.

Peter’s 5th Discipline Fieldbook and The Dance with Change, come with tons of exercises, tools and guest lectures that are all helpful at understanding organizational learning and systems thinking. However, as Peter said in the workshop, understanding the concepts are easy, but practicing them can be much harder.

Part of the success of this public workshop was working with these concepts in a context of a global problem that we all share.  We got to work on ourselves and a shared global issue.   And as a result, we seemed to all have limitless energy and worked from 8:30 AM to 7 PM each day.

I encourage you to visit these sites, they give climate change a face and a shorter feedback loop.  Both of these benefits can lead you and your teams to better understand and more easily act on this Global issue.

Thank you Tim, Peter, Sherry, Darci and all the other great folks who attended our workshop in DC.  I have my joy and I will share it and my personal learning’s from this event in my next post.

About the Author: Ryan Martens is a telemark skier,  founding board member of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and Founder and CTO at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.

Recently, I wrote the post “Escalation is Killing Agile – Can We Please Stop It?”  My passion around escalation brought 40+ in-depth comments.  With my travels and lack of internet access, I had been unable to sit down, sift through, and absorb all the various perspectives.  Until now.

I’m offering this follow-up post as a means to provide an overall response to all these great comments. I want to add some further background on the “escalation” topic and some more of my personal conviction around it. Specifically, I’d like to provide some insights into delayed feedback, the need for conflict, and how to “show up”, all without escalation.

In one part of the comment stream, I heard and felt the call for an effort to get to the root cause of such deep-rooted assumptions.

According to the Systems Thinking Toolbox from Pegasus Communications, to break an Escalation structure, ask the following questions:

1. What is the relative measure that pits one party against the other and can you change it?
2. What are the significant delays in the system that may distort the true nature of the threat?
3. What are the deep-rooted assumptions that lie beneath the actions taken in response to the threat?

So, in our system of sharing information in the Agile community, we have to ask, “Are we setting up a dynamic that pits us against one another?” If this is true, then we have to ask, “How can this be addressed and still ensure that we share insights?”

Guided by Systems Thinking, that means we need to check in with: what is distorting our communications and what might our deep-rooted assumptions be that would have us act as we do?

Here is an example:

I created a delay in feedback by my not responding to posted comments. I believe that created assumptions around what I may or may not have intended in the post.  I think some individuals thought I had written the post pointed specifically at them. Faster feedback would have helped quell that assumption.

I was writing about, and continue to write about, the Systems Thinking Escalation archetype and how I see it in our community. I was and am looking at a dynamic not at an individual. Escalation is NEVER about an individual; it is about the system in which blame is occurring and allowed to continue. I am fearful that blame and the win/lose game are in our system and that is what I do not like and I want to address.

Some of the comments to my post seemed to indicate that I was anti-conflict. Far from it! In studying the inner workings of high-performing teams, I have often referred to Sam Kaner’s model for participatory decision-making. Conflict is a must.

In this model, Kaner insists that, to get to high performance we must bring forth conflict to discover the best informed decisions. Divergent ideas must be invited. Divergent voices must be heard. Divergence must be allowed to just be. That is, don’t just jump to conclusions. With enough time and patience around divergence, we can then move toward informed convergence.

Conflict in this context is dialogue. It seeks insights. It invites greater and greater participation. I also want to emphasize that in this context of dialogue and non-escalation, our purpose is to engage in forward thinking. We let go and we look forward. And as we look forward, we let go.

So, as a member of the Agile community, my interest in expending energy in discussions is to seek insights, encourage divergence, and discover convergence as it emerges. All of these practices help and encourage me to create more and more forward thinking. If this is not occurring in our community, then we are not getting enough for the energies we expend.  If in our community we really “must win”  in order to “be heard”, we are stuck in an “Escalation” archetype. And, that means we are all trapped on an up escalator to nowhere.

What could any individual do to break an escalation pattern in a system? Create energy around your insights and share them without a need to apply win/lose stakes. Stop expending energy to refute others.

Here is a simple formula for bringing your viewpoint to bear without escalation:

1. Show up. (Be willing to be engaged.)
2. Find out what has meaning to you. (Be willing to be honest about your perspective.)
3. Tell your truth. (Be articulate about your insight without attacking or assigning blame.)
4. Let go of what happens. (Be courageous enough to allow others to agree or disagree.)

I believe this formula provides guidance on how to remain forward thinking, remain open-minded, and remain engaged.

I have some more mental models I want to offer here. But they will wait for another post.

Thank you in advance for your considerations, insights, and comments.

About the Author: Jean Tabaka is a wine enthusiast, author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.