Abstract: What happens when you take an agile coach and force them to "eat their own dog food"? This is my personal story about transitioning from an enterprise agile coach to a programmer on a team, and what I learned about agile, coaching, and myself in the process.
After two years of coaching teams and executives around the world, I found myself disillusioned by the concept of "coaching" and back as a developer on a team -- for the first time in 15 years. The experience of returning as a programmer was enlightening; it substantially changed my perspective on coaching and agile. Having worn the shoes of a team member, I acquired a new empathy for their world and perspective.
Lessons Learned from Your Experience: - 00:00 - My life as an "Enterprise Agile Coach", how I started as a coach and my approach to it.
- 00:10 - Disillusionment. My world falling apart, how a I started to become jaded about coaching.
- 00:15 - Life on a team -- growing pains, learning to fit in
- 00:20 - new perspectives
- 00:25 - looking back, what I would do differently
- There's are three story arcs that I intend to weave together:
- * How "walking in the shoes" of a team member is important, perhaps necessary, to gain the perspective and empathy to be an effective coach
- * How I perceived "coaching" from the "other side", i.e. "inflicting help" and very natural reasons why a team would be resistant to agile (I totally get it now!)
- * Where are the leaders? Frustrations with "side-channel" agile
- * Agile really does have "too many meetings"* I get it! I loathed the standup. Totally interrupted my dev flow.
- * The danger of "inflicted help" agile coaches
- * Process really isn't all that important.
- * When it comes to coaching, leaders must lead by example
- * Effective change comes from within a team
- * Coaching needs to explore multiple directions (including technical)
- * Lame retrospectives are a waste. There's the elephant in the room, but we don't talk about it for one reason or another, so we waste an hour of retrospective time painting the bike shed.
