The Dots

INFLUENCES

I want to know "where you come from" in the human and intellectual landscape, and "where you live now" in that landscape. And I think anyone claiming a title like "Agile Consultant" owes it to everyone to be clear about that.

Ron Jeffries - Aug 12, 2019

Where I come from

During that fateful XP/Agile conference in 2004 I attended two tutorials:

These were my first in-depth conversations about agility. From my saved workbooks I can see that I noted particular phrases. This was the first time I had heard and thought about concepts such as:

  • “Teams identify their own values”

  • “Envision-Evolve NOT Plan-Do”

  • “Conformance to acceptable results NOT conformance to plan”

  • “Reliable NOT predictable”

  • “Reduce the cost of change”

  • “Empirical control is through feedback loops of inspection and adaptation”

  • XP practices and values

  • Self organizing and cross-functional teams.

  • “Let people figure out the right way to do, and then do it.”

  • What does Done mean?

  • “Requirements are turned into tasks only when the business case warrants it”

  • What is more valuable? That we predicted requirements 6 months ago or that we added the highest value requirements and quality”?

  • “As a ScrumMaster you will have to contend with the legacy of lying and face reality.”

This experience led me to travel to Seattle in order to take my CSM from Ken Schwaber (I THINK Tobias Mayer was co-training that class) one month later and I started experimenting with what I had learned immediately thereafter.

The following summer, I attended Agile 2005 in Denver, Colorado. That conference exposed me to the thoughts and views of Bob Martin, Brian Marick, Mary Poppendieck (Agile Contracts), Joshua Kerievsky (Commoditizing Agility), Diana Larsen and Pollyanna Pixton (Agile Leadership). It was also at this conference that I attended two workshops (Release Planning Game and Advanced Feature Estimation and Project Planning) by Chet Hendrickson and Ron Jeffries.

All of these people encouraged conversation, posed questions, and presented data and concepts that were new to me, made me think about the world differently, and shaped me in ways that felt natural.

Through the mid-late 2000’s I joined the Calgary Agile Methods User Group and was influenced by people like Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, Jonathan Rasmusson, and Janet Gregory.

During this time I landed, much to my good fortune, in with some really talented and motivated teams that taught me the collective power of a group of focused individuals with a common goal.

I attended multiple conferences where I had the good fortune to learn from Tim Lister, JB Rainsberger, Craig Larman, Mike Cohn, Esther Derby, Jeff Patton, Johanna Rothman, Linda Rising, and Jean Tabaka

I spoke at my first international conference, Agile 2009, on the topic of the importance of framing Product Backlog Items as problems in context. It was also at that conference that I heard a talk by Pat Kua about the Dreyfus Model of Skills Acquisition applied to learning agile practices. That topic continues to shape my thoughts around approaches to coaching teams.

I received my Certified Scrum Coach accreditation from Scrum Alliance in 2010 and in the years since, I’ve been influenced by Lyssa Adkins, Alistair Cockburn, Roman Pichler, Pete Behrens, Dave Sharrock, Richard Lawrence, Nigel Baker, and John Miller. I’ve mentored several other coaches along their journey and I have maintained a learning circle of sorts with people I first got to know at the Phoenix Scrum Gathering in 2015.

Where I live now

These days I’m thinking a lot about value and how it relates to behavioural economics and society in general. To that end I’m keenly following and connecting the thoughts and work of people like:

 

Mariana Mazzucato - professor at University College London in Economics of Innovation and Public Value, is the founder and director of their Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP), and author of “The Value of Everything:Making and Taking in the Global Economy”

Richard Thaler - Nobel prize winning economist, one of the founders of Behavioural Economics and author of “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness”.

Daniel Kahneman - along with Amos Tversky, Nobel prized winning psychologist, and author of “Thinking Fast and Slow”

Stephanie Kelton - economics professor at Stony Brook University and author of “The Deficit Myth”

Kate Raworth - economist at Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute and author of “Doughnut Economics”

Daniel Pink - author of “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”

Yuval Noah Harari - historian, professor, and author of “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”

Patrick Lencioni - author of Five Dysfunctions of a Team and The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business

Nassim Nicholas Taleb - author of the “Black Swan” and “Anti-Fragility”

 

Other Coaches and Trainers I Recommend

 
 

When I'm not available, there are other Certified Enterprise Coaches (CEC) and Certified Team Coaches (CTC) that you can contact.

To find them, follow this link to the Scrum Alliance coach directory. Select your Country and then select either Certified Team Coach or Certified Enterprise Coach.

Often, my coaching is more effective if you and your teammates have already received formal training in Scrum from a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST).

To find upcoming Scrum certification courses available follow this link to the Scrum Alliance course search.