Notes on Rachel Davies workshop "The Role of the Agile Coach"

Rachel Davies ran a very interesting workshop yesterday at MiniSPA2009 on "The Role of the Agile Coach."

I won't give away the details of her workshop, but suffice to say that it involved some people working on a task and other people taking management roles. It looks like a very simple activity, but to me it felt like a re-run of the Stanford Prison Experiment with non-toxic glue and feathers.

Some observations from the experience:

• Even though Rachel's an Agile coach and this workshop was supposed to be about Agile coaching, everybody, especially those in management roles seem to treat this as a waterfall project, even down to trying to treat the instructions that came with the activity packs as a fixed spec.
• I was a worker, and as a worker my main motivations were to bond with my other workers and to make myself useful. I didn't really take any notice of the coach who was there supposedly to ask questions.
• Comments from the two people who were asked to take on management roles were almost all critical. In a sense, this was an artefact of the task - what else did they have to do but point out what they thought was going wrong?
• The spec for the task was very loose, but that didn't stop some people who were in management roles adding in extra assumptions, assuming spec where there wasn't any. And assuming that part of the task was to hammer down the spec.
• I found myself saying "We thought we were being creative, but management just thought we had no idea what we were doing." Oh boy did this chime! To some degree with my experience at Xerox, but especially with my experience working in research at Universities.
• We got fascinated with the task and missed a (perceived to be) crucial aspect of the spec. In the end I fixed this as I walked up to submit our entry. "Management" on our team perceived this to be a grave failing, even though my last minute solution worked.
• As a team of workers, we instinctively seemed to understand that we had to feel each other out and understand what we capable of - I think this is what's called the "Forming and Storming" sections of team building. Management focussed instantly on the "Norming and Performing" and fretted and criticised as it watched our "Forming and Norming" activities.

For further information, contact Mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604)