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Blog
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Wat is dat menselijk lichaam toch gaaf!
Vandaag erin gestapt. Hop, het ijswater in. Na een middag ademhalingsoefeningen. Spannend hoe het zou zijn, maar ook zin. De kou viel mij mee, het herinnerde mij aan de kou van een niewjaarsduik. Het gevoel erna is euforisch, wat een warmte. Mijn lichaam had wel even nodig om weer op temperatuur te komen. Intens om dat te observeren tijdens een afsluitende “ademreis”. Wauw, wat gaaf wat zo’n lichaam allemaal kan, veel meer dan het hoofd denkt!
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Zen & Agile: reality over theory
The past year I was given several opportunities to share my experiences on Zen-meditation and Agility. Each iteration improving my story and gaining new insights thanks to remarks and questions from my audience. However, it bothered me that I did not yet was able to go full circle and connect zen directly to the Agile Manifesto.
Grounded in Buddhism, in Zen one also tries to overcome ego and realize an end to suffering. Mainly, suffering is caused by perceiving reality through a misshaped lens. That lens being misshaped by our beliefs, concepts and ideas. That realization helps me to more clearly perceive reality or at least know my understanding is flawed. I try to see reality as it is and work with that. However challenging that is.
So how does that connect to Agile or Agility? Responding to change means choosing a different approach. Sometimes this is easy as alternatives are clearly better. Other times there is attachment with a chosen solution, for example. Zen-training helps me understand and compassionately release that attachment. In my experience the mental training strengthens my agility in that way. That same compassion and patience helps in the collaboration towards a, sometimes frustratingly, complex goal. The Zen mindset is truly being agile.
Recently I was asked to share my experiences with other Scrum Masters, but I was still chewing on how to make the connection more clear with the agile manifesto. I tried finding underlying values, but that just felt as abstracting it in a way so that it would connect to anything in that matter. As I kept iterating over those for values, the preferred values of the manifesto (‘interactions and individuals’, ‘working software’, ‘customer collaboration’ and ‘responding to change’) seem to have at least on thing in common: you work with what is and adept to that. The less-preferred values on the other hand, fall exactly together with the convictions, concepts, ideas and beliefs which can misshape our perception of reality.
Agile is preferring Reality over Theory. And to me, this is exactly what Zen has taught me over the years: I value the concepts and ideas I have, but value reality more.
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Change = learning
All change, in essence, equals learning. I wonder if the successful patterns in education also apply to change. Although I have some experience in education, I would not call my self an educational expert. However, I see some patterns emerging in education which could help adopting change in work or private life.
The only internal motivation is fun
Many educators will agree that motivating your students is one of the hardest things to do. As a teacher myself I learned that motivation is a spectrum, ranging from amotivation at the left, through extrinsic motivation to intrinsic motivation on the right. Intrinsic motivation is defined as the activity being worthwhile in itself, in other words: it’s fun to do. So how can this be applied to change? Especially when we change feels forced upon us. I think this depends, but, just like inside a classroom, there are basic conditions which need to be met: mental & physical safety, room for err, short feedback loops, clear and challenging goals. May be, I missed some, but I am convinced that in adopting to change these a crucial for succes…and having fun in the process!
Learn by example
An effective learning method is showing how something can be done. Having you’re students repeating that, while you help them understanding it. That’s also how our children learn….how to talk, walk. Especially young children copy the behavior they see from their caretakers. Being parents, teachers or daycare workers. So how can this help change being adopted, by having the role models in the organizations show how to do it. That does not necessarily have to be leadership, but can be “natural” leaders within the organization. Of course transforming a top-down organization it is somewhat conditional for success having leadership taking on that responsibility.
Be patient & compassionate
Change is hard, otherwise it would not be change. Everyone resists change for different, personal reasons. Understanding that, helps to grow patience, which helps to nurture a safer environment for change to occur. I once heard the quote: “everyone is fighting a war you know nothing about”. When I feel my impatience growing this mantra helps me to be more compassionate and patient, because I have to acknowledge the reference point and struggles the other one is dealing with. As a teacher, you sometime tend to see the path a student should take, but remember that everyone must walk their own path in order to learn and adopt to change. Allow for that room and the chances for successful change increase.
In transformation models, approaches or strategies there are lots of thing that can be learned from decades of educational wisdom. I think anyone who helps guiding an organization through times of change should make use of that wisdom. Changing is learning how to adopt or behave differently, there is much that can be learned from the way teachers guide there students through that process, because in essence it is the same.
I am sure there are more parallels to draw and I am curious to your thoughts. Don’t hesitate to share!
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Individuals over Interactions over Processes over Tools
Or how we externalize our interactions into the tooling we use.
Recently I had a conversation about a process to solve impediments hindering a teams flow. Nothing special so far other than the role the tooling had in that process. What triggered me was the question on how to involve others in resolving an impediment. Whether if the way was doing that through the tool we use as an organization.
When we externalize our interactions into software, what happens to our organization? To me the individuals and their interactions are the organization. If we let any of that slide into software, we loose part of what binds us together. Sure, quick interactions can perhaps be handled through a simple text message, but what gets lost by doing that?
I am unsure if communication software can be part of our organization. It is a means to support our interactions, but do we see our phone or the letters as part of the organization? Why do we allow important conversations to happen through mail? Why are discussions held through the chat functionality of Azure DevOps or Jira? In the end the lag that way of communicating creates fuels our frustration caused by the assumptions we made in the first place. Assumptions we could have invalidated over a cup of coffee. Creating mutual understanding and willingness the resolve the impediment that brought us together.
