Until You Can’t Get It Wrong (Part iI)
A two-part story about team behavior change told by Douglas Foster. Edited by Michelle Pauk.
In an earlier post, we shared a story about how Agile coach Douglas Foster helped his team with some funny social experiments. Echoing the words of Alabama football coach Nick Saban, Coach Douglas tells his team: “Don’t practice until you get it right. Practice until you can’t get it wrong.” Here we see how Douglas responded when the team and their stakeholder got it wrong.
About a month after the team passed their “test” to not accept work from anyone other than the Product Owner, something urgent came up that triggered an old habit. The team’s Assistant Vice President went directly to the team with the request, bypassing the Product Owner.
Seizing the opportunity as a coachable moment, Coach Douglas wrote a scathing email to the team.
TO: AVP and entire team
SUBJECT: Circumventing PO
Oh, I’m going to have SOOOO MUCH FUN with this one!!!
Team,
The Developers FAILED because they accepted work from someone else other than the PO. They did not redirect the Stakeholder to the PO.
The Developers FAILED because they did not identify this work request as an Impediment on the board that caused current work to stop.
Product Owner FAILED because they did not interject themselves into Stakeholder/Developer communication. At least the PO recognized this work should be tracked on the board and created User Stories.
Scrum Master FAILED because they did not protect the team by interjecting themselves into Stakeholder/Developer communication and iterating that the PO is the only person that can give the Developers requirements to work on.
The Agile Coach FAILED because they did not test the team enough regarding accepting non-PO work.
“Don’t practice until you get it right. Practice until you can’t get it wrong.” Nick Saban
I love giving you all a hard time and thought this was so funny.
Have a great weekend and a Happy Easter.
The AVP replied right away. “Yep, you're absolutely right. I take responsibility. I should have handled it differently.”
This instance was a bit more serious. But as Douglas notes, “If it wasn't for my relationship with all of those people and using humor to convey my message, there was no way I could get away with writing a scathing email that said you failed, you failed, you failed, you failed.”
