Under Pressure

Freddie Mercury and David Bowie (both are dearly missed) are singing their hearts out in my head right now. Under Pressure had so many great lyrics that apply to a conversation that I just had with a frustrated ScrumMaster. I know the song wasn’t written to communicate the virtues of Scrum or self-organization, but they are so well suited for it…

Under pressure that burns a building down, Splits a family in two

The ScrumMaster was frustrated that when her team, and others, had more freedom, they had self-organized meetings with all the ScrumMasters in their common line of business. During these meetings, they discussed Continual Improvement initiatives from team Retrospectives, organizational and local impediments and how they were addressed, etc. These meetings are gone now, with no obvious explanation.

Now, this was not the real reason she stopped by this morning. The deeper roots of problems are rarely transparent or obvious. She started by asking about velocity and how to become more accurate when people were taking summertime vacations, and people on the team were working from home more, and blah, blah, blah (I’m not downplaying the seriousness of her lengthy question. I’m just saying the symptoms aren’t as important as one of the underlying issues)…

After about 20 minutes of listening to symptoms, and digging deeper to ‘hidden’ impediments, she told me about the meetings I described above, and other self-directed activities that the teams used to engage in. I hope you have faith in my coaching skills to ask her why none of these rather mature activities were still incorporated into how the teams operate. It took a while but we found out together. Pressure.

It’s the terror of knowing what the world is about, Watching some good friends screaming, Let me out

When the teams came under pressure from a less-than-Agile management realignment, many positive things came to an end.

This led me to a realization, or theory, that I came up with long ago. When under pressure, either diamonds are formed, or fires erupt out of control (read that however you want - control causes the fires, or the fires cannot be contained). Specifically, I wrote down several years ago: “When an organization is under pressure, the most beneficial, self-imposed or self-directed improvements are the first things to go.”

What piqued my interest, in defining which things disappear and why, was a group of teams all simultaneously removing Retrospectives from their processes. We’ve all seen this before. I dived deeper into the larger organization and found that it was a single Program Manager, complaining about teams wasting time in “… sanctioned bitch sessions about management …”, who shut down this mechanism for self-guided improvement. Anyone else see the irony there?

I’ve seen:

• Scrum of Scrums meetings disappear
• Team celebrations were not-necessarily-banned-but-defunded
• Innovation Week activities reduced to only a select few teams that were invited
• Community of Practice attendance drop to unsustainable levels
• Skill mastery training denied
• Improvement ideas needing to be approved by multiple layers of management

all because the organization (I’m talking about several different levels of organization here) was under one type of pressure or another.

OK, I starting to hear a lot of fellow coaches chiming in with “Why didn’t they resist? This is exactly when your Agile champions/advocates/leaders need to speak up!”

Though I agree, this is where a general (and by that, I mean stereotypical) argument from our global Agile leadership and coaching community usually gets all heated up. We hear defense of full-time disempowered people. We hear from idealist consultants who get to preach from a safe distance. We hear from people who have never been empowered in the first place, and think we are crazy for saying they need to stand up for themselves. We hear from so many different sides – there never seems to be a solution for all organizations.

Turned away from it all like a blind man, Sat on a fence, but it don’t work

My best recommendation – strategy – is to stay the course, endure the difficult times until it’s safe to reintroduce the positive measures we know added value. When the time is right, we make what progress we can. When the pressure is on, we pull back or are forced back. 

I like the imagery of a coiled snake. When threatened it pulls back. When it feels like the time is right it attacks (moves forward), then coils again, to either strike again or to defend. We can play this game of gaining ground and losing it, but only if we make sure that we gain more ground than we lose, over time.

Is there a better solution? Absolutely! Ultimately, I believe it’s best for the entire company culture to be what we identify as Agile. With companies that number their employees and consultants in the hundreds of thousands, this is a very tough nut to crack. So (to use another cliché), let’s not bite off more than we can chew. Let’s diagnose the root causes to problems as best we can, and treat them as best we can. Let’s collect data on possible improvements and their ROI, versus reverting back to poor behavior and lackluster returns. The data is by-and-large irrefutable and immensely valuable.

When there’s a pull back from improvement techniques, let’s make our best efforts to provide data and options. Let’s guide rather than argue, or force a solution that we know is right. Let’s face it, the last time you really pressed an unpopular or difficult solution, you met with initial resistance, right? The same will happen again. Retrospect on you experiences and adapt to the environment. That’s what we tell our teams, right?

And love dares you to change our way of Caring about ourselves, This is our last dance, This is our last dance, This is ourselves under pressure