B (4:59)

Well, there's a lot of stuff there to unpack. And we'll put the link to Dissociation, what it means, and maybe the link to the Strategic Playbook. Of course, every one of the retros and Bernie's YouTube channel in the show notes. But of course we're also talking about success. It is success Thursday, after all. And we do all of these retros and a lot more things in order to achieve that success, which is often represented by a high performing team. Successful outcome for the organization and the team. But we need to know what that success means for us because we need to map, to track our way to that successful outcome. So let's define it. Bernie, when you think about your role as an agile coach and as a scrum master, how do you define success for yourself?

C (5:49)

At a broad level, it's having a situation in which a team can thrive and do their best work, even when it's challenging. Now some of the early indicators that I have for success, my goal when I come in and work with a team is to not be there forever. So I actually want the team to start to become self directed and to do their own stuff. So one of the first things that I will do is I will teach thumb voting or roman voting, some people call it, as a facilitation technique. And I'll try and teach it really well. And then I, I wait, I wait to see when the team starts adopting some of the stuff that I have injected. And thumb voting is one of the first things that I'll see a team do. Like when they come up for, they've got to do some decisions and they start organically on their own without me facilitating it. Using something like thumb voting that I've taught them, that's a clue to me that they're starting to become self directed. I can actually back off. So that's one of my early measures of success. Ah, this team is starting to get it. When I see them stepping out of waiting for direction and at least stepping into seeking permission, that's another sign of progress. I actually would love to get them into begging forgiveness, like understanding what the constraints are around them. And that's, that's something I try and get teams to understand. Diana Larson called calls this circles and soup. So at the inner circle is what the teams think they have control over. Outside of that is another circle that they think they have some influence over. And then there's the soup that they live in that they just have to live with. And part of our job is to coach those teams, to expand those circles, to get them to recognize that they've got more control than they thought they did, they've got more influence than they thought they did. And so as I see them starting to stretch those boundaries in an organization and starting to take initiative, that's, that's another sign of success. Look, honestly, every management team that I have worked with wants the teams to succeed. Now the managers, the leaders, they may need some coaching and leadership because they may only know about command and control as a leadership style. And so they're being very highly directive with their teams. And so part of my job is to coach those managers. And this is Typically line managers, first level managers, maybe second level managers. As you get into executives, they're already there. They know they have to delegate, they know they have to set direction and let the team go. But nobody and I referenced this when I talked about Peshawaria's too many bosses, too few leaders. There's. There's no structure to coach these people into these skills. And so that's part of what I do as a Scrum Master. How do those leaders start to set those boundaries of safety within which a team can experiment and then get those lessons? So another part of my success is getting those managers to start to expand those boundaries and then start to coach the teams instead of direct the teams. So those are some of the things that I look for as the more I do that, the more self directed the whole organization becomes and the more I can back off and go find another client.

B (9:09)

The circles and soup example, I think makes it very concrete, one way for us to observe that the team is becoming more self directed because we see that what's under their influence keeps expanding. And if we do that at a regular interval in the retrospectives, where are these things and just do the mapping within the circles and try to understand, is the team believing that their domain of influence has grown or are they not? Because that might be a possibility. There are changes happening all the time and that is a very important, even very practical and pragmatic cue for us to help the team understand that, hey, this thing was in our control before, why is it not now and what can we do about it?

C (9:56)

A very concrete way that a Scrum Master can help is again, going through retrospect. If you go into any organization, there's going to be a ton of stuff that's getting in the way of the teams being productive. And in retrospectives, part of what we're doing is we're surfacing, how could we improve? And some of that's going to be systemic in the organization. So early on, teams are like, yeah, we want to be self directed and yeah, this stuff is getting our way. If nothing changes, your team is going to get depressed. So one of the things I coach Scrum masters towards doing is build up a backlog of things that need to be fixed. So as you surface things in a retrospective, great. Surface all the things that are getting in the team's way, but put them in an improvement backlog and focus on only one thing. Focus on the top thing and keep focusing on whatever the top thing is until it changes. If nothing changes, your team is going to get depressed. They're going to feel like this is just process theater and why are we doing it? And they're going to fall back into waiting for direction. But if they see that their inputs start to change the overall organizational system, that's where they're going to have a little bit of hope. And they're going to keep chipping away at that sort of stuff.

A (11:13)

Yeah, absolutely.

B (11:14)

And they get to this point of relentless improvement, which is a phrase somebody used here on the podcast. And I, I very happily stole that because I think it's a beautiful, beautiful phrase.

C (11:24)

I love that phrases as well. I've got a, an, an example, if you want, of getting a manager to recognize how they, they needed to change.

B (11:33)

Thank you very much for sharing all of those stories with us, Bernie.

C (11:37)

Okay, thank you.

A (11:42)

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B (13:32)

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