Transcript
A (0:04)
Hey there, agile adventurer, just a quick question. What if for the price of a fancy coffee or half a pizza, you could unlock over 700 hours of the best agile content on the planet? That's audio, video, E courses, books, presentations, all that you can think of. But you can also join live calls with world class practitioners and hang out in a flame war free and AI slop clean slack with the sharpest minds in the game. Oh, and yes, you get direct access to me, Vasko, your Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. No, this is not a drill. It's this Scrum Master Toolbox membership. And it's your unfair advantage in the agile world. So if you want to know more, go check out scrummastertoolbox.org membership. That's scrummastertoolbox.org Membership. And check out all the goodies we have for you. Do it now. But if you're not doing it now, let's listen to the podcast.
B (1:11)
Hello everybody. Welcome to our Team Tuesday where we talk about teams that self destruct. But first we welcome our guest back, Bernie Maloney. Welcome back.
C (1:22)
Thank you, Hasko.
B (1:24)
So Bernie, we'll talk about teams in a second. But first share with us what was the book that most inspired you in your career as a Scrum Master?
C (1:33)
You know, Vasco, I'm not going to point to one. I've got a bunch when, when you brought this question up, it's like, oh, he may love me or he may hate me for this. Now look, everybody out there loves Sinex. Start with Y and Drive by Dan Pink. And I think, I think they're great books. I found Sinek around 2010, right about the time they published the book. But I'm going to cite several others. So one that I read about the same time in 2010 is change the culture, change the game. Because that's really the job that we're in as Scrum Masters is changing the culture. And a big point that I can remember from that, I'd have to go back and review it again to be current is you actually need to get leaders to start demonstrating the change that they want. Now, about the same time that I found Sinek and everybody knows Sinek's Golden Circle, the why, how, what? I also found a book by Steve Denning. Steve Denning got really popular with the Leader's Guide to Radical Management in Agile Circles. But before that he wrote a book called the Secret Language of Leadership. Now like I I explained in the Monday episode, neuro, linguistic programming is all about language. So this, this kind of caught My eye. And Sinek talks about leader or talks about storytelling as a leadership technique. And it's really powerful. And he says compelling stories have a pattern of attention, emotion and reason. So the ability to tell a compelling story on the fly is a really great skill. And you see the same thing reflected in connects. Why, how, what? Attention, emotion and then reason. If you know the triune model, the brain, it maps identically. You also see that in any newspaper, any day. Attention, a big banner, headline, emotion, full color picture, reason. The little details you see down the side. Another one that I think is, is really significant is Too Many Bosses, Too few Leaders by Rajiv Peshawaria. Now in that book, Peshawaria makes two significant points. He says the hardest transition to make in management is when you go from first level to second level management. Because the second level you have to let go. And that's what we do in Agile. By having self directed teams, lots of line managers have to let go. But then he says the second problem is there's nobody, there's no structure there to help you do that. You're on your own. You got to go figure it out. So to me, that's a big part of being a Scrum master is helping those line managers, those project managers, recognize how they need to develop coaching and mentoring skills to really step into that second level of management. Because that's what second level managers should be doing. Now a more recent book came out in 2023 is by an author, Andrew McAfee, called the Geek Way. And he talks about four cultural norms that go into high performance. It's really, really impactful. In fact, he's going to be part or that reference is going to be part of the thread that I give at the Scrum gathering Banff in about a month from when we're recording this. So and if you put that in for a lunch and learn everybody, you can reach out and contact me. Happy to bring that in as a lunch and learn. But McAfee says the four cultural norms are science. The willingness to run experiments, openness, the ability to challenge authority, speed. Now this is where most organizations get it wrong because they hear speed and they think speed of execution. It's actually speed of learning. Okay. And then ownership, actually letting the teams own the decisions. That's huge. Okay. Another book that I'm going to cite in that talk is Amy Edmondson's Right Kind of Wrong. Now Amy was the one behind Psychological Safety. And in Right Kind of Wrong she points out that there's three types of mistakes. Commonly there's basic Mistakes. And that's what most organizations think the mistakes are. Okay, there's complex mistakes. These are chain of failure mistakes. I'm going to come back to that in a second. And then there's intelligent mistakes. Intelligent mistakes we see all the time. Like in pharma where you're running experiments. Oh, we're back to experiments again. And you want to run intelligent failures on stuff like this. Now we're back to make new mistakes. Okay. So the complex failures are the ones you got to watch out for. And she points out in a lot of instances these are over constrained problems where if you put too many constraints in, then a chain of failures happens and literally the plane falls out of the sky. So and then another great one for Scrum masters is a book called Strategic Play, Creative Facilitators Guide. It's out of Lego Serious Play and it is a great facilitator book that you can use with teams for lots of different things, using an eight brick LEGO kit with a technique called what the duck. So it is, it is great for facilitation. So all of those are like really influential and I cite them all the time. Vasco, sorry for like running on and on and on.