Vulnerability as a Tool for Overcoming Change Resistance in an Agile Transformation | Sara Caldwell

Summary

Summary of "Vulnerability as a Tool for Overcoming Change Resistance in an Agile Transformation | Sara Caldwell"

Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast
Host: Vasco Duarte
Guest: Sarah Caldwell
Release Date: December 9, 2024

Introduction

In the episode titled "Vulnerability as a Tool for Overcoming Change Resistance in an Agile Transformation," host Vasco Duarte engages in a deep conversation with Sarah Caldwell, an organizational anthropologist, Agile Coach, and Certified Scrum Master. The discussion delves into Sarah's unique journey into Scrum Mastery, the challenges faced during Agile transformations, and the pivotal role of vulnerability in managing change resistance.

Guest Background: Sarah Caldwell’s Journey to Scrum Mastery

Sarah Caldwell shares her diverse professional background before embracing the Agile methodology. Her career trajectory includes roles such as a dog trainer, accounts payable agent, and recruiter across various industries. This eclectic experience informed her approach to Scrum Mastery, where she emphasizes human-centered change and strategic empathy.

Notable Quote:
"Dog training is more about coaching people to train their dogs and not necessarily the dog behavior in itself."
– Sarah Caldwell [01:51]

Sarah highlights how principles from dog training, particularly coaching and understanding behaviors, seamlessly transferred into her Agile coaching roles. Her transition to Scrum Mastery was gradual, fueled by natural curiosity and problem-solving tendencies that aligned with Agile values.

Embracing Agile: The Shift from Traditional Project Management

Sarah recounts her initial exposure to Agile through an Agile bootcamp and introductory Scrum readings. This exposure was transformative, providing her with tools and values that resonated with her innate approach to management and team dynamics.

Notable Quote:
"It was about creating a system that worked for people that are also in the system."
– Sarah Caldwell [06:02]

Despite her alignment with Agile principles, Sarah acknowledges grappling with anti-patterns rooted in traditional project management practices, particularly those influenced by the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). Her journey underscores the nuanced shift from process-centric to people-centric methodologies inherent in Agile adoption.

Navigating Agile Transformation: Challenges and Resistance

The core of the discussion focuses on Sarah's experiences during an Agile transformation within an organization. Initially, she concentrated on team-level changes, facilitating PI planning, fostering mindset shifts, and removing organizational impediments. However, she soon realized the importance of addressing the broader organizational system, including roles not explicitly defined in the Scrum Guide.

Notable Quote:
"I was hyper focused on the team... they felt uncertain and didn't know where their place was."
– Sarah Caldwell [07:46]

Sarah encountered resistance from leaders, project managers, and business analysts who felt marginalized by the Agile processes. This disconnect highlighted a significant gap in the Scrum framework concerning stakeholder engagement outside the immediate Scrum team.

Vulnerability as a Strategic Tool

Faced with subtle backlash and communication barriers, Sarah embarked on what she terms a "vulnerability tour." This involved openly expressing her feelings of lack of support and seeking direct feedback from leadership.

Notable Quote:
"I decided to go on what I now refer to as a vulnerability tour, where I essentially was just really vulnerable about my feelings and not feeling supported."
– Sarah Caldwell [08:54]

This approach humanized her interactions, fostering honest dialogue and uncovering underlying frustrations among stakeholders. By embracing vulnerability, Sarah was able to bridge gaps, enhance transparency, and foster a more inclusive Agile environment.

Lessons Learned: Integrating Stakeholder Management into Agile

The discussion underscores the necessity for Scrum Masters to adopt comprehensive stakeholder management strategies, drawing from project management disciplines that emphasize communication and relationship-building.

Notable Quote:
"Scrum Masters get more curious about who are the other players in their system. It's not just their team, it's a whole system in which we operate in."
– Sarah Caldwell [10:36]

Sarah advocates for utilizing tools like "Friend or Foe" from Liberating Structures and stakeholder management techniques from PMBOK to better understand and engage with all parties involved in the Agile process. This holistic approach ensures that no role feels alienated, thereby reducing resistance and fostering a cohesive organizational culture.

Conclusion: People-Centric Agile Practices

The episode concludes with a reflective note on the importance of viewing Agile transformations through a people-centric lens. Sarah and Vasco emphasize that successful Agile adoption hinges not just on adhering to processes but on nurturing relationships and addressing the emotional and psychological facets of change.

Notable Quote:
"People aren't the process."
– Sarah Caldwell [12:11]

This poignant statement encapsulates the essence of the episode, highlighting that the heart of Agile lies in its people and their interactions, rather than the rigid implementation of processes.

Final Thoughts

Sarah Caldwell's insights provide valuable lessons for Scrum Masters navigating Agile transformations. By embracing vulnerability, fostering open communication, and integrating comprehensive stakeholder management practices, Agile practitioners can effectively mitigate resistance and cultivate a resilient, adaptive organizational culture.

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Additional Resources Mentioned:

• Friend or Foe from Liberating Structures
• Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK)

Closing Note:
Listeners are encouraged to apply these insights to their Agile practices and consider rating and sharing the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast to support the community of Scrum Masters worldwide.

Transcript

[Vasco Duart]

Hi, I'm your host, Vasco Duart. Welcome to the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast where we share tips and tricks from Scrum Masters around the world. Every day we bring you inspiring answers to important questions that all Scrum Masters.

[Unknown Host]

Face day after day. Hello, everybody. Welcome to one more week of the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast. And this week, joining us from the center of the US or should I say the middle one of those anyway, Sarah Caldwell. Hey, Sarah, welcome to the show.

[Sarah Caldwell]

Hi.

[Unknown Host]

Sarah is an organizational anthropologist and those words alone make me want to talk to Sarah and I'm sure you will see why in a second as we start discussing the questions that we go through. She's passionate about human centered change. She helps organizations tackle tough problems, all while keeping things fun and engaging. Sarah blends strategic thinking with empathy, turning challenges into opportunities. Agile values are what guide her, whether helping teams flow or wrangling her rescue pets or navigating the complexities of everyday life. Sarah, that was a short intro. Tell us a little bit more about yourself and how did you end up becoming a Scrum Master?

[Sarah Caldwell]

Yeah, thanks for introducing me and letting me be here to nerd out with you today. So I, you know, I think everyone's journey to Scrum, Scrum mastering is unique and, you know, I follow along those same patterns as well. Had a lot of different roles in my life. I was a dog trainer, accounts payable agent, recruiter, and many, many more positions across a lot of different industries.

[Unknown Host]

Funnily enough, dog trainers also handle agility issues.

[Sarah Caldwell]

Quite often they do in so many different ways related to the actual, like running through the hoops and then also just trying to understand what behaviors like owners or their guardians want from them. So they definitely, I definitely borrow a lot of dog training concepts not to say that people are dogs. It's really, dog training is more about coaching people to train their dogs and not necessarily the dog behavior in itself. So I pulled a lot from that. It was a big, huge lesson that I learned because, you know, like, quite honestly, I would tell, I would tell my clients, it doesn't matter what I can do with your dog. It matters what you can do alone in your kitchen with your dog. And that was, that was a huge, huge lesson that has been really transferable into my Scrum mastering and agile coaching roles.

[Unknown Host]

So how did you get started? Were you then, like, in some, I don't know, inspiring moment, you decided to take the leap and started to learn about Scrum Agile and all things Scrum? How did you become a Scrum Master?

[Sarah Caldwell]

Yeah, I think it's several moments. So throughout all of my positions I really naturally gravitated to it. And I am a curious person. I'm a problem solver and I was often working in the business space and we'd have this kind of concept of, you know, I'm being a little dramatic here, but the sentiment is still the same. The lights would go off in the building and every, everyone would say, oh, it released again, it can't get anything right. And I really started to get curious and say, and kind of like, you know, peep my head over into the black box of it and say, hey, what's, what's going on there? Can, can I help? What, what, what are we doing? And so, you know, I had a number of positions where I was loosely associated with it, maybe a liaison if you, if you were, you know, project management or business analysts. And then I started working for an organization that was really starting on their Agile journey. And you know, at that moment I was serving as a project manager of sorts where I had learned that, you know, my project management style was more on like operational efficiency and teaming over necessarily status updates. Like I wanted to connect the dots of the big picture with what we were doing at the local level. Just naturally. That's how my brain works. And you know, also I lean more towards naturally the growth mindset. But as a project manager I had a little bit of that. But I also have the influence of this PMO rigor. And so like while I was living in agile mindset before I even knew what the words for were for it and like, I think it's important to note I did have a lot of anti patterns as well. I'm not saying I was the ideal Agile mindset and that's because, you know, my references, the people that I was talking to, the books I was reading, the articles were all centered around pmbok.

[Unknown Host]

And that's a project management body of knowledge by the way.

[Sarah Caldwell]

Exactly, yeah. And then my experience of how, you know, that what I was reading in the book didn't really work for me in real life, but still doesn't by the way. And you know, but what I was doing was I was like the process, I know the process, I follow the process, let's get on to the process. And you know, and I knew that like face to face conversations was, and transparency was key, but I was still about the process, doing the process, doing the.

[Unknown Host]

So what, what made the switch? What, what really kind of inspired you to take the leap into the agile side of the fence?

[Sarah Caldwell]

So I was working with an organization that started an Agile journey and I went through an Agile bootcamp and read Scrum and like I was a changed person. And it's like something as everyone wrote down exactly what I was trying to do and gave me some tools and values to help me accomplish it. And like I was just immediately hooked. Drank the Kool Aid and then these really helped me understand it wasn't about the process, but it was about, you know, the creating a system where that people, you know, creating a system that worked for people that. Who are also in the system.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah, absolutely. And that understanding kind of switches our, I guess, perspective on what is happening. You know, we look at the same events in a different way, but it still takes a long time before to really grasp, before we can really grasp what Agile is all about, especially if we have a background in project management. And of course, I speak for myself here because that's my background. I started as a project manager as well. So Sarah, tell us one story of one of those moments where you were still realizing what that shift in perspective meant in practice. And as we all do, of course, things just didn't go as you expected. So tell us that story first. We'll dive into the takeaways later, but tell us the story.

[Sarah Caldwell]

All right. So I was working with the organization that was starting their Agile transformation. And I was roughly like about, you know, a year in, I was helping running PI, planning events. I was, you know, helping teams work through the mindset shift from the way they were previously working to this new way of working, working to remove organizational impediments, Just really hyper focused on the team and helping them figure out, you know, all the ways that they could succeed in helping explore topics that they wanted to get a little bit more curious about working with Team Dynamics. But what I ended up ultimately struggling with was understanding that I was part of a larger system and appreciating how the different other elements that we were a part of were experiencing this change. And oftentimes I typically find it's the roles that aren't clearly identified in the Scrum Guide that feel kind of threatened related to some of these changes.

[Unknown Host]

Can you give an example? Yeah.

[Sarah Caldwell]

So through my experience, I found it's. It's the leaders, it's the project managers, it's the business analysts. They often, you know, are kind of glossed aside maybe by design in the Scrum guide. And sometimes as Scrum masters, as agile coaches, if we're not leaning into some of that uncomfortability and uncertainty that they're experiencing, we can accidentally cause, you know, some friction. So for example, during that time where I was spending about a year, year and a half with this organization under undergoing a transformation, I would, you know, be and I was hyper focused on the team. I would send an email or have a conversation with leaders and project managers and the PMO and felt that I was receiving some like subtle backlash, like some dirty S felt like we were on the same page but then like things would happen where it would indicate that we're not. And I really couldn't figure out what was going on. And I had just like reached my like, wit said and I decided to go on what I now refer to as a vulnerability tour, where I essentially was just really vulnerable about my feelings and not feeling supported and just like going to each leader and saying, what, what am I, what am I doing that is frustrating? What am I doing that's not working? Help me understand. And you know, each, each leader had something different but like ultimately they didn't feel that I was working with them. Like they felt that I was kind of boxing them out of the team. Like, you can't go to the retros, you can't go to the standup, you can't go to all these things. And that, that made them feel uncertain and didn't know where their place was. So that was one of the biggest.

[Unknown Host]

Lessons and I think that's a very fair feeling for them to have because literally that is how Scrum works, right? The, let's call it the traditional hierarchical leaders have little influence or even participation in the day to day of a SCRUM team, with the exception of the product owner, the Scrum master and the stakeholders involved in the demos or reviews. There's very little mention in the Scrum guide about how to interact with and engage other stakeholders. And this reminds me of one of the few things that I think are really, really valuable from project management, which is the whole stakeholder and communication aspect of the PM book, which I think all Scrum masters would benefit from reading about and learning more about, because it is a key part of our work to work with these other stakeholders that are not the product owner or direct quote unquote customer representatives that come to the review. But they might be hierarchical leaders who have line responsibility over that and other teams and want to still be involved and perhaps don't know how to anymore.

[Sarah Caldwell]

When scrum comes in 100% right, they feel that they were still responsible for what the team was producing, but were feeling boxed out. And I love your suggestion of having Scrum Masters get more curious about who are the other players in their system. It's not just their team, it's a whole system in which we operate in. And there are really great tools out there like friend or foe from Liberating Structures and the PMBOK of stakeholder management that I think are, to your point, really great for all change agents to be able to appreciate and identify.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah. Being a project manager by training, one of the things that I found quite sad when I finally left that background and started my Agile journey is that we have lost some of the best things that came from the project management movement, especially later, like in the 90s and early 2000s, which are all the aspects that are related to managing the social system around the project, like stakeholder management, communication plan and all of that, which as Scrum Masters, we are not necessarily exposed to those ideas because they are not in the Scrum Guide. The Scrum Guide is very clear. There's team and there's outside the team. And outside the team, there's a product owner who interfaces with the customer and brings their insights. And then there's a few people who come to the review. That's it. That's what Scrum is. Right. Everything else that exists in a standard organization is not accounted for, but we need to account for that as Scrum Masters.

[Sarah Caldwell]

Yeah, such a great point. It reminds me of that people aren't the process. Right?

[Unknown Host]

People aren't the process. That's such a beautiful way to end this episode. Thank you for that, Saira.

[Sarah Caldwell]

Thank you.

[Vasco Duart]

Monday is about what we learn from our obstacles and our failures. But tomorrow is Team Tuesday. Here on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast, we explore teams and their journeys, the habits they develop that threaten their performance, how each of our guests help their teams evolve, and the one key lesson they learned from that experience. We really hope you liked our show, and if you did, why not rate this podcast on Stitcher or itunes? Share this podcast and let other Scrum Masters know about this valuable resource for their work. Remember that sharing is caring.