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. Hello everybody. Welcome back to our Tuesday episode this week with Ali Dad Hamidi. Hey Ali dad, welcome back.
B (1:19)
Hey Mesko, good to be back.
A (1:21)
So Tuesday is Team Tuesday. We'll talk about teams in a second. But first, Ali dad, share with us what was the book that most inspired you in your career as a Scrum Master?
B (1:32)
I really find it challenging to answer that question because I went back and I mean nowadays a little less. But there was a time that I used to read one book a week. There were many, many books that I was thinking about. Part of my practice is system thinking, open system theory and other things. So there's a lot I can talk about in terms of systems thinking as well as human psychology. But I want to talk about two books. One had a massive impact on my practice as a coach and the other one as a human being. And hopefully I'll connect it to how it helps the Scrum Master. One that especially helped with my coaching practice, a book called More Time to Think by Nancy Klein. She obviously it help us to particularly about Scrum Masters. I want to talk about this. It teaches you to create a space, not to feel. It help you to listen better. It help the Scrum Masters to create those spaces for team to slow down and Scrum Masters and managers to listen deeply. And designing the containers as an example, meetings or workshops that allow for deeper thinking to emerge nationally naturally, rather than telling them, you know, have to think. It also turn facilitation into liberation. It's about how do you help people to find the solution among themselves. And it had a huge, huge impact on my way of thinking about coaching. I actually first time I listened to the audiobook of More Time to Think, it's actually the second book, second book from the same series that the first book is called Time to Think. But I first listened to More Time to Think and I really enjoyed even now, after I went and read the Time to Think, I enjoyed More Time to Think More. So that's one book, the second one, which is more recent and has a significant impact on my thinking, both as my practice as an organizational designer and advisor, but also as a human being. And it's called Confronting Our Freedom Leading a Culture of Chosen Accountability and Belonging. It's a book that is co authored by Peter Bloch and Peter Kostenbaum. Peter Kostenbaum is an existentialist philosopher and he passed away just recently, Peter Black obviously still alive. And it's about how do we believe in our freedom and human agency and the accountability that comes with that. And it's kind of the similar trait that we talked about earlier. There is this part in the book that says the cost of freedom is the anxiety that comes with it. And it talks about two types of anxiety. The anxiety of accepting that we are living in a world that a lot of it is out of our control, but we are still accountable for our own behavior. And the anxiety about the anxiety, which is the bit that we don't want. The first bit, I think it's the anxiety is something that's part of our experience as humans, I think. How do we live with anxiety? Because a lot of the time in large organizations, in order to remove that anxiety, we come up with bureaucracy, hierarchy, control, metrics, all of that things. I'm not saying metrics, practice, by the way, but instead of being comfortable with the anxiety of living, if you are a human and if you're living in this world, there's always an anxiety there because there's always a space. First of all, world is unpredictable. Second of all, there is always a. A gap between what we want to achieve and where we are now. And that anxiety is actually the engine for a lot of freedom. It's the engine for the innovation for entrepreneurship. But if you want to get rid of remove that anxiety, we end up with a lot of structure and bureaucracy and control. So why is it important for Scrum Masters? I think first of all, understanding that tension that is there. And also if as a person you can't deal with your own anxiety and freedom, if you can't accept the accountability, it's very hard to help the teams that you're working with to do that for themselves. This book had a significant impact on my philosophical view about the world as well.