What happened at your four-day class?
“I learned thrice what I previously knew about the Scaled Agile Framework.”
What did you learn?
“How much I did not know from the transformation I’ve been participating in for the last 15 months. That no matter how committed you are to the transition and learning how to do something correctly the experience of what you’re actually doing, really doing, informs things so much more than you realize from inside the experience.”
Tell me more.
“It’s San Antonio, so there were lots of USAA folks and former military personnel there, and they have a very distinct way of being and acting. My tablemates, a random collection of folks who happened to sit together, were lovely. One of them had taught classes in one of the armed services and had a very interesting take on how permanent our first lessons actually are. It stayed with me, and I spent many of the hours after the class wondering how much my understanding of SAFe is informed by my first experience with it at the bank.”
What is that experience?
“Positive enough to commit me fully to the framework and becoming a coach, flawed enough to make me feel occasional hopelessness.”
What made your tablemates lovely?
“A proper, if accidental, mix of ages and personalities. And genders. That became apparent to me as we did various exercises. If you put nothing but men in an exercise, the struggle for dominance is baked-in. Men will argue for the joy of competing and get nowhere and do so in a way that is comical to onlookers. I’ve never been at a table of nothing but women, obviously, though I imagine it brings its own complications. But if you have men and women at a table, the women tend to bring a gentle knowingness – from watching their fathers and brothers and husbands and sons plow courageously forward in pursuit of the stupidest things – and if the men allow them to speak, there is a selforganizing direction that is wonderful to see.”
What does that make you think?
“That I learned as much about the value of diversity in the classroom as the Scaled Agile Framework. That I already understood diversity well enough to live its virtues in my personal life, but that I didn’t believe in its value in a corporate setting the way I do now.”
What about your CTI classes?
“Right. They comprise predominately women. And they are immensely enjoyable experiences for me. But again, they aren’t a corporate setting, they aren’t subjected to the pains and rigors of organizing round profitability. The experience I had at that SAFe table goes in the toolkit henceforth: Instead of repeating threadbare platitudes about diversity or avoiding the subject for fear of misstepping, I now have an experience I can cite with passion.”
What else?
“That if a company begins its Agile adoption by avoiding the excruciating pain of what political battles Value Stream Mapping forces and simply draws lines round its existing org chart and calls those lines ‘Agile Release Trains’ it dooms itself to a complete restart someday. You don’t wait to map value streams a couple years after you launch ARTs.”
What does that mean?
“Years of pain to come in the transformation I’m currently a part of.”
And so?
(Smiling)