When Collaboration Becomes Clobber-ation
I was new on site and agreed to co-create a working session with the company Agile coach for developing the skills needed to split large stories into smaller stories. The plan was to develop the skills of the company's scrum master pool so that they could then deliver this presentation to their teams. Given the diversity of the team projects involved, I proposed that it might be helpful to open the session with a short segment on how to size stories, just to be sure everyone had a baseline understanding. To this end and in the interests of time I offered to leverage a 10 minute presentation that I'd used successfully for several years.
"Great," she said. "Let's see it."
Thirty minutes and an uncounted number of interruptions later to interject what I should do different here and where I was wrong there, I stopped trying to get through my short deck of slides. The interaction had all the feel of turf posturing and a clear need for the company coach to be the sage in the mix. I don't mind getting thrashed by sharp or well placed feedback from a curious novice or a proven master. These insights are often the most valuable and important to learning and growth as an Agile coach. But if anyone deploys a tear-you-down-to-build-me-up strategy in the name of collaboration I've learned it's best to cut my losses and walk away.
And that's what happened here. The co-creation dissolved and the working session never occurred. Weeks later, the company coach emailed the approved deck of slides to the scrum masters with instructions to present the deck to their teams. How to do that was "in the notes."
There were a lot of things wrong with this interaction and, indeed, with the company's Agile implementation. But the lack of co-creation and collaboration was a core issue. Healthy and productive collaboration includes all of the following:
Asking many questions
Careful attention and listening to answers
Making few statements
Setting aside the limitations of "or" and embracing the power of "and"
Understanding the goals of the collaboration
Understanding the purpose of the collaboration
Respect for everyone as professionals
Communication that is open and uncontaminated by back channeling and triangulation
Patience
Photo by Ashley Jurius on Unsplash