Overflowing - Make room for new ideas, new practices, ...

The card game continues. Here's the card I drew this time... Living in the Moment by Barbara Ann Kipfer (a deck of 52 inspirational cards).

So what does this one mean in an agile world.

As I work with groups to transform the way they build software, resistance is just one of the challenges we face. Every time, every place it's the same. Some of the people in the organization are reluctant to try something new. Like the card says, if your glass is too full, there's no room for any new ideas. I ran across this just yesterday. I was working with a team that was heading down the path of building out a set of large, detailed schedules. I was confused by the approach. There are multiple teams that need to work together, yet they haven't worked together. How exactly is that going to work?

As the meeting was ending one of the participants literally was saying he didn't need any of what we were selling. And what was that? Oh, just the idea of some basic planning and coordination. Maybe a little bit of road mapping, some evaluation of dependencies across the various groups, maybe just a little bit of conversation around how the multiple teams will work together. 

In this meeting we had the one vocal naysayer, but we also had 3 others that were thinking differently. They were thinking that sounds just like what we need and we need it right now. Not sometime in the future, but now.

As the meeting adjourned I said - call me if you think I can help. I definitely don't expect a call right away. Maybe some of the water in that glass full of opinions & old ideas will spill out and just maybe there'll be enough room for something new. Something collaborative, something more effective. Time will tell. What do I expect will happen? I'm hoping the others interested in moving forward will have some influence and we'll see a change of heart. If that happens, the work has just begun. 

We'll have to look for simple straight-forward ways to ensure change happens. Not grandiose plans that change the world - just small, simple things we can do to take a step or two along the path to agility. If we can get a couple of steps without turning back maybe those steps will turn into 3 or 4 more and then again. At some point the hook is set and we're reeling them in.