Frank
Sinatra sang ‘Strangers in the Night’ in 1966.
It became a popular song that marked Sinatra’s return to the limelight
in the popular music business. Towards
the end of the song he chants, 'Do-be-do-be-do', and this is the tune that Paul
Whitcomb (a fellow Generative coach) and I sang during a collaborative coaching
session with him one sunny Sunday in North London.
Paul and
I spent time together talking about coaching.
As we talked it became apparent that there were parallels in what we
wanted to explore. So we agreed to create a space where we could look at
some deeper concepts to do with the second skin (the notion of a receptive but
also protective outer layer that we all possess when we interact with each other
in the world), to see if we could create a deeper connection between us using
some Generative Coaching techniques and also consider the concept of being and
doing.
As we were
working together, I became very conscious that the field that we were in was so
similar, to the current world of Agile, and the Agile mindset.
To those
of you who are familiar with Agile, you will be aware that Agile is a
mindset based on 4 values, 12 principles and a whole bunch of different
practices. I think the graphic below demonstrates this very well (with
thanks to Arbinger Institute for allowing me to share it).
Doing
Agile
There's a
lot of talk within the agile community about being agile and doing agile.
And this refers to the fact that often, the pressures of work can lead us
towards focussing on the doing part of agile. This can mean that people
spend a lot of time directing their attention towards a tool like Jira or Azure
DevOps or a framework like Scrum or Kanban.
I'd even
say that sometimes, Agile consultants can get quite prescriptive. I often
see experienced Project Managers who are under pressure to deliver to a fixed date, but they also are under pressure to show that they're delivering their project
in an agile way.
Unfortunately,
I have not seen successful outcomes in these scenarios. Usually, the
'agile transformation' becomes a ‘tick box’ exercise, where people look to
demonstrate agile ways of working but actually there are no behaviour changes
taking place at all.
There's
lot of doing but not a lot of change.
Unfortunately,
Agile Coaches don't always help here. In fact, there's a danger that they
might even make things worse. This is usually because the Agile Coach has
experience in a specialist area and so that person evangelises the benefits of
that specialism to their client, possibly without spending time with the client
to understand their context and situation.
When this
happens, this moves the client away from the true spirit of agile and toward a specific
framework or application of something. It misses the whole point about
what agile is. A way of being. A mindset if you like. A
philosophy. A way of life even.
Being
Agile
Agile
teams follow practices and behave in ways that support the Agile principles:
- Regular incremental delivery
- Constant feedback and
interaction with customers
- Adaptive and continuous
planning
- Focus on value
- Teams self-organising
- Collaboration
- Continually improving
So, don’t
focus on the doing but do focus on the being bit. This is what agile is
all about.
Agile
Leadership and Culture
Often the
problem is that, because agile is seen as a team level thing, Senior Leaders
don’t think it has anything to do with them. As a result, problems start
to arise in the middle layer of management. As Ken Schwaber said, “Agile
development will not solve any of your problems – it will just make them so
painfully visible that ignoring them is harder.”
This can
mean exposing political challenges within an organisation. These can be
tricky to resolve. Particularly the higher up the organisation you go.
A lot of this comes down to challenging political power and authority.
I haven’t
found a way to simply resolve this, and I’ve read a lot of books and worked
with a lot of people to explore different approaches. It all seems to come down to attitudes to
change, an openness to learn and better ourselves.
And an
openness to take a coaching approach. By
this I mean moving from command and control to a more open, ‘I don’t have to be
the expert’ approach. This is akin to Peter Senge’s book, The Fifth
Discipline –The Art of Practise of Learning Organisations but also Claire
Grave’s work on Spiral Dynamics and Peter Drucker’s notion of the Knowledge
worker.
Peter
Drucker, defined a knowledge worker as ‘someone who knows more about their work
than their boss.’ In this age, we can
all recognise this in our work environments.
So, what
does all of this have to do with Generative Change?
Generative
Change is a term created by the International Association for Generative Change
(IAGC). Here's a link to their website. https://generative-change.com/.
Mission
The
mission of the IAGC is to bring Generative Change work to the world. We want to
see a world where coaches, psychotherapists, leaders, teachers, trainers and
entrepreneurs are living principles of Generative Change and are creating a
world to which people want to belong.
The
IAGC was founded by Stephen Gilligan and Robert Dilts.
Robert
Dilts is well known for his work on Logical Levels (amongst other things as he
has written numerous books). This term refers to a series of levels that
can be applied to an individual or group of individuals. These levels
create a potential roadmap of change for a coach whether at the individual,
team or organisational level. The levels go from environment (what the
environment is like? where somebody is within that environment) via behaviours,
capabilities, values and beliefs all the way through to identity (for an
individual, a team or an organisation overall). This should be starting
to paint a cultural picture when you work across all of these levels. Click here for a more detailed description,
<<Insert link to dilt’s work here>>
Below is
a picture of Dilts talking about this topic on his generative coaching
programme.
The term ‘Logical
Levels’, was adapted by Dilts from Gregory Bateson's anthropological work that
can now be applied to the life of people in any system, and indeed the life of
the system itself. It can be described
and understood at different levels: environment, behaviour, capabilities,
values and beliefs, identity and purpose.
Agile
Logical Levels
I have
now taken this work and applied it to the world of Agile. Rather than
showing it as a hierarchy, I am showing it a series of three circles as
below. The idea is that for us to work effectively with agile we should
start from the inner circle (the values) and work our way out from there rather
than, what can happen, which is to start from the outside and work
inwards. The trouble with the latter is that the move inwards never
happens.
But if
you start from the middle you will always move outwards. This is because
of the nature of the fast-paced world we live in and its focus on delivery
results. The doing will always be there. And so, will the being,
but often the being gets pushed into our un-conscious.
This
comes back to the notion of being agile rather than doing agile. So, in
the middle we have the agile mindset. This is 'being agile'.
The outer
circle is the day to day reality of life. This is 'doing agile'
And then
the middle circle is the glue connecting the being and the doing
together. I see this as being driven from purpose. In generative
coaching, we say, "and what is your intention in 5 words or
less..." This helps to create the connection between the being and
doing and it drives our behaviour.
And now,
we can look at the generative aspects of this in more detail. In a lot of
ways generative coaching is about 'turning the mind' down and just being.
Connecting to our bodies and observing what is happening in the present moment
in a neutral and non-judgemental way. This helps us to raise our
awareness and become more connected to our deeper selves and each other.
The inner
circle - Mindset
Here we
are connected to our inner selves and present in the current moment. We
are aware of what is happening in that moment, aware through all our
senses. In generative coaching we talk about a COACH state. This
is:
- C - entered
- O - pen
- A - ware
- C - onnected
- H - ospital
This
refers to our state at a given point in time. The better our coach state,
the better placed each of us, is to do good work. Of course, we are all
human and so none of us will ever be, permanently in a COACH state (we are not
robots). But the point of this work is to be self-aware and when we fall
out of coach state (a CRASH! as generative coaches call it) we can work to get
ourselves back to coach state.
Click
here for more details on this, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/empowering-generative-change-jon-sleeper/
Another
important aspect of this generative work is to create a somatic representation
of ourselves in certain situations. Below is a sketch of my own stance
for when I am in my best COACH state. I'm standing firm, rooted to the
earth. That gives me my centre and my source of life and strength.
My legs are straight, knees slightly bent to give me some agility. My
back is straight but not too firm and my head is upright but relaxed, slightly
tilted to the sky. My arms are open and 'I'm here', available and attentive to
the needs of whatever is happening around me.
The outer
circle - Processes
“Oh dear!
I shall be too late!" say's the rabbit to Alice in Alice in
Wonderland. Alice then follows him down the rabbit hole into
Wonderland. How often do each of us do something like this in our own
lives?
This is
the normality of everyday life. A lot of us seem to live busy lives,
moving from one context to another whether within work or outside of
work. We're busy doing stuff but what is that stuff that we're
doing? And what value do we place on it?
When I
stand in the place, I imagine the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. But
this is when I'm working without focus. So, I'm not actually
standing. I'm running. My heart is
racing and I'm rushing to get stuff done. I spent a few years of my
career in this space as a Project Manager focused on achieving the next
delivery for my project. It was like running to stand still on a
treadmill.
If I can
start from the middle, the mindset, then my work is more congruent with my
purpose and my own self. I'm much more likely to do work that is valuable
to me and others in my environment. But to achieve this, I need to know
what it is that I want.
Middle
circle - Intention and Behaviours
The
middle circle is the connection between Be and Do. Neither Be nor Do
achieve much in isolation. By adding intention and behaviours, both being
and doing can become highly productive and, also rewarding. It's a
win-win situation for everybody involved.
As I
stand in this place my somatic representation of this is to be standing with
purpose, one leg in front of the other, facing in the direction that I want to
go. My arms are forward as I get ready to move. I know what my
positive intention is, I can state it to myself and others and it creates motivation
for me to move forward and do.
Generative
Agile
And the
final part of this is to bring it all together in the sketch below. This
shows four boxes. The first one is the current state and the next is the
future state. This is a standard coaching representation of a change and
a goal to move from one state to another. The generative coach adds
further parts to this though. The generative
coach helps the client to look out across the environment, to understand what
resources are out there to support the client, but also to identify obstacles
and to bring them into the field also. These obstacles are there for a
reason and we don't want to shut them out. They make us who we are, we
want to embrace them, to welcome them into our world and to see if they can add
to the resources that we already have.
The
sketch below is a mock-up of the world of modern digital community. I
hope we can use this to bring us together, to collaborate and together, to
generate a new approach to evolutionary change that encompasses the agile
logical levels.
Thanks for reading
