Improve your decision-making and avoid three mental hazards.

Photo by Tim Johnson on Unsplash

Have you ever been stuck at a decision point, trapped in uncertainty or paralysis? Or have you had the experience of making a poor decision? It would be hard to find someone who doesn’t relate to one or the other. Ready to make this year full of great decisions? First, consider how you make decisions.

You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that’s clear, I will choose free will

Those are the lyrics to “Free Will” by drummer Neil Peart of the Canadian band Rush. Peart was highly perceptive about human behavior, as reflected in songs revealing numerous cultural, humanitarian, and philosophical themes. And, from the academic corner, Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman agrees with the talented drummer-songwriter. Based on Kahneman’s work in decision-making, we humans make poor decisions because we:

• Are overconfident (Peart calls this a celestial voice—a Higher Power, inner voice, or instincts)
• Cautious to a fault (choosing not to decide)
• Get caught up in emotions (phantom fears and kindness that can kill)

Sometimes, the reason behind an undesirable result in a decision can be traced back to insufficient data, poor alternatives, or misguided costs and benefits. But we can often trace poor decisions back to how our minds work.

Read on to learn how to recognize and escape three common thinking sand traps before they become judgment disasters.

Kahneman posits that we have two thinking systems. System One is unreachable; it’s our unconscious and fast reaction to things, often based on intuition. It cannot be turned off.

Our System One thinking is responsible for most of our daily decisions, judgments, and, surprisingly, many purchases. System Two thinking accesses working memory in the rational side of our brain, which helps us make more analytical and deliberate decisions, such as weighing our pros and cons.

Have you ever purchased a costly but unneeded item on the spur of the moment because you wanted it, then rationalized your decision on the ride home? That’s our System One and System Two thinking at work. System One makes a quick decision in the heat of the moment; System Two helps to make sense of more complex scenarios. Unfortunately, System Two thinking uses a lot of mental processing, which means it’s System One that is usually in charge. Therefore, our first instinct is often a poor first decision, especially if we are emotional, because of cognitive biases and built-in mental shortcuts.

There are many biases—the Decision Lab lists around ninety! Decision-making is big business, especially with the modern advantages of AI and innovations in data science. But let’s focus on individual decision-making and biases.

The good news is that sometimes a bias can be helpful to facilitate other life tasks. But, more than likely, our biases can become obstacles. Here are three prevalent decision-making biases and how they show up in our day-to-day decisions as helps or hazards, and a few responses to breaking out of the sand traps.

The Status-Quo Trap

The Bias: Decision-makers display a strong bias toward alternatives that keep things as they are. Studies show that when people are given one of two gifts and are told they can exchange it for the other, only one in ten do. The more choices we are given, the stronger the appeal of keeping the status quo.

What we do: Avoid taking actions that change the current state.

Why do we do it? To protect ourselves from risk. Loss aversion. Fear of failure. Feeling overwhelmed.

How it shows up in our day-to-day lives:

Why break free? So you don’t miss out on beneficial opportunities and advantages

3 acts to break free of this sand trap:

1. Revisit the goal and examine if the status quo hurts or hinders it.
2. Identify other options and consider the pros and cons
3. Imagine a future where the status quo has changed and then evaluate the choices

The Anchoring Trap

The Bias: A person relies too heavily on the first piece of information about a topic, becoming anchored by values that aren’t relevant to the topic. The anchoring bias has a powerful effect on human psychology and is highly pervasive in decision-making. In addition, anchoring can drive other cognitive biases, such as the planning fallacy (underestimating the amount of time it might take to do a task) and the spotlight effect (overestimating our significance to others or negatively exaggerating it.)

What we do: We filter information around a belief and then build a mental model consistent with that belief, even when evidence shows we are wrong. And the more we think about the scenario, the more we are anchored in our beliefs.

Why do we do it? We don’t want to admit we are wrong. We like consistency and patterns.

How it shows up in our day-to-day lives:

Why break free? So you can contribute to creating an inclusive, engaged, and diverse environment for solid decision-making.

3 acts to break free of this sand trap:

1. Intentionally seek other points of view that challenge the anchor, essentially creating a counterargument
2. Design short, safe-to-fail experiments to test new ideas
3. Embrace a culture of learning and celebrate shared knowledge, especially when it is spawned by a failed experiment, to embrace the process

The Framing Trap

The Bias: The Framing Effect occurs when people decide something based on how information is presented instead of the information itself. In other words, the same facts presented in two ways can lead people to make different decisions. For example, agreeing to medical treatment with a 90% chance of survival is more appealing than hearing that the same treatment has a 10% chance of death. It’s the same data with different framing.

What we do: We instinctively avoid certain losses over an equivalent gain.

Why do we do it? We are wired to avoid loss, and many of us have an inherent aversion to risk.

How it shows up in our day-to-day lives:

Why break free? So we don’t undervalue facts or make decisions based on poor information

3 acts to break free of this sand trap:

1. Don’t accept the first frame; draw out different aspects of the problem using multiple points of view from others not invested in the decision.
2. Map out various choices with all the facts before making a decision.
3. Consider how your decisions would change if the framing changed

Responding versus Reacting

Kahneman’s work notes that our first reaction is often poor, and biases are inherent in decision-making. In addition, in our current knowledge era, we must learn how to make adaptive decisions in the face of ambiguity. To make things more complex, we often make decisions as a group or system dynamic rather than individually. Dave Snowden, known for the Cynefin framework, describes this modern decision complexity with the delicious phrase “the science of inherent uncertainty.”

The steps to successful decision-making are:

1. Build awareness of your biases and mental shortcuts.
2. Learn to identify the complexity of the problem accurately.
3. Follow through with subsequent action and adaptation.

As with everything else, decision-making is situational, and the sands of change shift arbitrarily. Therefore, how you make decisions, especially learning to adjust as situations evolve, will make the difference between reacting and responding.

Behavioral science is relatively new, but studying human behavior is not. It’s a fun fact to conclude with a note that Kahneman wrote his book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow” in 2011. Neil Peart wrote “Free Will” in 1980.

~Julee Everett

Hone your craft, speak your truth, show your thanks

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Visit Julee Everett’s YouTube Channel for a growing library of webinars and conference talks.

Sources you might find interesting related to behavioral science:

The book: “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” by Daniel Kahneman

The podcast “No Stupid Questions” by Stephen J. Dubner (co-author of the “Freakonomics” books) and research psychologist Angela Duckworth (author of “Grit”)

One of many valuable sites on the topic: https://thedecisionlab.com

Lessons from KonMari, the Growth Mindset, and the Psychology of Patterns 

Rachel is a founder, an ideator, a bias-to-action, err on the side of collaboration kind of gal. She’s started skill-based communities, meditation groups, mentoring circles, and book clubs. She serves on conference boards. She speaks at industry conferences. She mentors others. Her philosophy is that “opportunity drives opportunity.”

But now she’s tired. The kind of fatigue that sucks the energy out of the (virtual) room, that shows up in destructive self-talk, and that leads to long hours of escapism through novels or binge-watching Netflix. Despite her accomplishments, she recognizes this is not the life she dreamed of.

Rachel is a human anagram. She’s part me, part colleague, part friend, and part coaching client. If you relate, read on to discover three questions that can help you design your best life.

Is this serving my best life?

Out with the old, in with the new—it’s not just an adage; it’s a life lesson that reminds us that we have to create space for potential to unfurl.

When building something, like a business, your personal brand, or career, “yes” can be a powerful opportunity-maker. However, if you are ready to pivot to something new, you need to intentionally create space. The Japanese professional organizer Marie Kondo has evangelized the philosophy of decluttering our lives. Her philosophy of keeping only things that bring you joy has many of us systematically cleaning out our junk drawers and evaluating our impulsive purchases. (Ironically, when close to a holiday, her website at konmari.com leads with a holiday gift guide.) However, going beyond our crowded closet sojourn is a more in-depth inquiry. What are we keeping ourselves from discovering by keeping practices and activities that have served their usefulness to us, even if they they us joy?

Perhaps we can turn the common phrase that consumer brands and services ask, “How can I best serve you?” to our own choices and self-talk. “Is this serving my best life?” Consider these three actions to help declutter your inner self and set the stage for your best life.

Unsubscribe. The entire digital world seems to know the address of my tiny work-from-home corner. All the messaging and marketing energy previously dispersed through print media, billboards, point of sale, and personal contact has converted to a tsunami of digital information and calls to action.

Here is a call to action for your new year: Unsubscribe. Stop digital hoarding and filing. If you find you are deleting emails from feeds without reading them or marking them to read later unsubscribe. If you are getting coupons and discounts from brands and stores you no longer visit, unsubscribe. You can most likely find the information again or sign up anew for those discounts when you need them.

By letting something joyful go on the journey of imperfection and experimenting, we may find we also have to let go of our emotions attached to those things.

Let it Go. Rachel recently resigned from several responsibilities, specifically creating space for something new. These were not emotional decisions; her transitions were well-planned and thought out. She simply wanted to create space for new synergies and relationships. In addition, her decision to back away gave others a chance to lean in and lead, building out the communities she had formed.

However, she was surprised to feel the bittersweet emotions that surfaced, particularly the question, “Who am I if I am NOT leading these efforts or known for these things?” She is not alone; it’s a common sentiment expressed by leaders who have pivoted in their journeys.

Carol Dweck, in “Mindset,” writes extensively about this unsettling feeling described by people who have actively worked on changing their mindset. However, new research shows that our brains respond to change by getting stronger. Dweck writes, “opening yourself up to growth makes you more yourself, not less.”

Say No. When I was walking along an undeveloped stretch of beach, I passed a set of run-down stairs painted with this message to the universe: “Don’t say maybe when you want to say no.” The message resonates with my desire to live in my truth and be impeccable with my word.

A symbolic gesture for the new year is writing down the things, responsibilities, beliefs, or people you desire to let go of, then burning them. If you are in a small space, dissolving paper works just as well.

Is my Karma Boring?

Don’t confuse intentionally creating space with boredom. Boring is tedious. It’s repetitious. It’s unimaginative. So don’t do boring. Check in with a personal examination of who you spend your time with and what you do with them.

If you find you are doing the same activities or having the same conversations with the same people, you may be just playing it safe. Sometimes, that is okay. As humans, we look for patterns so that we can sense how to respond. Greg Satel, writing for Forbes, points out, “We use patterns to derive meaning without having to do a more detailed inspection.” This pattern recognition can serve you well if you are in survival mode. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we may have felt like we were living on a global “Survivor” series with a horrific outcome. During the pandemic, limiting risks made sense—an invisible predator lurked on surfaces and traveled in droplets, invading our lungs, gatherings, and neurological systems.

However, a life devoid of risk could be a red flag that you are stagnating.

If this resonates with you, perhaps it is time for a more detailed inspection of each relationship.

Satel writes, “Just because a pattern exists, doesn’t mean that the cause of that pattern is important or meaningful.” While some of our relationships are born of safety, some are feeding the beast of dependency. Take a closer look at any relationship that might feel toxic, one that feels compulsive, unhealthy, or imbalanced. Perhaps it is easier to keep connections from old neighborhoods, activities, or social circles because they used to bring joy, or you feel some form of expectation or obligation. Remember the first question – Are they serving your best life?

Being willing to break old patterns and try new experiences may attract others seeking to grow in the same direction.

To open up your karmic cycle, ask five casual acquaintances for coffee or a virtual meet. make deeper connections by seeking commonalities that go beyond what you can see or what you know.

What is the last thing I changed my mind about?

The ability to change your mind is a powerful tool. George Bernard Shaw wrote: “Those who can’t change their minds can’t change anything.”

I borrowed the question, “What is the last thing you changed your mind about?” from Dave Stachowiak, host of the “Coaching for Leaders” podcast. I’ve started turning this question on myself, and I invite you to do the same.

Consider a time when you believed something that was later proven to be untrue. Perhaps data or evidence changed your mind. Maybe it was by going further to discover more about a topic or a person. You can practice changing your mind by intentionally taking a different perspective, such as in a debate, or by directly and honestly addressing criticism.

One of the hardest things to change our minds about is how we think about ourselves. Carol Dwyer writes in “Mindset” about the discomfort of practicing a growth mindset. She describes how unsettling it is to step outside our fixed mindset, which shows up in our internal talk track: “Don’t do this, it’s not worth the risk. Protect yourself.”

Imagine a professional ballplayer who strikes out at the plate. They don’t quit the game. They return to the dugout, shake it off, and get ready to step up again.

The growth mindset athlete tells themselves: “Go for it, learn something new, embrace the practice and the study.”

Write your personal affirmation ... Focus on a behavior or personal belief you want to change. Then compose a sentence, in the future tense, as if it is already true.

(To get you started, visit Dr. Carmen Harr’s 35 examples of affirmations.)

Conclusion

In conclusion, I hope these three questions will help you make some small pivots to a new and fulfilling chapter in your life.

Open up space by clearing out what no longer serves you. Question if your well-formed patterns are distractors to your future. Create an affirmation to change your self-talk. Although we cannot think our way to new behavior, challenging our old behavior is the first step. The most inspirational life stories form in the grimmest circumstances, from those who dare to dream of the life they desire.

Then, apply the growth mindset as you take the steps to fulfill your wildest desires. Find new skills and relationships to explore, revel in bringing the beginner’s eye, be a curious cat, and take healthy risks. Above all, embrace the winding trail of imperfect self-discovery.

One last quote from Satell: “If you believe that the patterns of the past determine our future, then you will cling to them dearly. On the other hand, if you believe that the most important patterns are those we have yet to uncover, then the future has no bounds.”

~Julee Everett

Hone your craft, speak your truth, show your thanks

5 C’s to Drive Powerful Coaching Outcomes and Scale a Coach Community

Last year, I was diagnosed with a serious medical condition. My unusual illness doesn’t show many outward symptoms, but it smolders away until it burns up a vital organ. I don’t look sick. But I am. However, that isn’t the focus of this post. This article is about how we built a Bad Ass Coaching Community to scale our coaching abilities and competencies worldwide. When I envisioned this strategy for pairing, sharing, and scaling, I knew there would likely be at least one person who would personally and professionally benefit from it. The fact that it would be me is what surprised me. Read on to learn what we did and what others said about our efforts.

Clarity

Our small coaching team in America partners with a larger group in India; we are all based in the engineering division of our company. Our US team has many decades of diverse coaching experience, but except for one person, we have an average of 1–2 years of company experience. So, the first thing we did was clarify everything. We created agile career paths and job descriptions for each level, paying particular attention to maturing expectations on how to advance an agile career. We collaborated with leadership and human resources in America and India to ensure we set consistent expectations across countries. Utilizing Pia-Maria Thorén’s People Agility principles, we focused our job descriptions on demonstrating competencies and potential as well as making an impact rather than listing accountabilities.

The Indian Agile Director and I persevered through a year of process hurdles to change our job names from project management titles to Lean-Agile titles. Some of you may be thinking, “Who cares what coaches are called?” but this became a critical conversation that helped align everyone with our new career paths and clarify expectations about our role with our stakeholders.

Cohesiveness

Identity. We developed a logo representing our new practice (with the assistance of a graphic artist!) And, since we coach that every team needs to have a vision, we created our own to reflect our values and help us realign to our north star when the path gets rocky. And we invested in spending time together to help move through the teaming phases.

Agility: It’s not just a job for us; it’s our passion.
We are professional coaches who are serious about influencing better ways of working. We serve others with curiosity, learning, and innovation.

Example: Over the year, we’ve held many icebreakers, played games, and generally got to know one another better. We’ve started to develop private jokes, vocabulary, and even some “safe for work” gestures (jazz hands!) Equally significant, we resolved several disagreements and emerged from them with a higher degree of communication, trust, and a couple of safe words!

Competencies

Launch. Our team attended Bob Galen’s Bad Ass Coaching Days, and we also created an internal Agile Summit of our own. In addition to team-building exercises, we took a few hours a day (about 12 hours total) for teaming, skill development, and creating the following year’s outcomes and measures.

Baseline and Goals. A cross-functional team consists of individuals with a variety of roles and competencies. So, we aimed to become cross-functional with a mix of strengths in various coaching specialties, such as portfolio, team, or product agility. We established a baseline for our individual coaching competencies using the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel. This created personal insights, and as a team, we built a shared vocabulary that helped us align with what the different stances meant for each of us. That helped us create a comprehensive skills marketplace and goals tailored to individual passions and interests. Then, we determined who to best partner with to help us grow and keep each other accountable.

Learning. Before closing our summit, we drafted a sequence of monthly learning events and facilitators so we would be sure to continue to invest in ourselves. We started the year by exploring techniques and coaching strategies to navigate complex topics like participatory facilitation, release forecasting, and navigating conflict. We took inspiration for several sessions from the “Extraordinarily Bad Ass Coaching” book by Bob Galen.

Example: We used Galen’s Coaching Arc template to prepare for a typical tough conversation (change, anyone?) and then used coaching dojos to role-play. Along the way, we explored how our personal meta-skills (one of Galen’s terms) helped or hindered us in our coaching. Galen provides pragmatic advice and helpful templates for these types of exercises in his “Bad Ass” book.

Pairing and sharing. Borrowing from the value proven with pair programming, we each partnered with another teammate throughout the year, so we always had backup and support.

Example: pairing to deliver workshops and training, helping facilitate team events, collaborating on documentation, and creating new materials.

We also held numerous reviews to demo our work and help each other. This practice provided many benefits to our teams and stakeholders, as they had multiple resources to turn to and coverage when someone was out of office.

Our buddy system also helped increase confidence and safety for coaches practicing new stances, like role-playing difficult conversations or staying positive through change management challenges.

Coach pairing was pivotal to scaling our new product planning practices worldwide. We typically have US-based coaches working with US-based teams and Indian coaches working with Indian teams. We spent time sharing our knowledge and demonstrating across countries, so we learned from each other, challenged the current experiments, and helped solve tool or data issues. Coach pairing also reinforced consistency in our coaching messages and new planning practices.

Pairing also helped us translate the patterns and practices that worked well in product engineering to data engineering. This was not a cut-and-paste activity; there was a lot of problem-solving for the different domains. But coach pairing across divisions helped ensure we didn’t reinvent things.

Feedback from others. A data leader had this to say about our coaches and our agile planning outcomes:

Later in the year, as our teams became busier with deliverables, we transitioned to micro-learning, using focused weekly objectives to hone and practice skills like storytelling and presenting.

Feedback from each other. A fun and valuable exercise was creating videos of our standard practices, like how we are using our workflow tool to plan and track dynamic release forecasts. We also practiced our presentation and storytelling skills with each other. Limiting ourselves to a 3-minute timebox for our videos and storytelling provided focus and helped us practice lean communication. Candid feedback sessions provided helpful criticism of both content and our public speaking. I don’t believe it would have been as effective without the teaming we did earlier in the year.

As a side note, I believe we tend to undervalue storytelling and public speaking as coaches and don’t practice enough until we are in high-stakes situations; I strongly advise investing in these skills! But I digress.

Community

So, are we a team or a group? My preference is the word community, with all that word evokes. We leveraged both planned and ad hoc learning events, as well as various types of sharing, to mature agility across our 11,000-member organization.

To allow everyone to showcase their dashboards, exchange tool expertise, and practice concepts like release forecasting before teaching larger audiences, we hosted reviews and demos between American and Indian coaches.

We offered opportunities for individuals to contribute to the organization in ways that aligned with their interests and career development goals, like through our core Community of Practice (CoP) committee.

We centered our CoP with two regular monthly events—our Pathfinder and Navigator series. (Through team building, we discovered we all enjoy hiking, so we capitalized on that similarity to add some flair to our language!) We hosted our events at 10 a.m. EST to cover the most time zones, including the US West Coast and India, and kept it on the same cadence to reduce complexity—every other week, the same day of the week. We avoided our synchronized Sprint Events week and adjusted the calendar as needed to support organizational events like our global hackathon. Recognizing that these times are only convenient for some, we recorded most presentations.

Our Pathfinder series focused on sharing. We seeded the conversation with a topic and interactive questions that helped kickstart fruitful conversations using a hybrid lean-coffee strategy, like “What does Predictable Delivery mean to you?” Then they showcased relevant successes.

Our Navigator series focused on learning. We invited external speakers in addition to our own presenters, using a quarterly theme to focus our topics, like “The Human Side of Agile,” which included a variety of presentations around safety and engagement.

Our learning labs focused on targeted role coaching, especially product ownership. A small group meets regularly for a short teaching block, hands-on practice, and homework to help absorb the recommended practices and material.

Example: Learning Lab topics include organizational metrics, role clarity, and planning practices. The group can also vote on various topics to explore, like discovery techniques.

We’ve held five 3-6-month learning labs in America, India, and Australia. These cohorts have aided in conveying our planning procedures and quality standards and have sparked insightful conversations around accountability and organizational design. Those who felt isolated in their roles got to know one another through this frequent and interactive touchpoint.

Feedback from others. One of the focuses of our learning was to introduce competencies to support our product agility outcomes, which resulted in a senior tech leader saying:

Training and workshops. We collaborated with our learning and development team to offer certification training and focused workshops through the organization’s training platform. We do not have access to this platform; therefore, one challenge we had was having to plan a training calendar for the entire upcoming year to allow our learning and development partners to post all the classes in the system at one time. The advantages of using this platform were that people could manage their registrations themselves and the vast organizational reach it provided. That visibility opened opportunities for people and teams outside of our direct influence in engineering, which then led to opportunities for coaching conversations and role growth across the organization.

Additionally, we augmented our workshops with third-party webinars available through our learning platform for those wanting to go further with their education. And, because of our investment in growing our training competency with our Train the Trainer program, participants experienced a consistent message, and events were held in regionally friendly time zones.

Methods: Our training employs adult education strategies that require participation to get the most value out of virtual learning. Therefore, we set expectations ahead of time that we would require cameras to be used and total attendance—no jumping in and out of the session. We sent tutorials for our online tools and several reminders to help prepare students. Because of the immersive nature, we required a minimum of 4 people to hold the course so we could use breakout sessions and participatory facilitation techniques to maximize the learning experience. We used the online collaborative tool called Mural in combination with either Zoom or Teams for videoconferencing. We did not record training because students were in breakout rooms about 50% of the time, which helped promote attendance, safety, and interaction.

Feedback from others: A product leader commented on our engagement and upskilling outcomes:

Micro-learning: Some other ways we created community were by presenting webinars to audiences like new hires and product and project managers that drove awareness of our material repository and training calendar. We also recorded brief video demos of some of our processes to post on our internal repository and use in training.

Results: Throughout the year, we facilitated more than 40 events, delivering more than 4,200 learning hours across the globe. Additionally, our online repository, where we published our best Community of Practice videos and continuously expanded our collection of job aids and demos, received hundreds of monthly visitors—20,000 visits last year!

Feedback from others A learning and development leader said this about our training outcomes: that we are…

Consistency

Occasionally, we need our leadership’s help to communicate significant changes. But we know agility can’t be copied and pasted across different divisions. We focused on attracting people to try practices that have succeeded inside our organization rather than trying to enforce them. We also know how frustrating it is for people if different coaches deliver conflicting messages. So, we worked together to ensure our coaching voice is consistent in areas that matter to our organization. This takes time and discipline, but the added advantage is the opportunity it provides us to identify and close knowledge gaps.

We define it. To define our playbook, we first discussed the problem to be solved, then experimented in one product area, and then documented the process for other teams to try.

Example: Our Epic template helps product partners create a lightweight business case and align on clear business drivers (revenue, strategy, or efficiency).

With our documentation, we weren’t trying to recreate the internet. We wrote short job aids or facilitation guides for topics specific to our organization and posted them on a central repository available for everyone to use. Taking the time and effort to document different practices helped ensure that our diverse, global audience interpreted things similarly. Our online playbook was proven to be very helpful when new people joined the organization or teams decided to improve their agility. The area of our playbook that received the most frequent visitors was our release planning process and templates.

We practice it. In the spirit of “working product over contracts,” we didn’t try to document every use case. Regular reviews and coaching dojos helped us refine the nuances through application. Our new library of short videos goes further to reinforce consistency.

Example: Epic burndown charts help show the progress of a release and if the scope needs to be changed. This requires a lot of consistent behavior across teams to be accurate.

If coaches were new to a practice or technique, we followed a three-step “I do, we do, you do” pattern to ensure they felt confident in coaching something new (like release forecasting) before facilitating it themselves.

We evolve it. A complex topic often benefits from a few iterations to simplify it. We’ve spent a year working to understand how we can best introduce dynamic release forecasting and the leanest data points that would be the most valuable for organizational reporting and decision-making. An indicator of success is when another group reaches out to use our practices or materials for themselves. It is even more satisfying if they help us improve them. That’s when we know we have a sustainable pattern.

Conclusion

Throughout the year, our crew experienced several life events. Many were momentous, like the birth of new agilists; others were for personal enjoyment, like traveling abroad; yet others were get-togethers with family and friends (Bowling Hall of Fame!). Every time someone was away, a pairing buddy was available to fill in, guide teams, and ensure events went smoothly.

And some had more significant health and medical problems, just like me. I am fortunate to have a knowledgeable and gifted physician who never gave up trying to navigate my test results. One hundred and thirty-nine tests and 11 biopsies later, I have a diagnosis and a course of treatment. Although I won’t be cured, my prognosis is good!

Taking a step back and letting go is maybe the best way to gauge how well a self-organizing, high-performing team is doing. I knew I could change my priorities and focus on my family and health as I prepared myself for a few months of a medical and medication regimen, along with a short leave of absence.

People reading this may think, “We just don’t have the time for all this learning and pairing!” Building a community takes time, and that is a trade-off, for sure. We invested 4–8 hours monthly on average, which is a small percentage considering the professional growth and outcomes we experienced. We paced ourselves: we did a lot of intensive learning early in the year but eased up throughout the summer months so we could practice our newer competencies; in the last quarter, we switched to micro-learning as our Summit was a major time investment. It also takes discipline. We ground ourselves in the principles of agility to keep it simple and experimental, but we stay disciplined (with Kanban.)

There is one thing I know for sure: I don’t lay awake at night worrying if we are delivering value or if there is a team without coverage because I know we’ve done the work.

Feedback from others: One tech lead had to say this about one of our coaches, and I believe the sentiment perfectly captures our year’s coaching outcome:

I hope our 5 C’s to build a Bad Ass Coaching Community help you if you are looking to scale your coaching. Let us know in the comments below what is working for you!

~Julee Everett

Hone your craft, speak your truth, and show your thanks

Visit my YouTube Channel for a growing library of people, products, and business agility resources

I unabashedly use Bob Galen’s tremendous body of work in this article (and title) because it has been incredibly valuable as a guide for maturing our Lean-Agile community. Don’t miss the opportunity to learn from his generous and pragmatic leadership by purchasing his books online at Amazon.