Honor Your Own Journey

Have you ever given a talk? Did you prepare weeks in advance? Or did you type the last word on the final slide 10 minutes before you spoke?

I gave a talk recently at Agile and Beyond, a regional agile conference in Dearborn, MI. I presented the material 3-4 times before, but I always get a little nervous before I present.

Throughout the day, as I visited the speaker room, there were other presenters in various stages of practicing and polishing their slides. I was in awe of the last-minute preparations. How could they just show up, finish some slides and nail it?

And most of them do nail it. I’ve heard them – articulate, funny, expertly fielding questions from the audience. No one has any idea that they never ran through their slides in their entirety out loud. And I’m so jealous.

I felt completely out of my league. It had been a few months since I gave my talk so I practiced the week prior then I ran through it twice on the car ride there. All the while with typed-out notes so I wouldn’t forget key points.

Why can’t I just wing it? I know this stuff! This particular talk is about my journey of discovering how I can add value. So why do I still need notes? And how am I in the same room as a girl literally hitting save on her slides as she left to go give her talk?

Ok, so maybe there are other explanations. Maybe she’s given that talk 10 times and was just tweaking something minor. Maybe she’s written countless articles about her subject. Or maybe, just maybe, her “practice” is the hours she spends coaching and teaching on a daily basis.

I guess none of these “maybes” matter anyway. I have to remember that we all have our own style of learning, practicing and mastering skills. Just because I don’t follow the same steps or pattern doesn’t mean that I can’t achieve the same success.

…Just like climbing a rock wall. At a gym, there are 100’s of holds to help you get to the top. But even

following the same route, no two people will ever use the same exact combination of holds to achieve the summit. A hold that is perfect for my reach is too close or too far for yours. We are each made gloriously different so we must each make our own path to the top.

And thankfully, we don’t have to go it alone. My first experience climbing taught me the value of having friends to guide your way. When you are hanging onto a wall, trying not to plummet to your death (those ropes are SO thin!), your face is inches away from the wall. You can only see the holds that immediately surround you. There are moments when you feel frozen, with no hope for continuing.

Your friends on the ground can see the whole wall. They know that just past your view is a perfect hold that will help you. They yell things like, “Let go with your left hand and reach straight up 18 inches. You can do this!” You don’t want to let go, but you trust their guidance and, reach by reach, make it up the wall.

Trust and let go…

Trust that your path is going the right direction and let go of pre-conceived notions of what success looks like. You will never follow the same exact path as someone else so stop comparing and start honoring your own journey toward mastery. And don’t forget to listen to friends for guidance when you can’t see the next step. Each climb gets easier and less frightening (I hope!). 

Where do you feel out of your league? What do other people breeze through while you stress out? And how can you honor your own journey?

Standards Are Not The Answer

While I am a huge proponent of stable teams, I do understand the reality of acquiring or losing team members. There will always be some amount of on-boarding and assimilation to a new team and their spoken and unspoken working agreements.

Some feel that standardizing practices would help this transition. But with a healthy, self-organizing team, I don’t think formal definitions or supporting structures are needed. Instead, we should focus on creating a shared understanding of WHY we follow certain practices.

This suggestion for standardizing agile practices has been around for years. Some managers argue that if we all did things the same way, then they could more easily shift & shuffle us around teams. I will steal my response from Google and say to them, “Don’t be evil.” I can deal with the deeper dysfunctions of these folks in another post.

Then there are managers who genuinely think it would help their employees to have continuity between teams. They aren’t advocates of shuffling, but know the reality is that people will be moved from team to team. Even good intentioned, creating standards is not the answer.

Most agile practices already have common definitions or commonly acceptable components. So creating standards would be wasteful. Why do we think we need to create new standards for our company? Are we that unique? Why don’t we just follow what’s already established?

Asking this uncovers the disconnect – our lack of awareness and acceptance of those common definitions.

Each practice was created to solve some repeating problem. So it has, at its root, a kernel of intention behind the suggested behavior. For example, let’s look at stand ups. How can we, as a team, stay connected to each other and what we are working on, as well as raise issues and ask for help, on a regular basis? Solution: Let’s take 5 minutes every day to intentionally check in as a team.

The implementation can vary from team to team but the intent is the same. So one team with several verbose members decides to use a talking bowling ball – you must hold the ball when it’s your turn to speak. Another team feels bored with going around a circle, so they throw a hacky sack randomly at the next person. Because they understand the intent, these teams experiment with rituals that work for their specific needs.   

The problem at many companies is that the original intent of a practice is missing.

For example, your “stand ups” are actually status updates for your PM. They last from 10-30 minutes because your team members are spread among different projects. The time is spent reporting to the PM what you are doing. The original intent is completely lost.

Or maybe it was never there in the first place. When we teach practices, the WHY is so much more important than the WHAT. Because without the WHY, any practice can, and will be bastardized to fit the current dysfunction. And no amount of standardization will help that.