Changing habits

Marianne Worren, , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I have failed miserably at several attempts to change habits. These include maintaining a regular exercise routine, fasting, and quitting coffee. Lately, however, I’ve had the mental space and energy (and the feeling of midlife creeping up on me) required to actually change some deeply ingrained habits. These include quitting alcohol, keeping my phone out of the bedroom and reintroducing daily meditation. Having previously coached others to change behaviours, using coaching methods such as the GROW model and Motivational Interviewing, I have used the same methods on myself. In addition to using coaching tools, I approached habit change with a curious, pseudo-scientific mindset.

Daily cold baths were an overambitious habit that lasted two weeks for me (my husband, on the other hand, has managed to continue cold showers – I think it is because he experienced more benefits, like a slow and steady dopamine release).

These are some techniques that have worked for me, along with links to resources that have proven useful. There are endless other ways to quit and build new habits. Take from it whatever is useful to you. How much structure and micro-management each of us wants to apply to your life varies widely. So please be mindful of how you want to approach changes in your own life: with fun and ease, or by rigorously applying all the tools available.

Clear values and visions

It might be obvious to you why you want to change a certain habit. But change requires a lot of effort over time. To avoid being tempted to take the easy path, reminding youself on why you are making the change can be the one motivation that keeps you on track. Changing habits can look like you’re becoming a different person (and indeed, you are) and can feel confusing and threatening to people around you. Being clear on what is most important to me in my life right now and having a clear sense of who I want to be has given me the strength to no longer live up to my old identity. For me, imagining myself hiking and traveling well into my senior years is a great motivation to keep my healthy habits. My future dream scenarios are tied to my values around adventure, nature and health.

I have written about values work here.

My husband and I also used Pixar’s Story Spine to help us create compelling stories about our desired future state and motivations. This can be a fun exercise to do alone or with someone. Revisiting your story later is also a good way to see whether you are closer to your dream or if your dream has changed.

Knowledge is power

Seeking information and understanding how our brains work can help us develop strategies and overcome obstacles. Our brains are wired for survival and want to keep us safe by tending to the familiar. Dopamine seeking drives our behavior, and makes it especially hard to stop unhealthy habits that give us a fast reward, like sugar, nicotine and alcohol. Having the vocabulary and some mental models, like how the pain-pleasure balance in the brain works, has been helpful to me.

  • Choice Point: a useful model to look at choices as behaviour that either takes you towards or away from your desired habit.
  • Dopamine Nation: especially interesting if you want to quit habits.
  • Atomic Habits: not the newest science, but still very useful and practical tips on behaviour change.
  • The Habit Loop

Mapping habit loops

You cannot change what you cannot see. Before you jump ahead and try to change anything, it can be useful to start where you are and become aware of your current habits. This is where the mental model of habit loops enters. The number of steps and vocabulary used to describe habit loops vary. James Clear uses cue, crawing, response and reward. I chose to use Dr. Jud Brewer’s steps: trigger, behaviour, reward. Over a couple of weeks of tracking my habit loops, I caught my own thoughts defending why being lazy was a good idea. I became more familiar with this conservative, concerned, and change-avoidant voice in my head, which goes to great lengths to preserve homeostasis. This allowed me to deploy strategies to reassure the worried voice that the change was okay and to let the safe, ambitious, and courageous part of me take over.

Experimenting

In my work as an agile coach, I often have described experiments using this template from John Cutler. The experiment is described in terms of duration, purpose, desired outcome and possible obstacles. I find it useful to think about (or, even better, write down) my answers to these questions in relation to new habits I want to try.

Duration

For the duration of the experiment, I find it useful to use the rhythm of the calendar. Dr. Anna Lembke recommends 30 days to reset the brain’s pain-pleasure balance. So, especially if you’re quitting a habit, like coffee or alcohol, a month will let you get over the abstinence and reset your dopamine baseline. So I decided to use each month as a temporal landmark, adding a reflection and adjustment at the change of each month.

Desired outcome

To describe the desired outcome in each experiment, I made some assumptions about what the habit would lead to. When I can measure the result with my smart ring, I describe an observable outcome. Others were more objective experiences. I actually don’t think everything should be measured – something is better felt in the body (but that’s another discussion).

These are some examples of desired outcomes related to some of the habits I have tried:

➡️= causes

✅= supported

❌= rejected

  • Cold swimming ➡️ More retorative time (❌)
  • Reading books before bed ➡️ Better sleep (✅)
  • Daily formal meditation ➡️ Deeper concentration (✅)
  • Daylight before screenlight ➡️ Better sleep (✅)
  • Swapping coffee for matcha ➡️ More energy in the afternoon (✅)
  • Swapping smartphone for dumbphone ➡️ A simpler and easier life (❌)

As you can see, some habits did not lead to the desired outcome and were therefore aborted.

Tracking progress

As mentioned, I use a smart ring for measuring my health. After almost three years of wearing one, I am also very cautious about using wearables and biometrics. I have both had great scores and felt totally drained, and the opposite. In some ways, using a smart ring has made me more aware of certain effects on my body. For example, I don’t think I would have quit alcohol if it weren’t for the alarming negative effects it had on my health scores. However, I must admit I have found myself deep in analyses of HRV, heart rate and VO2 max, involving both AI and extensive research. Obsessing over metrics can be interesting and fun for a while, but it can also lead to more stress and, ironically, worse health.

A better way to track habits, I think, is an analogue, visual, available, tangible habit tracker combined with daily and monthly reflection (not automated or digital, as James Clear promotes). With good old pen and paper, I make calendars for my husband and me every month, where we are deliberate about what habits we want to track. Tracking your habits requires you to be clear about which concrete behaviours count and which do not. We often have to remind ourselves about the purpose of the habit.The discussions and reflections that follow can lead to greater clarity.

For the last six months, my husband and I have tracked the habits we want to change in monthly calendars. The calendars are visible throughout the apartment. The symbols have different meanings. At the end of each month, we adjust the habits and symbols.

Mindfulness

Being mindful is a key skill in changing habits. Having a space between your thoughts and your behavior can make all the difference when stopping yourself from engaging in unwanted behavior. This is how you break the habit loop. When I’m mindful, I can catch my thoughts as they try to argue that skipping the gym is a good idea. Mindfulness allows me to catch my thoughts with their pants down. I cannot help but laugh at them (in a warm and friendly way), then they become embarrassed and retreat. I’m then free to make the decision that takes me towards my desired life.

As a result of being more mindful in my day-to-day life, I find that many other things shift as well. These are results that are hard to measure, such as a lighter mood, greater payfulness, more energy, deeper relationships and greater care for myself. This is a great reminder that even the smallest change can shift the whole trajectory of your life. You don’t have to wait until you have capacity to change many big habits all at once. A small step in a new direction can make all the difference in the long run.

Mindfulness is a tool for changing habits, and meditation is a habit that trains your focused awareness. Read more about my thoughts on mindfulness here.

Celebrate

In order for your brain to change its preferred neural pathways, you sometimes have to trick yourself into liking the new habit more than the old. Take a moment to be proud of yourself and reward yourself for the desired actions you take, or be curious about how your new behavior feels. Gamification can also work, like giving yourself points or stickers on a calendar.

How you reward yourself can either enhance or reduce your intrinsic motivation. Stacking dopamine-triggering behaviors is usually not recommended anymore (contrary to what we believed earlier, based on books like Atomic Habits). According to Andrew Huberman, if you enjoy going to the gym, adding music and coffee to that experience will reduce the joy you get from exercising in and of itself.

Other tips

  • Start small. Ambitions can be high, but the first step is more likely to succeed if it is small and obtainable.
  • Design your environment for success. Willpower is unreliable and weak. Don’t have candy in your house if you don’t intend to eat it.
  • Invest in your new lifestyle. If you want to use your bike instead of public transportation, take care of it and maintain it.
  • Be vocal about your new habits. You will feel more accountable once you voice your intentions to others.
  • Visualize your habits and keep track of your progress.
  • Connect your habits to other fixed routines. Practicing 5 minutes of mindfulness meditation can piggyback on your already established habit of brushing your teeth.
  • Consistency over speed. Slow and steady wins the race.
  • Be aware of the obstacles you might face and have strategies to overcome them.
  • Be kind to yourself. Getting out of our habit loops and building new ones is hard work. See failure as an opportunity to learn, and simply start again.

What is your own experience with changing habits? What tools, tips and methods have (not) worked for you? Don’t be shy to leave a comment!

Changing habits

Discover (and Rediscover) Your Values

Marianne Worren, , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

“I cannot use this microphone”, my colleague gently told me, right before entering the stage where she was going to give a talk. The microphone was supposed to go behind her ears, but she was wearing a hijab. I immediately felt my stomach drop and embarrassment for my own ignorance. How could I not have thought about this? An honest mistake, still, I felt that I had stepped on one of my core values: inclusion.

What are values?

Values can be personal and also be held by different social groups, as you might be familiar with in your organisation, in your team at work or in sports. In social settings, values align us and guide decisions and behaviour, creating a culture that’s (hopefully) adaptive to its context. Values can be held by countries too. In The Values Compass, the author, Dr Mandeep Rai, assigns different values to different countries (I can’t help but feel proud that she assigns the value of diplomacy to my home country, Norway: “being independent, humble, and willing to engage”. What a badge!).

In our personal lives, values are our heart’s deepest desires. They are what we truly care about, and how we want to live and show up in the world. We all have our unique set of values. Some values are shared by most humans, such as connection, while others are more unique. There are no right or wrong values, no values are better than others, and we can all honour and be proud of our own values.

To see some examples of values:

Prioritized

Values can, and maybe should, be prioritised. A couple of years ago, I remember reading about the differences in values between Republicans and Democrats in the US. The article said that we all have the same values: for example, freedom and family are important to most people. It’s the priority of our values that makes them different.

Core values

Your highest prioritised values are often called core values. Some describe core values as constant throughout your life, and something you never want to compromise on. Others believe they are more fluid. What’s your experience? Do you believe that your values were shaped in early childhood years and are a fixed part of your personality? Or have your values changed over time? Personally, I see a shift from deeply caring about compliance and independence to prioritising flexibility, intimacy and connection in my life.

How many values

Brené Brown says you should limit yourself to two values, which are universal across your professional and personal life. Others say you can have different values across different areas of your life, as in the Bull’s-eye exercise. The Values Bridge claim there are only 16 human values, and that we have a hierarchy of core, moderate, and peripheral values. And if you want people to remember your company or team values, many recommend limiting them to the magical number three, though many companies don’t follow this advice.

Yes, I’m also confused. Values work is not an exact science. Labelling, categorising and rationalising about something as abstract as values will inevitably lead to a myriad of different models. Models are not reality. All models are wrong, but some are useful. Follow whatever recommendations resonate with you.

Personally, I find it useful to apply different values to different areas of my life. Sometimes I have one value at the front and centre of everything I do. Other times, it’s a whole sports team of values guiding me. In this brilliant episode on values at The Imperfect Podcast, a sports analogy is used: your values are the players, and you can choose which ones are on the bench and which ones are playing at any given time and place. I would also add that how many values are at play at once is up to you. What kind of sport do you imagine your values are playing? For me, I think of soccer.

Values are not

  • Goals. Unlike values, goals are tangible, achievable outcomes.
  • Principles. Unlike values, principles are actionable, concrete guidelines.
  • Feelings. Unlike values, feelings come and go on their own.
  • Expectations (but your company’s values might be)

Be mindful of when you are using the word “should” in relation to your personal values. That might indicate that the values are unconsciously derived from others’ expectations of you or from what you think society would value.

When working with values, we eventually find ourselves in discussions like “Is this a value or not?” For example, some say that health is not a value. You can ask yourself what good health will allow you to do, and that might point you to the underlying value. Nature is another one that’s debatable, because it’s not a doing word (verb or adverb). I still choose to hold nature as a personal value because it gives me direction in life, even though some might say it isn’t a value.

It’s also common to use values and principles as synonyms. In my work with values, I haven’t seen any major problems with not being strict about these definitions, as long as we are clear on what the words or sentences mean. Have fun with it, and don’t let yourself get too caught up in the semantics (unless rigidity is your core value, then please go ahead and take it very seriously).

Scepticism and fear

Throughout my career as an agile coach, I have worked with values in teams, communities, departments and in 1:1 coaching. My experience is that, understandably, values work can lead to a lot of aversion and frustration. We have all seen the fancy words on shiny posters that are inconsistently acted on. Values can feel important to the people who defined them, but meaningless to those who didn’t participate in creating them. Working with values and putting them into practice, whether it is in your personal life or at work, requires ongoing reflection and action.

Some say that values drive our behaviour. This is not always true. Sometimes, you go in the opposite direction and feel a short-lived sense of relief, only to be followed by guilt and despair. For example, you avoid going to the gym even though that would be more in line with your values. Living by our values can be uncomfortable and sometimes requires courage. Fear can also steer us away from living by our values. For example, you might value knowledge sharing, but your fear of public speaking keeps you from speaking up. Living by our values can be painful and hard. It requires a willingness to meet our pain and fear with compassion.

Benefits of knowing your values

Have you ever achieved a goal and then felt empty afterwards? Or felt that life is without a direction or a purpose? These are signs that you are not living by your values, you might not be aware of them, or your values or what they mean to you might have changed.

Knowing your personal values is key to understanding yourself and guiding you towards a purposeful life. Values are often referred to as our inner compass. When we live from our values, we usually feel a sense of purpose, integrity and motivation. When we don’t live by our values, we can feel lost, confused, disconnected and drained of energy.

If you are not convinced yet, these are some of my favourite reasons why it is useful to know your values:

  • Values give you a sense of direction, purpose and stability in life
  • Values help us get to know ourselves and others better
  • Values uncover where we are not living the life we truly want
  • Values create a sense of agency: No matter the circumstances, you can always choose to act in accordance with your values. Even when you can’t control the outcome, you can still feel good about your actions.
  • Values make decision-making easier, and you become more confident in your decisions
  • Values give you a clearer sense of your identity and help you create an external consistency in who you are. For example, if you deeply value and live by honesty, people in your life will know they can trust you.
  • Values make goals and habits more motivating when they are connected to your values

Values in a relationship

If values can be held by different social groups, why can’t they also be held by couples? Having married a facilitation geek, my husband had little choice but to co-discover our values together. One value that has recently arisen to the surface (not related to midlife crisis at all) is adventure. Being adventurous was important to us before, but it’s even more important now. It’s like we pulled adventure off the bench (remember the sports analogy?). Making this value explicit helps us when planning events or prioritising what to do. If it does not feel like an adventure (and we are still debating what counts as an adventure), we simply no longer do it.

If it’s not an adventure, we’re not going!

Discovering your own values

Do we discover our values, or do we freely choose them? Are they already present in us, or can we decide on whatever values we like? How do we know they are our values, and not the values of our society or our peers? In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), values are said to be “freely chosen“, meaning they are free from aversive control. I think this wording is unfortunate when it comes to personal values, and it’s more helpful to think of values as “discovered” or “uncovered”. Organisational values, on the other hand, I think, can be freely chosen (not necessarily discovered), based on what we want to change.

Since personal values are to be uncovered, I recommend working on them from different angles over time, iteratively. Take your time. Values work is an ongoing, never-ending process. If you don’t actively use them, they will start to gather dust again. Write them down and keep them visible if that feels right for you.

Here are some angles you can take when approaching your personal values.

Select from a list or take an online test

If you want to do a quick-and-dirty first iteration, you can simply choose from a list of values. You can use the elimination method, cutting the lists in half until you have about 2-5 values left. However, without reflecting on and feeling your way into it, you might end up with a list of values you think you should have, rather than your heart’s deepest desire. So be mindful about how you choose and reflect on your values.

Also, remember that words mean different things to different people. Make sure to dig one layer further down, to what your chosen value words look like to you. Don’t be shy to come up with your own words that are not on any list. Why not smash two words together and create a truly unique one?

Extrapolate values from strengths

The VIA Character Strengths Survey, from positive psychology, is a test for finding your strengths, and this can also point you to your values. Based on my top five strengths, I identified values such as open-mindedness, inclusion, wisdom, and honesty.

Turning towards your body and feelings for guidance

We all have personal values, whether we are conscious of them or not. Finding your values is more about uncovering them in your body than creating them in your mind. Values are connected to your emotions, so being aware and mindful of how you feel in any given situation makes it easier to uncover them. Emotions are information from your body that asks for your attention. If you’re not as connected to your feelings, you can still go towards what gives you energy and where you find yourself engaged. Chances are that’s also where you find what is truly important to you, i.e. your values.

Reflect on relevant questions

These are some prompts that might help point you towards your values:

  • Imagine it’s your future funeral, retirement or an anniversary, where the people in your life are speaking about you. What do you wish they would say about how you’ve lived your life?
  • Remember a time when you felt truly engaged. It could have been at work or in any other setting. What were you doing? What was it about that experience that was really important to you?
  • Look to your emotions: Remember the last time you felt angry or frustrated. What was the value that was stepped on?
  • What would you do if no one were watching? What does that tell you about your values?
  • What do you feel is missing from your life? What would that give you?

Working with values

Now that you hopefully have become more familiar with your own values, you can try them on and start connecting them to behaviour and real-life decisions.

Here are some examples of how you might put your values to use:

  • Brené Brown’s guide on taking your values from bullshit to behaviour
  • The Choce Point diagram from Russ Harries is a great, simple mental model to help you become more aware of how your actions are taking you away or towards your values
  • Use The Wheel of Anything or a spider chart to score yourself on your alignment with your values. Use the result to set goals pr define new habits where you want to improve.
  • Make art. Be creative. Draw associations to your values.
  • Connect your personal goals to your values.

What other tools and tips do you have for discovering and working with values? Also, please let me know if you disagree with anything (I value divergent perspectives and opinions) or if you have any feedback (learning is also a core value of mine)!

Discover (and Rediscover) Your Values

Mindfulness (and) meditation

Marianne Worren, , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

When was the last time you sat down, dropped everything and did nothing? In our hustle culture obsessed with productivity, slowing down and simply being, rather than doing, can almost seem like a provocative act. We have transitioned from human beings to human doings, rushing through our day on autopilot (System 1) and lost in thought (Default Mode Network). Interrupting ourselves with our phones and overconsuming information are among the many ways we distract ourselves from our own lives. We fail to notice and appreciate what’s already present here and now, and miss opportunities for awe and connection. The uncomfortable feeling most of us have of time flying by is a consequence of this. If we want to experience the full richness of our own lives, we have to slow down and cultivate greater awareness. Which, whether we like it or not, leads us to mindfulness and meditation.

How do you react when you hear the words mindfulness and meditation? What does your mind say? Chances are you might frown, laugh or shake your head. Mindfulness and meditation are widely misunderstood; one common misconception is that they’re superstitious practices. Yes, it can be done in a religious and spiritual context, but it can also be approached through a scientific lens. Since we have not been able to locate our awareness in the brain, or anywhere else for that matter, conscious awareness can only be experienced directly. This leaves room for beliefs and assumptions. Luckily for those of us coming from an ateist science and engineering background, mindfulness meditation does not require us to believe in something that can’t be proven. You just have to be willing to try and see for yourself.

Definitions and understanding

So what am I talking about? Let’s clear up some of the jargon (or skip this part if you find it too technical or boring). There are many definitions out there. I am by no means an expert, but this is how I understand the different concepts. Feel free to disagree and challenge them.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is the practice of non-judgmental awareness of our present moment experience. We approach our experience with openness, curiosity, and a willingness to be with what is (paraphrased from UCLA). Mindfulness can be practiced in any activity throughout our waking day. It’s a continuous practice and a way of being in the world. Mindfulness is not something you add to your life. It’s something you stop doing, like being less on autopilot and lost in thoughts.

Meditation

Meditation, also called mindfulness meditation, is the formal practice of mindfulness. It is typically where you sit down, close your eyes, let everything be as it is, and pay attention for a given period of time. It can be guided by a voice or done in silence. Your attention can be narrowly focused on an object, like the breath, or awareness can be open and spacious, taking in the whole range of sensations, like sounds, touch, smell, temperature, bodily sensations and thoughts.

When you practice non-dual awareness, you become aware of awareness itself. Your sense of self, your ego, a construction of the mind, drops away. What’s left is consciousness and its content. I find non-dual awareness to be the most challenging, mysterious and exciting form of meditation.

Awareness

Awareness is the perception or knowledge of something, like thoughts and objects. Awareness is the content of consciousness. To know that someone is consciously aware, we rely on their ability to report on their experience. Conditions like the locked-in syndrome demonstrate that we cannot know from outside observation whether anyone is consciously aware. When you are on autopilot, you are unconsciously aware.

Consciousness

From Lights On: Consciousness is the fact of felt experience. It’s a feeling or sensation, as distinguished from perception or thought. Consciousness does not require complex thoughts or brain processing (though not everyone agrees). It must be felt from the inside, that’s why it is so hard to study. American Philosopher Thomas Nagle said that for an organism to be conscious, it has to be something that it is like to be that organism. When you are in deep sleep, you are conscious without awareness.

Mindfulness or meditation is not

  • A calming and relaxation technique, although it has shown to reduce stress
  • A religious practice, although it is at the core of Buddhism and other religions
  • An escape
  • Controlling or getting rid of thoughts
  • Positive thinking
  • A silver bullet to all your problems
  • Without risks

⚠️ Meditation is not for everyone. For some people with mental illnesses, it might even be harmful. Seek professional advice if you are in doubt. Practicing non-dual mindfulness can also feel destabilizing when the ego drops away. There are some prerequisites for dealing with unpleasant experiences, such as non-judgment and self-compassion. It can be helpful to find a local or online community where you can discuss questions and challenges along the way.

Why meditate

Several studies have shown that regular meditation changes the physical structure of the brain through neuroplasticity (!). The prefrontal cortex and hippocampus increase, the amygdala decreases, and brainwave patterns change. You are less in the default mode network. Based on this, we can see a whole range of positive effects on our health and well-being.

These are some of the most compelling reasons for me to meditate:

  • To improve my facilitation and coaching skills
  • To improve attention
  • To observe my inner voices and strengthen the observing self
  • To create space between my thoughts and actions
  • To see my thoughts more clearly, hold them more lightly and not identify with them
  • To cultivate the capacity to be mindful in relationships and day-to-day experiences
  • To cultivate greater awareness required for making conscious decisions, inhibit impulsivity and change habits
  • To cultivate easier access to flow state
  • To cultivate greater psychological flexibility
  • Improve emotion regulation
  • Cultivate emotional intelligence
  • To meet pain and let go of suffering
  • To practice self-compassion
  • To slow down my perception of time
  • To explore the nature of reality and consciousness (=spirituality)

In the end, all you have is your mind. So why not give it your full attention?

How to get started

If you have read this far and are not already practicing mindfulness or meditation, here are my general tips for getting started.

Meditation

To try meditation, the easiest way is to download an app or search for sound clips online. There are many variations: different voices, with or without sound, some not really meditation but rather relaxation techniques. Experiment with what resonates with you. My recommendation is to find a teacher with experience teaching directly with students in person, not just online. I find that many online teachers don’t have the same sense of how their instructions might land and how long the silence should be. If you want a science-based approach with some great Buddhist teachers, I recommend The Waking Up app, which I have been using for the last six years. Headspace might be the more popular, mainstream choice, and an easy place to start. I find it focuses more on relaxation and adding pleasure to your experience rather than undoing and cultivating clarity.

The simplest way to try meditation is to try something like this, preferably alone or in a place where you won’t be interrupted. Set an alarm for 5 minutes or as long as you like.

  1. Find a comfortable position, either sitting or lying down. Let your body come to a rest. Let everything be as it is. Close your eyes.
  2. Become aware of the sensation of breathing.
  3. Count your out-breaths.
  4. Once you notice that you have been distracted by thoughts (unless you are a meditator guru, we all get distracted by thoughts – that’s what our brains do), simply bring your attention back to the breath, and start counting again from one. The practice is to notice and return to your present sensations again and again, not to get rid of thoughts.
  5. Once the alarm goes off, take notice of how you feel in your body. How was your mind?

Practicing mindfulness meditation is like going to the gym: you have to continuously work on it. Be realistic about your expectations, start small and approach it with a beginner’s mind.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is easier to integrate into a busy life because you don’t have to allocate time for sitting still. You can simply decide on what activities you want to do mindfully. Activities can include brushing your teeth, showering, drinking coffee or tea, making dinner, doing the dishes and eating. Do one activity at a time, and give it your full attention. be curious and use all your senses. Some people also like to have a reminder on their phone that goes off at any time during the day, prompting them to pause and take stock of how their mind is and how they feel in the body.

An efficient gateway to mindfulness is your senses. Take a walk in your neighbourhood, and identify the sounds that represent the area. Or take a walk in the city center, focusing on smells. Life in 5 senses has inspired me to become more aware of the senses I normally overlook.

My daily morning mindfulness and meditation practice, before I do anything else, consists of making and drinking matcha tea mindfully. Then doing a guided meditation for 10-60 minutes. It required effort when I started six months ago, but now it’s a habit I truly enjoy.

What do you take away from this? Do you have a clearer sense of what mindfulness meditation is, or are you more confused? Are you motivated to try for yourself? Feel free to comment any thoughts, questions or feedback!

Mindfulness (and) meditation

Getting Older Is

Marianne Worren, , , Leave a comment
A smiling woman and man wearing traditional conical hats and sunglasses, sitting in a boat on a river.

Worrying about your parents traveling through Southeast Asia, realizing that the tables have turned.

Noticing how your reflection in the mirror keeps changing.

Swapping chronological age for biological age.

Becoming familiar with death and your own mortality.

The greatest gift.

Taking better care of your health.

Forgiving yourself.

Letting go.

Working smarter, not harder.

Paying more attention to one thing at a time.

Shredding insecurities.

Peeling of layers of conditioning.

Taking yourself less seriously.

Befriending your inner child.

Learning how to recognize, set and keep your boundaries.

Becoming more selfish, for the good of the realm.

Waking up to your one wild and precious life.

Becoming yourself.

Falling in love with yourself.

Again. And again. And again.

Getting Older Is

Product Manager Day 2024: Creating an Authentic Conference Experience

Marianne Worren, , , , Leave a comment

On a sunny and rainy Norwegian summer’s day, I woke up excited and early to host our first ever mini conference for 80 Product Managers in NAV. Product Manager Day 2024 was finally happening! Working within budget restrictions and high ambitions to create an authentic conference experience, my colleagues Sigrun, Ingrid og Yvonne and I had spent three previous months designing the program together with the participants, on top of other tasks. Our aim was to boost the strong product managment community within our organization and utilize the competence and engagement that was already present. At the end of the day, the participants rated the experience a total score of 4.74 out of 5 😍. We couldn’t be more proud of the magic we created together with our PM community!

Beside our typical main ingredients for organizing events (structure and planning, facilitation experience, collaboration, and fun 🥳), this post elaborates on five key lessons.

Sigrun and Marianne excited and honoured to welcome 80 amazing PMs to our conference!

Lesson #1: Fewer organizers are more efficient 🚀

After the four organizers had agreed on goals and budget for the event, Sigrun and I had the opportunity to put in some extra effort, and thus took lead of the process. Collaborating in a well functioning pair is super efficient (as I have written about before), and Sigrun and I knew from previous experience we made a great team. A pro-tip when you are co-facilitating or co-organizing is to make sure you and your partner align on ambitions and quality, and support each other.

Now and then we checked in with our sponsor and the other organizers to get feedback and help. When the big day was approaching, we were all in sync and could easily split the rest of the tasks between us to be even more efficient.

For planning tools, we used Trello, Slack, and Mural. In the beginning, the digital whiteboard functioned as a common planning tool, but as Sigrun and I started digging deeper in to details, the board soon became too messy for anyone else to keep track of. We compensated with regularly updating and involving the rest of the organizers on Slack and in weekly meetings.

One of the risks we took was the possibility of one of us getting sick or absent. We barely managed to organize everything on time, and it’s a vulnerability we need to consider for our next big event.

Lesson #2: Details can make the difference, but avoid rabbit holes 🐇

Aiming to create the same feeling you get at an actual conference, Sigrun and I sometimes went a bit over board with the nice-to-have details. We AI generated our own playlist, our own logo 🐙, created stickers, a bingo competition and filled 80 goodie bags with branded merch for each participant. Working late, having too much fun playing with the details, we sometimes had to ask ourselves this question to get our priorities straight:

If we had to organize the event tomorrow, what would we be working on today?

Sigrun and Yvonne providing name tags and merch upon registration.
Bingo competition.

Lesson #3: Create a feeling of abundance and FOMO 🤹‍♀️

The most import ingredient to mimic that authentic conference feeling was for us to pack the program with parallel tracks, to create that frustrating feeling you get when you are forced to miss lots of interesting talks. That way, you have more to discuss during breaks and a stronger incentive to ask questions, network and connect. It also helped shift and rebuild the energy between each session, because it was always a new group attending.

Sigrun leading one of the parallel workshops.
Ingrid leadning the other workshop.

Lesson #4: Invest in your own talent 👨‍🎤

To kickstart the day and bring in some inspiration from outside our company domain, we invited two fantastic keynote speakers from Aidn, Kim and Marius. Having two impressive product people share their honest experience with us lifted the quality of the event. At the same time, we were conscious about our own talent sitting in the audience. When we first sent out the invitation, we invited the participants to contribute, and 16 product managers immediately raised to the challenge. That allowed us to have 16 lightening talks in the parallel tracks.

Our top priority was to be of service to the product managers that were contributing their wisdom, effort, and heart in their lightening talks, to make sure they felt confident when they entered the stage. Sigrun and I offered mentoring, dry run sessions and feedback. At the time of the event, the rest of the audience were instructed to give positive feedback to our lightening speakers, to train our ability to identify each other’s strengths, and to offer a gift of appreciation to our talented pool of speakers. According to positive psychology, focusing on our strengths will allow us to perform better than focusing on our weaknesses.

Positive feedback to one of our awesome lightning speakers.

Lesson #5: Make the rules of the game clear from the start 💎

One of my biggest learning and reminder was to not underestimate the need for explaining rules of new concepts. I have run several Open Space sessions in my organization, also with larger groups, but not with this community. Many had never attended an Open Space before, and I assumed the rules were clearer than they were. Next time, I will share some information beforehand, and explain from the beginning what it means to propose a topic, to make it safe from the start to engage. Once we got going, the participants loved it, and the group discussions were fun and energetic. With the proper framing and introduction, I highly recommend Open Space as a concept!

Explaining how Open Space works.
The most engaged and supportive audience ever 👏

Have you organized big events, and what’s your learning experience? What do you take away from our learnings? Where do you disagree? In what other context do you find these and other learnings applicable?

Product Manager Day 2024: Creating an Authentic Conference Experience

Pair-Agile Coaching: Work smarter in pairs

Marianne Worren, , , , , , , 1 Comment

Six months ago, the team of Agile Coaches at my company decided to experiment with working in pairs. Previously, we had been working in pairs as a way to onboard new team members, inspired by how our developers do pair-programming. We discovered that it wasn’t just the new team members that benefited from working in pairs. The learning went both ways, and we felt stronger and better at agile coaching. Our hypothesis was that we would create more value in the organization working in pairs than alone.

My agile coaching partner became Annette, and together Marianne and Annette became Marionette. Hopefully, our agile coaching pair would become more empowered and less of a puppet than our name implied.

Marionette decided on a goal for the next six months:

To create a work environment that we don’t need a vacation from.

For us this means establishing a healthy balance between reflection and work load, reasonable working hours, autonomy and motivating tasks. Our workday should give us more energy than it takes, and be sustainable over time. We believe that no matter what your role in the organization is, you create more value when you have energy and space to reflect and learn and to focus on what really matters. Work smarter, not harder. It’s a win both personally and for the organization.

One precondition for this experiment is that we are in control of our own priorities and the way we work. We are lucky to have a high degree of trust from the organization, and are more or less self-managed.

How we did it

Marionette kicked off the collaboration by establishing new routines for continuous goal settings and learning. Our most important routines were weekly recurring meetings called Monday commitments and Friday wins, after inspiration from Christina Wodtke’s Radical focus. Other tools and methods we used for building a strong pair were the Wheel of anything, feedback and retrospectives.

We will now take a closer look at our meetings and the Wheel of anything.

Monday commitments and Friday wins

We start every week with a Monday commitments meeting, where we decide on our goals for the week. Planning in weekly intervals helps us split larger missions in to manageable chunks and achievable steps. We also use these sessions to plan our schedule and to reserve time for preparations and follow-ups on our deliveries in our calendars. Based on our experience, if we facilitate a workshop, we use three times as much time as the workshop itself on preparations, plus the same duration as the workshop for follow-up tasks. That’s five hours in total for a one-hour workshop. Estimating and timeboxing all of our known tasks might sound rigid, but it allows us to visualize how much flexibility and slack we actually have in our calendars. As agile coaches, we want to leave some space for unforeseen tasks and opportunities as well.

Every Friday, we revisit our goals in a Friday wins meeting, where we also look at what we learned. Together we mark each goal as completed or fail. The goals we fail at reaching are dead and buried, so we don’t have a growing backlog of tasks we drag along. Next Monday, we start with a clean sheet. We trust that if the failed goals are important enough, they will show up again. This leaves us more mental space to focus on the tasks with the highest impact each week. For more inspiration on why and how to kill your own backlog, I highly recommend Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.

Photo by Mike B on Pexels.com

Wheel of anything

Another useful tool for Marionette has been the Wheel of anything. This cake diagram allows us to portion out our capacity in an honest and realistic way. It keeps our capacity limit on 100%, since it’s impossible to expand the circle. If you try to fit in a new priority, something else needs to go. Now and then, we take a look at our own personal wheels to see if we need to change the slices or reprioritize our tasks.

Wheel of anything, to map out how we prioritize our capasity.
A snapshot of Marianne’s Wheel of anything.

Benefits of working in pairs

After six months of investing in stronger relationships and structure, we now experience several benefits, both individually and in how Agile Coaching is done in our organization. To fully utilize these benefits, we have decided to continue for another six months, even if the experiment now has formally ended. Then we plan on switching pairs. We believe that the benefits we see outweigh the cost of investment and the potential downsides and risks. Maybe our next post will be about the flip side of par-agile coaching? For now, we would like to share what we proudly have gained.

Focus

With weekly sessions for goal settings and learning, it becomes easier to have fewer priorities, stay focused and hold each other accountable. We now do more of the high impact tasks, and say no to the less important ones. We also do less multitasking.

Working closely together also calls for more transparency and honesty regarding our capacity. Visualizations and realistic planning gives us the overview and mental picture we need in order to evaluate if we have the capacity to take on a new task.

Quality

One plus one equals more than two. The quality of our work is way better when we challenge and build on each other’s ideas and utilize both of our differences and strengths.

Wellbeing

Working closely together with someone who knows what you’re dealing with, both professionally and private, is of great support. We care about each other on a personal level and lift each other up. Having fun is also an important part of learning and thriving in our role. Laughter boost our creativity and makes us more confident to play and take on reasonable risk.

Robustness

If one of us is absent, or a new opportunity arises, we can split and still deliver on our commitments. We are flexible to grab new opportunities that are in line with our mission.

Did we meet our goal?

Did we meet our goal of creating a work environment that we don’t need a vacation from? Now that Christmas is near, Marionette feel less of a rush to finish our tasks before the holidays. We already are in control and on track with our work, which is more manageable in size and focus. Both of us even plan on clocking in some hours during the holiday, because our work gives us energy. However, we still believe leisure time to be a healthy win also for our day job, since we can seek other hobbies and get new perspectives and inspiration. But our holidays are no longer just a means to recharge and recover before a new sprint at the office. We enter the holidays with energy to spend on our leisure time as well.

What is your experience working in pairs? What role do you have in your organization, and how do you think you could benefit from working in a pair? What preconditions and pitfalls do you see? Feel free to leave your thoughts and feedback in the comments below.

Pair-Agile Coaching: Work smarter in pairs

Lessons Learned From a First Time Design Sprint Facilitator

Marianne Worren, , , , 5 Comments

Last week I co-facilitated a Google Design Sprint for my colleagues, a process for solving big problems and testing new ideas in just one week. We did the Design Sprint version 2.0, which is the 4-day process instead of 5.

The main activities each day of the Design Sprint v2.0

Top 8 key learnings

The problem we were trying to solve was related to risk assessment in the public sector, so I learned a lot about the domain. I also learned a lot about the Design Sprint process.

One of the advantages of facilitating a Design Sprint is that you can get insight into new and exciting problem domains. But keep your focus on facilititating and don’t be tempted to participate.

These learnings are based on only one time as a facilitator (I have previously been a participant). However, I do find it useful to jot down my own key takeaways while they are still fresh from a beginner’s mind. I also think most of these lessons can be valuable when facilitating other processes.

1. Trust the process

If your domain is complicated or complex (as the public sector can be), parts of the sprint (e.g. the map and the story board) can feel hard and frustrating, and you might dubt that you are on the right track. The timeboxed activities and voting activities are designed to help you progress in a meaningful way.

2. Work together alone

Brainstorming doesn’t work. That’s why we let the participants think and be creative alone in silence. We then mix, match and build on each other’s (anonymous) ideas.

3. Block your calendar and turn off your phone

Blocking everyone’s calendar for a week allows for full focus, efficiency and effectiveness. No multitasking, no context switching and no digital devices (exept when building the prototype).

4. Collaborate with a designer

Design thinking, UX and UI competence is crucial, both in a Design Sprint and in product- and service design in general. The designer(s) should participate throughout the entire sprint.

5. Prepare and adjust

Define the challenge and desired deliverables in the beginning and be open for adjustments as new insight is unveiled during the sprint. Chosing the target customer and target event defines the rest of the sprint and is imporatant to get right. If your organization is large or your domain is complicated or complex, do some research, like system mapping, in advance. Try to get an idea on where the root cause or main problems might be. It might also affect who should participate in the sprint.

6. Choose the participants and experts carefully

The end result depends on the group composition. Make sure you have a cross-functional team with a broad mix of skills that represents the different expertices and interests needed to solve the problem. Make sure some of the participants also have ownership and resources to take the result further. You also have to put some effort into who you invite for the Ask the Experts activity on Monday.

7. Facilitating is hard and rewarding

A Design Sprint requires a lot of planning, organizing and preconditions to be met. The facilitator needs to be well prepared and organized around the activities and the schedule, while at the same time keeping energy and mood high throughout the days.

8. Know when design sprint is not the solution

Design Sprint is not the solution to everything.

As with all new and shiny processes, you need to know when a Design Sprint is not the solution.

Walking through the solution sketches.

Questions

These are some of the questions I still have:

  • How and when do you detect whether your solution should be bought or build? How do you avoid making a prototype of a product that already exists in the marked and is not part of your core domain?
  • If the sprint team is cross-functional, autonomous and self-organized, do you need the Decider role? (The Decider is the person making the last call on all decisions.)

Sources

Other than working together with an experienced Design Sprint facilitator, these were my main sources of information and inspiration when preparing for the sprint:

What is your experience with Design Sprints?

Regardless if you have more or less experience with design sprints, I would love to hear from you in the comments.

Lessons Learned From a First Time Design Sprint Facilitator

What does Agile and DDD have in common?

Marianne Worren, , , , 2 Comments

This evening I attended an inspiring meetup The pillars of Domain Driven Design with Marco Heimeshoff. I am quite new to DDD (Domain-driven Design), and Marco Heimeshoff did a great job explaining it.

In short, DDD is about translating business domain language into code, using one obiquitous language to create a bounded context in which to reason about the domain. This creates coherence and reduces risk and complexity. DDD can also create motivation, as it enables autonomy (through bounded context), mastery and purpose.

programmer2
This picture illustrates how to not do DDD. Using DDD, the developer would implement the code using the same words as the user, like sofa  picture and table.

This talk has got me hooked and I am definitely going to learn more about DDD.

However, being an agile enthusiast, I couldn’t help but noticing the similarities between DDD and Agile. You could basically just swap the word DDD with Agile, and it would have made perfect sense.

From just this one talk, I gathered 10 examples where I felt that the topic could just as easily have been about Agile as DDD.

Example 1

What DDD/Agile is not:

  • New
  • Hard
  • Overhead
  • Only for complex domains

Example 2

It’s a dance, not a march (if someone gives you a three steps guide to DDD/Agile, it’s a hoax).

ddd is a dance not a march

Example 3

DDD/Agile gives you the most benefit in the complex and complicated domain, but can also be valuable in the other Cynefin framework domains.

Example 4

Who should learn DDD/Agile? Everyone involved in the software development process.

Example 5

There is a bunch of methods (that consultants will try to sell you), but they are not the core of DDD/Agile. Only use them if they are useful to you in your context. If you find other more suitable methods, please use them instead.

Example 6

DDD/Agile changes everything in the company (like how we are organized, the way we work, roles). DDD/Agile is a mind turner.

Example 7

The more you try to prove that DDD/Agile works, the more it backfires because people will protect their identity (their existing roles).

Example 8

You are not a DDD/Agile person. You are a problem solving person, aiming to add business value.

Example 9

The first rule og DDD/Agile is: You do not talk about DDD/Agile.

If you use branded names, people will get too hung up on the methods and the practicalities, and lose sight of the underlying purpose (and expect it to come in a box with a certificate).

Example 10

The way to implement DDD/Agile is through small controlled experiments.

This is just the examples I had time to scribble down during that one talk. What other similarities can you find? What are the significant differences?

What does Agile and DDD have in common?

Key Considerations When Starting a Community of Practice Inside Your Organization

Marianne Worren, , Leave a comment

Do you want to change how your organization works? Or do you have a burning passion for a specific technology or field of practice you want to share with your colleagues? Establishing a community of practice is a powerful tool to help you connect across silos and spread your ideas far beyond your own formal position and without direct authority.

Communities of practice have many valuable benefits, as Emily Weber points out in Building Successful Communites of Practice:

  • Accelerating professional development
  • Breaking down organisational silos
  • Enabling knowledge sharing
  • Building better practice
  • Helping to hire and retain staff
  • Making people happier

Personally, starting a community inside my organizations has been extremly rewarding and motivating. I’m constatly growing and learning together with wonderful colleagues from all over the organization, whom I didn’t know from before. However, starting a brand new initiative yourself is more challenging than joining an existing, well established community.

Based on my own experience, here are some key lessions I hope will motivate you to start a community inside your own organization.

1. Be open and transparent

We had our first meeting in January 2017 and since then we have had regular meetings one hour every other week. The meetings are open for anyone in the organization. We are currently about 100 members, and about 20-30 people turn up at every meeting.

As people hear about our community through word of mouth, they get curious and want to learn more before they join a meeting. So for them to know more about what we do, I make sure to document our values, purpose, members list and every meeting. We use Confluence, and our page is open for everyone to see and even edit. It takes about 30 minutes to write a short summary after every meeting, and maybe post some pictures. This also makes it possible for other people to add stuff and comment on the discussions, even those who didn’t attend the meeting. We also have an open channel at Slack.

2. Change topics, formats and locations

To grow your community requires courage to try new things, and it can be helpful to look at your community as a social experiment. Our default agenda is to split into groups and do lean coffee, but more often than not, we have workshops, lightening talks, discussions, presentations and other formats that members suggests. Make a survey and ask for feedback.

An eye opener for me was that while some people loved heated discussions with lots of interactions in the open canteen, others were uncomfortable and would much rather listen to presentations in a closed meeting room. Because of the variety of personalities and opinions I realized I would not be able to please everyone. Thus I have to constantly change the meetings to include different people. The same goes for topics. For agile, you have to find the right balance between agile for developers (e.g. continuous delivery and DevOps) and the more “soft” people oriented topics of agile (e.g. collaboration and culture). You can of course choose to pinpoint it down a specific area and smaller group, but since agile transformation requires a change in all parts of the organization, I try to broaden up as much as poossible.

3. Diversity matter – Also in opinions

Diversity in gender, neurodiversity and different social and cultural background has proven to be an important factor in creating innovation and value. The same goes for opinions. The best meetups we have is when someone openly feels safe to raise their concerns or disagree with what is being said.

This may sound weird, but it is important for us that you do not have to agree that agile is a good thing to join our agile community. Respect for different opinions is a crucial part of creating an open learning culture and avoiding groupthink and echo chambers.

The best meetups we have is when someone openly feels safe to raise their concerns or disagree with what is being said.

sailors-all-hands-navy-military.jpg
Avoid groupthink and echo chambers.

4. Ask for help

This is one of the many patterns from “Fearless change” that have helped me both run a community and in introducing changes in the projects I’m in.

When I was prevented from hosting a meeting in the last minutes, I asked one of the attendants if he could host the meeting. He said yes, and it went really well. What’s even more amazing is that after that meeting, there suddenly was a summary of what had been discussed up on our Confluence page. Someone had voluntarily, without being asked, stepped up and taken responsibility. I have also had someone else arrange for a social meeting after work, and after asking the community it only took one minute before someone immediately jumped to the task.

By including others and letting them help you out with arrangements, you not just take work off your own shoulders. You expand your network and attract new people to the community. You also make the network less vulnerable by depending on one single leader.

5. Just do it

I often find that we are limited by our mental boundaries of what we think we have permission to do. If you have a great idea you strongly believe in and want to spread across the organization, just make sure the idea aligned with the business goals and you have management support. If your organization values the creativity and passion in their employees, you probably don’t even need all the formal approval you might think you do. One huge advantage of not having a formal mandate is more freedom to explore and try out new experiments as the community grows and takes shape, and less time on reporting and administration.

team-motivation-teamwork-together-53958
Who or what is stopping you  from making something awesome?

The next steps

Being a network of people, a community is somewhat fluid and organic. It is therefore impossible to say where our community will be in a year from now. A community requires constant attention and nurturing, so planning and prioritizing the next steps can still be a good idea.

These are the next actions I am currently looking forward to take in order to grow our community:

  • Creating a safe to fail environment, where people can openly share failures as well as success stories (we have some examples on agile initiatives that have failed, but it can be a higher bar to share those stories if your company is in the early progress of creating a learning culture)
  • Expanding the leadership beyond myself, so that the community is not dependent on only one leader
  • Expanding beyond our own organization, sharing experience and learning with other companies

 

Key Considerations When Starting a Community of Practice Inside Your Organization

Five Forces Against Agile

Marianne Worren, , , 4 Comments

Let’s say you had to choose a default strategy for developing software:

  • bureaucracy, waterfall development, centralised decision-making and micromanagement?
  • Or a culture of trust, autonomous cross-functional teams, continuous delivery and iterative development?

Seemingly, people in the IT-industry now have come to recognise the latter as a more successful strategy. We know that agile works. Even in the public sector. Then why is the transformation from slow, rigid and expensive processes to a more successful, cost efficient way of generating better value so hard?

Sure, there are obstacles in factors like these:

  • Budgets
  • Contracts
  • Architecture
  • Organization
  • Legacy systems
  • Tools and technologies

These are certainly real barriers for an agile transition. However, they are all tangible, visible and, dare I say it, easier to deal with than the more complex, darker forces lurking in the shadows of the human mind (they are not really dark forces, but a normal part of our human nature and survival strategies).

In this post I suggest five forces I see working against a better way of developing software. All of them might not be relevant in your context and some are stronger or weaker depending on your context. If none of them are familiar, consider yourself lucky.

1. Individuals resist being changed

If you work in a startup or with innovation, you might be familiar with the diffusion of innovations. Only 16% of people are considered Innovators and Early adopters. Humans have a history of surviving by staying with the pack and following the majority, and most people need serious consideration to accept new ideas. For organizations, the adoption to new ideas are even more complex.

change

2. People enjoy power

Agile is about autonomy, learning by doing and letting the team decide how they solve the problem. This requires a large dose of trust, not just inside the team but from management and leaders. Agile does not work very well in a command and control environment.

Unfortunately, people who are used to being in control and exercise micromanagement will naturally find it hard to let go of their control. It requires a shift from Theory X to Theory Y, where not only leaders learn to trust but the team member stop playing the blame game and learn to take responsibility.

3. “We would rather be wrong than uncertain”

Agile are optimized for changing requirements and uncertainty. Humans are optimized for categorizing data and generalizing problem solving. This gives us the warm and fuzzy illusion of control. We are extremely bad at dealing with uncertainty. As Dan North says it: We would rather be wrong than uncertain.

The irony is that agile sceptics often mistake agilists for being daredevils and risk takers, when in fact agile is handeling risk in a much safer way than what carving assumptions into stone is.

One consequence of this is that we are tricking ourself into believing we can predict the future with mental images based on a weak analogies.

The House Analogy

One often used analogy for software development is building houses. This gives us the illusion that we are building something concrete which we should plan in great and accurate details up front, and it will in fact turn out that way. And the bigger the better. It also implies that demolishing the house and starting over is expensive, when in fact, deleting code and starting over is literally done by a keystroke.

The Elephant Analogy

Another analogy we often use is comparing projects to elephants. “How do you eat an elephant? One bit at a time.” This gives us the illusion that we know exactly how the end result is going to turn out, and we can just split the problem into 100% accurate increments and assemble all the pieces perfectly together at the end. When in fact we are trying to grow a new creature that doesn’t exist yet and no one has ever seen before.

43-eating-elephant

 

4. Agile threatens The Establishment

This is an often overlooked consequence of following the agile principles. Delivering value early and frequently has a significant impact on how we are organized and what skills are needed. Our goal is to get real feedback early. “Working software is the primary measure of progress”. Instead of getting written specifications handed over, developers are working face-to-face with business people and user representatives. We are in the complex domain of the Cynefin framework and apply a probe, sense and respond approach. This greatly reduces the need for detailed planning, estimations and comprehensive documentation up front. Consequently, it reduces the need for coordinators, managers and administrators.

mvp
http://blog.crisp.se/2016/01/25/henrikkniberg/making-sense-of-mvp

 

It can then seem like a contradiction when we choose to outsource programming, making it harder to collaborate through geographical distances and cultural barriers. At least it generates more work for management. Christin Gorman has an excellent point about this.

5. Agile is small and cheap

Agile is in a sense about keeping it small and simple and eliminating waste. Simplicity and downsizing does not generate the same amount of need for middle managers, coordinators, documentation, meetings and administration. Yes, we are saving costs and that is a positive force for the company paying for the IT related services. But on the other side we are also cutting income for the people making money out of those very activities that does not generate direct value.

Agile generate less income for management consultancies than the waterfall model (unless you are selling agile coaching, courses and certifications). Unfortunately, money is power and this is a strong force I think often is overlooked by somewhat naive techies. Budgeting and economy is not our favourite topic (and economists  on the other side don’t bother with understanding technology either when they outsource core business to India hoping for cost savings).

And let’s be honest. For humans in general, smaller projects are not as impressive on our resume.

“Don’t fight stupid – Make more awesome”

Introducing and sustaining agile can sometimes seem like a dark and long path through frustrating and complex people issues. Introducing change to a business requires great patience and a positive attitude. But it is also necessary to understand the challenges and unfavorable conditions working against you when all your best effort, logic, reasoning and patient are not getting you any closer to your goal. Recognizing the human drivers at play can make them easier to tackle and to know when to stop banging your head against the wall. Maybe you will even find a way to use them to your advantage?

Taking a deeper look at these human forces will also make you realize that all of them are a natural part of our nature and not as evil as they first might appear.

Fortunately, there are lots of techniques for overcoming people issues. Fearless Change (a wonderful read) by Linda Rising and Mary Lynn Manns contains powerful patterns that will make your mission towards change more fun and more efficient.

Besides, being the most adaptive creature on earth, humans have the capability of learning new skills and adopting to change. Bosses are becoming leaders, test managers are becoming an integrated part of development teams and project managers are providing their skills as coaches and scrum masters. And as I have learned from coaching theory and from reading Fearless Change: In order to introduce change, you have to genuinely believe in the hidden abilities and good intentions of people.

Five Forces Against Agile