Mya’s Reviews > The Hitchhiker's Guide to Agile Coaching > Status Update

It turns out that for a proposal to be a safe-to-fail experiment it is essential to have a way of dampening the side effects, a kind of rollback plan.

Many companies have a static perspective on organisation.They believe that the current setup is stable and that any change requires energy.The more agile approach is to assume that change is inevitable: the question is in which direction to guide it.In the context of organizational change, avoid asking “Shall we try this particular proposal?” and instead try asking “Which of these proposals are we going to try next?”

As an aside, it can help to take a so-called “yes, and” approach and build on top of suggestions posed by the organization. (When changing.)

The team receives the rewards, and the managers are there to facilitate and support.

Traditional command and control organizations are often “business monarchies” or “technical monarchies” which means that managers or technical leads are accustomed to receive the rewards: they enjoy higher status, they provide directions and action plans, they decide who does what, they control the budget, they decide who is in the team and who is not and they can choose to share or withhold information.

Because the mere perception of predictability is what counts, people are happy to believe in project plans even if they rationally know that the software project failure rate is immense.

Certainty — Your perceived ability to predict the future.

SCARF describes low-level threat or reward scenarios in the amygdala: people unconsciously try to minimize threats and maximize rewards. We do this by tagging stimuli as either “good” (associated with rewards) or “bad” (associated with threats) and try to respectively approach or avoid such stimuli.
Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness.

And so we have evolved a mechanism for getting ourselves out of dangerous situations quickly and with a minimum of thinking. In fact, thinking is high on the list of things not to do.

Case studies for TCF

pg 106 Some nice examples of Coaching Cards