The Bright Side
Not all of us naturally have the gift of helping people recognize and resolve dysfunction and impediments without, um, peeving people off. When serving a team as a ScrumMaster, it’s easy to turn into a harping kvetcher. When management and team members both start changing their paths when you walk down the corridor, you know it’s time to find a more effective approach to your job.
Gretchen Rubin makes a familiar but often forgotten good point recently in her blog: there are different ways of looking at a given situation, and some may be more palatable and effective than others. A frequent result of your good work as a ScrumMaster is exposed dysfunction in your team or company, but there’s no reason to rub people’s faces in it. With a little imagination or attitude adjustment, you can make your point in a way that’s effective instead of demoralizing, while avoiding becoming a Pollyanna or sweeping problems under the rug.
My favorite example of this approach comes from a performance review written by the best manager I ever had. Summarizing the primary accomplishment of my last six months, a technical manual that I’d researched for five months and written in one, she wrote, “Michael’s guide to system management is the best manual on the subject we’ve ever seen. One can only imagine how good it would have been if he’d started writing it earlier.”
Lately, I’ve been particularly aware of how, in response to a positive suggestion or idea offered by another, many of us start by saying, “The problem is…” We lead with the negative, hardly the way to make our conversational partner feel good about their idea or our interest in it. There’s always time for the challenges to surface and be identified, but perhaps that time isn’t seconds after we first hear the idea.
Agile teams spend a lot of time dealing with “the problem,” in retrospectives, in pairing sessions, in planning meetings, in raising impediments. This is why it’s so important to identify and celebrate successes frequently, but there’s no need to wait until success is obvious. Create environments where success can thrive, by focusing on what’s good and encouraging more of that.
Now that I think of it, that’s how you brew good beer. When the sweet wort enters the fermentation vessel, it has lots of wild yeasts (from the air) and brewing yeasts (from you) in it. The trick to getting good beer is to encourage the brewing yeasts to grow and work faster than the wild yeasts. The good pushes out the bad, or if I’m going to be more facilitator-y about it, the useful prevails over the not useful. I’m told you grow a nice lawn the same way, but I know more about fermenting beer and Scrum teams than I do about gardening.
Feeling Agile 
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