The Holy Crap Moment

Here’s how Urban Dictionary might say it…

1

Holy Crap Moment

Bad news revealed in front of a group of oblivious people

“So, we’re watching this VCR tape, where my uncle recorded his ‘last will and testament’ before he died. And he goes, ‘I hate my family, and therefore I’m leaving all of my vast wealth to charity. You all get nothing.’ It was a real holy crap moment.”

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Holy Crap Moment

The instant that a team at once realizes something surprising and dismaying, where most people in the group are inclined to yell, “holy crap!”

“The finance guy came in and told us that our expense numbers were way out-of-whack, and there’s only 1 week left in the quarter. We had a serious holy crap moment after that!”

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How It Goes

We’ve all been there. Everything is going along just fine at work. Energy is good. People are working hard. Now, we’re having a meeting to discuss progress on the decisions made at an offsite meeting several weeks ago.

Then it happens.

Scrum Master: So, looking at the canvas we did at the offsite, I’ve created stories in the backlog for all of the stuff we said we would do on the project. And, voila….

Team Member 1: Looks great!

Product Owner: Wait just a minute here. That’s not right at all!!

Team Member 2: It’s not?!?!

Product Own: No!!!

Everyone: Holy crap!!!!

What Is True

Here are some things that are true. The holy crap moment:

*Reveals something that was true before it happened.

*Ignites a period of chaos and emotion, which needs to pass before anything can rationally be done.

*Brings out the best in some people and the worst in others.

*Represents a collective failure. If everyone is in the same “holy crap” situation, then there is no room to blame an individual.

What You Can Do

If you sense a holy crap moment in your future, find a way to make it happen sooner rather than later.

One critical element of the holy crap moment is that it introduces urgency to a situation where no urgency previously existed. The earlier the problem is revealed, the more time you have to deal with it. There’s an old saw that sums it up, “the best time to realize this would have been 6 weeks ago; the second best time is right now.”

Find the goodness in the holy crap moment.

Once the shock and dismay has subsided, look at the situation as an opportunity to make something right before something truly disastrous happens. It also might be an opening for an individual to embrace the urgency and become a hero or emergent leader.

In your warnings about a holy crap moment, include data, not just your intuition.

If you sense a holy crap moment on the horizon, sharing your intuition is probably not enough to spur the team to proactive action. Find and present facts in a controlled manner and let a kinder, gentler version of the holy crap moment unfold.

Reflect on the holy crap moment

Holy crap moments are usually the product a sub-optimal way of working. Nonetheless, even good teams have them, and everyone can learn from them. After the dust settles, ask yourselves: How did we get here? Why did that moment happen? What do we need to do differently going forward to not have that happen again? What did we learn about how we work together and treat each other in such situations?

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Holy crap moments happen. It’s how your team responds that is most important.

Boss, get out of the way

“Could you imagine if school teachers allowed students to pick their own grades?”

This was Boss’ response to the idea that agile teams can plot their own “maturity” against an agility rubric. Boss told me that the agile coaches should go around with a clipboard, citing what each team is doing right and not right against the rubric.

My response to his response was basically, “you can go ahead and use this agile maturity exercise to rate and compare teams, but don’t ask me to do it. And, while you’re at it, I don’t suggest you do it either.”

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Many years ago, I was a school teacher (high school and junior college), and I did what Boss said should never be done. At grade time, I would take each student aside and ask the two simple questions: “What grade do you think you deserve?” “Why?” Compounding the initial confusion was the condition that I hadn’t assigned any number or letter grades during the term. Everyone’s first assignment received a check (√), no matter what. I told them when handing back the assignments that this was a baseline, and that the name of the game was improvement.

After the first assignment, everyone was judged against themselves, not their peers. So,

Progressing as expected à √

Outstanding progress à √+

Blew me away à ★

Not impressive à √-

Didn’t do the assignment, or did a half-assed job à 0

The nuns at the Catholic high school didn’t like my system much more than Boss did. I wish in retrospect that I had the perspective now to explain it to them.

Here are some of the findings (n~=200 students over 2 years):

• The vast majority (80%) of students suggested a grade that I could live with, that roughly represented their progress and effort. These were easy. “OK, 85 sounds about right to me. Let’s go with that. If you continue to get better throughout the year, that grade will go up. If not, it will go down. How does that sound?”
• ·        Almost no students asked for a grade that was wildly too high. In response to the 1-2 times that a student who put in a lackluster effort asked for a 90+ grade, a simple “really?” from me got the conversation back on track.
• ·        A good chunk of students suggested a grade that was WAY too low.

In those cases, when I asked (what I thought was) a 90 student why they thought they deserved a 75 for a grade, I got an instant teachable moment. Most of those kids suffered from low self-esteem or a self-fulfilling prophecy complex.

Here’s a typical conversation:

“I’m bad at English. I always get around a 75. I’ve never gotten an 80.” one kid told me.

“Why do you think that is?”

“I’m not such a great reader or writer. And usually the material is really boring….”

“That’s very surprising to me. I’ve seen you work really hard this term, turning in all of your assignments on time. And, you’ve gotten a lot better as a writer..”

And so it goes.

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This agile maturity exercise is meant to be a development activity, intended to help individuals or teams to get better. It necessarily needs to be separate from performance evaluation activities. If you, Boss, conflate development and performance, bad things happen, and you,

1. Undermine empowerment. By telling the teams what they are doing right and wrong, you are telling them that they are unable to do same.
2. Sow distrust. If the teams think they are being rated and compared, they will, in the interest of self-preservation, do things to undermine the system.
3. Show that you don’t think much of their ability to make decisions. Let’s face it: Your people can read a rubric and map their own performance against it. If you can’t trust them to do that honestly, then that’s a big problem.

If we coaches aren’t going to rate the teams, what should we do? The overall role of the coach is to help teams perform better. We do this in different ways. Sometimes, we share our vast agile knowledge (teach). Other times, we lead individuals or teams through a process (facilitate). Occasionally we directly advise individuals and teams on how to get to the next level of performance (mentor). And often we ask questions and lead people to find answers to their own problems and dilemmas (coach).

The art of coaching is to figure out when to assume which stance at which time, keeping in mind that the performance and the outcomes belong to the team. The coach is not part of the team.

Now, no matter how empowered (or whatever) the team is, the Boss still employs them. But, we’re not talking about hiring and firing here; we’re talking about performance. And, to get the best performance out of a team the Boss needs to tell them what good performance looks like, and then get out of the way.

The Answer to Your Process Question? It Depends!

In my role as an agile coach, presenter and facilitator, people ask me process questions about agile methods every day. After all, I am an agile “expert.” This is what people expect me to know.

“Should we assign story points to a spike?” goes one such typical question.

“It depends…” begins the answer that I always want to give. Of course, if I start out every response with “it depends,” it will get annoying. What I mean is, the answer to the question depends on who you ask, and more importantly, what you’re trying to accomplish with this decision. I want to facilitate the questioner through the thinking, so they can answer their own question, armed with the conventional wisdom.

Here is a simple technique to try.

Step One – Answer the Question

Respect the question and present the generally-accepted consensus answer, if there is one. If there is no consensus, I cite both sides of the argument. “Well, that’s an interesting question. One the one hand, reason ABC says you should assign points. On the other hand, reason XYZ says you shouldn’t….” Teasing both sides cues up a meaningful discussion.

Step Two – Probe

I’m trying to set up a teachable moment here, and I use questioning to get there. The lesson is that you should follow or not follow certain rules based on how that rule will serve your team. There are a number of questions that can lead you there - What do you do now? What doesn’t work about how you do it now? What is the problem? Why are you even talking about this?

I like to try a few of these questions to get to the underlying issue. Then explore the issue, trying to facilitate the person’s (or team’s) understanding. Whatever decision is made should help the team to be better, and whatever happens should be retrospected along the way. E.g., you might start assigning story points to a spike, and it doesn’t fix the problem, or it causes some unintended consequence that needs to be addressed.

Step Three – Revisit the Question

My questioning leads the asker of the question to a better framing of the issue. Now, I can be the asker. “So, based on all of that, what do you think you should do?” There are countless directions this could go, but this type of examination is better than just taking the answer out of a book or out of the mouth of a so-called expert.

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While many cast me as an agile “expert,” my ultimate value is in helping people (individuals and groups) discover best answers to their own questions. Ultimately, I want to move them to a process where they examine the impetus for the question.

So…

Q: Should you assign story points to a Spike?

A: It depends. If it helps you to work better, then you should.