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Resistance at Shu level

Last post 05:45 pm December 16, 2016 by Boris Kazarez
1 reply
02:35 pm December 16, 2016

I joined a Scrum team a few months ago as their Scrum Master. After spending some time observing them, I noticed some anti-patterns - eg. status reporting at DS, no handle on their velocity, taking on way too much every sprint, etc. Using the Shu Ha Ri model, it was clear that the team needed a Shu approach of getting back to basics on many practices - so my approach was to take a teaching stance rather than a coaching stance. Using our retro's, I suggested things we could try - eg. DS at a board with 3 questions, but taking an approach of one per sprint, to keep it gentle. Initially it worked well, but after a few retro's, a couple of the team were quite vocal in their resistance that they felt there was now too much process or we were removing a process to replace it with another.

Would you have taken a different approach here?


05:45 pm December 16, 2016

When you take a teaching approach, do you teach the values and the principles behind the practices, i.e. WHY some particular practices are useful and how it can help the team to deliver better results? Do you always start with WHY?

Also, in my experience a coaching stance is most always much more helpful than teaching. How often do you ask coaching questions vs telling the team how they SHOULD be doing things?

As long as the team does not see the real value in the improvements that you are suggesting, you will either be forcing a 'process' upon them or fighting with them, both are pretty useless and painful.


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