This applies to yoga, life, and Scrum.
The peace of yoga. I yearn for this time away from the hustle of life and work.
But during a recent yoga workout, I lost my state of mindfulness. The instructor said something that broke my yoga groove. It hit home to a core truth of change—something I work with day-in and day-out as an Agile Coach.
”The degree of your change depends on your ability to let go. Let go a little, a little bit of transformation takes place. Let go a lot, and a lot of transformation takes place. The degree of your success has everything to do with the degree of your surrender.”
—Travis Eliot, Yoga Instructor
In Yoga, you let go by using tension, time, and breathing. This reshapes your body, building strength and flexibility. When you first start doing Yoga, your body is stiff, and you are not accustomed to the technique. It is not pleasant to perform the movements.
If you do not let go and surrender to the poses, you will experience a slow change in your body or none at all. If you become overzealous, you can progress too fast into advanced movements. You could sustain an injury. This might cause you to suspend your practice or abandon it altogether.
But if you are patient and progress daily under expert guidance, your body will transform. This foundation will prepare you for advanced techniques. The more you let go and surrender to the practice and progression of the movements, the greater your success.
This yoga analogy speaks to the heart of what makes change successful or difficult in those I coach.
Some become frustrated with the change and do not see it through. Or they detect the foreign element of change and find the quickest way to eject it from the system.
Others don’t put in the time to learn the new behaviors. They rely on their instincts born from old behaviors, skip over foundations, and try to go too big, too fast.
But a few let go, dive deep into practice, and embrace the change. Desire to change is a key reason they let go. They have a need driving their change. As they let go, their curiosity heightens. They look for guidance in technique. They let go a lot. And they succeed the most.
Let’s discuss a common example of how this plays out in Scrum—the adoption of Scrum Events for a new team.
Scrum Events—The Foreign Element
A team new to Scrum will meet the Scrum Events with resistance more often than not. Scrum Events include Sprint Planning, the Daily Scrum, the Sprint Retrospective, and the Sprint Review. Add Backlog Refinement into the mix and the resistance rises to a fever pitch.
Managers see the Scrum Events as overhead. They want to reduce them. They look for any chance to remove them so the team can focus on “real work.”
Team members become frustrated when the events pull them away from their work. It becomes a hassle to break away from their work to go to another “meeting.”
When a team is new to collaborating, it becomes difficult to converge during the meeting time box. The Scrum Event objectives become elusive. The meeting runs long. Frustration is high. This brings extra stress into the equation.
You will often hear, “all we do is meetings,” “this is a waste of time,” or “we did not have all these meetings before.”
Before long, teams find a way to eject the foreign element. The duration of the Sprint Events get shortened. Some events get eliminated or reduced in frequency. Attendance is reduced to only “key” team members.
This has a cascading effect. The team starts to become less aligned to their goal. Collaboration and shared understanding suffers. Transparency begins to fall apart. The focus becomes blurred. Rework due to misunderstanding is now commonplace. Feedback loops slow down. These effects impede the flow of work.
Like a yoga student who bypasses foundational moves, the team does not develop a foundational element of Scrum. The three pillars of Scrum—transparency, inspection, and adaptation—are not fortified.
Embracing the Scrum Events—Let Go
The Scrum Events are the heartbeat of the Scrum team. They are in place to support empiricism through transparency, inspection, and adaptation. They keep the team aligned on their Sprint Goal and help them adapt towards it. They support the team in adapting to their reality. Scrum Events are a key collaboration mechanism for teams to stay in sync. Without the Events, teams will suffer. A virtual environment amplifies their importance.
When you are new to Scrum, the Events can seem overwhelming. They happen every Sprint at the same time. They each have a purpose. There is heavy interaction and collaboration with your teammates. There are many new patterns of behavior you must learn. This level of rigor can be exhasting at first. But with practice and an eye on continuous improvement, they will become your team’s heartbeat. They will keep you steady, focused, and sane.
Here are some ideas of how you can “let go,” stretch your behavior to new levels, and build a solid foundation with your Scrum Events.
1–Shut Down the Voice: That voice in your head telling you to eject the foreign element must go quiet. You must fight the urge to reject the change. The old behavior patterns that had no Scrum Events is history. Now you must direct your attention to mastery of the Scrum Events.
2–Practice: Treat every Sprint Event as a practice routine. Prepare for the event. Sketch out the objectives. Determine your approach. Chart your gameplan. Execute the plan. Assess the execution. Build learnings into your next session. And try again. Practice makes perfect but only if you inspect and adapt to get better and better.
3–Get Outside Help: It is difficult to practice a new technique without guidance. Guidance is best from an unbiased party. This could be an Agile Coach or it could be an experienced Agile practitioner from another team. An outsider will be able to see your old patterns and help you course-correct behavior. These corrections are best done in the moment as you practice the new Scrum Event behaviors.
Change is hard. Letting go is hard. It is not natural. Letting go requires a leap of faith and requires determination.
If you are new to Scrum, remember trying something new will hurt at first. This is just like when you try yoga to improve your health. Before you improve, you have to get used to the moves. You have to stick with it to see the benefits.
Sticking with it requires you to silence your inner voice telling you to go back to pre-Scrum patterns. If you don’t, you will not take advantage of all Scrum has to offer.
Trust in a guide to learn the correct execution of new Scrum Event behaviors. Persevere and become great at executing them. In time, you will form new habits. You will experience the intended power of the Scrum Events. And with better results, it is likely your belief system will change.
When faced with change, don’t fight it. Let go! This will allow you to embrace change and move forward. The degree of your success depends on it.
Also published in Serious Scrum on Medium.
Read other posts related to embracing change below:
- Let’s Put the “Continuous” in Continuous Improvement
- Out With the Old, In With the New
- Using Resistance as a Change Enabler
References
The Scrum Guide, 2017, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber
Todd Lankford unlocks Lean Leverage in organizations to cultivate powerful, engaged product teams who maximize outcomes and impact.
His articles share his experiences and learnings along the way. Join the mailing list to get them in your inbox.