Make Your Agile Teams Uncomfortable

A conversation came up recently at work and it got me thinking about a topic that pops up here and there with my fellow APM’s at CareerBuilder. Typically, one of us will say something like this:

                  “I’m not sure my teams are really ready for ________. They aren’t comfortable with that.”

I really started thinking about this recently though, and isn’t that our job? Aren’t we responsible for making our teams uncomfortable and help push them out of their comfort zone? In my blog post last week, I talked about Experimentation & Learnings and how it is a major part of Agile. Not only do we need to experiment and learn about the software we are building, we also experiment and learn about ourselves as a team. That is a big reason we hold retrospectives on Agile teams; to reflect back and help make improvements for the future.

Where we fall short sometimes is not holding our teams accountable to honestly assess and push themselves to get better. Instead, we let them stay in their comfort zone and maintain status quo.

If you read articles I write, or have any lengthy conversation with me, you’ll quickly learn that I love to use metaphors (usually sports related) and I’m going to give an example here. I enjoy working out and have done so pretty much since I was 14 years old and preparing for high school football.

When you work out, you don’t ask yourself, “What weight am I comfortable with” and then proceed to lift that same weight every single time you go to the gym. If you did that, you don’t really get much stronger and your muscles don’t grow. Sure you would become extremely efficient at lifting THAT weight, and your strength would increase some, but you are really setting a very low ceiling on how much your overall strength will improve. On the flip side, you also don’t go in and try to lift a weight that you absolutely cannot do. You’ll fail at it a lot, get discouraged or even possibly injured, and give up.

The trick is finding a weight you can handle, but one that pushes you to the point of being uncomfortable. Your body is an intelligent system and when you push the weight to the uncomfortable point that fatigues your muscles, your body learns and adjusts so that it can start to handle that weight. The point at which you are uncomfortable is the point where growth occurs, or as the picture puts it: “Where the magic happens”!

One of the consistent arguments I hear against trying some of these things that make our teams uncomfortable is that they’ve done it in the past and it didn’t really work for them. Maybe their team tried Estimation, or Story Mapping, or conducting Retrospectives in the past, but they really didn’t get any value from it. Challenge that assumption though before completely ruling it out for your team. Perhaps they have a complete misperception on what a proper Retrospective or Story Mapping session should look like. As a kid, I “hated” Brussel sprouts and wanted nothing to do with them. Somewhere in my 20’s, I finally learned that what I thought was a Brussel sprout was actually an alfalfa sprout. Turns out I love Brussel sprouts and eat them all the time now. Maybe your team doesn’t like to Retro because a past team or past Scrum Master didn’t run an effective Retro, or even called something a Retro that really looked nothing like a Retro. Now you may try something with your team and find that they still don’t respond well to it or get value out of it, and that’s fine, but you at least have to try.

Part of your job as a Scrum Master is to help push your teams beyond their comfort zone and help them find that spot where they begin to focus on continual improvement. Only at that point, will we truly start to mature as an Agile team and see the results we are delivering increase exponentially.

One final note I’d like to make, I do not recommend that you come into a team and try to change everything or immediately push the team out of their comfort zone. For this to work, you have to start with building rapport and earning the trust of your team. Only then will they start to allow you to help push them.

In what ways are you pushing your team(s) out of their comfort zone? Please leave comments and let me know what you think. Even if you think I’m completely wrong, comment as well because we all grow through debating ideas and evolving our thoughts on Agile, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for reading!