Shu Ha Ri

I attended an interesting session at Agile 2011 this year, about applying Shu Ha Ri at the leadership level.  The talk was given by Bob Galen and talked about how it can be useful to take a look at an organization’s leaders, assess where they are in terms of Agile maturity, and consider this information when looking at implementing agile processes, or later to see how parts of the organization are performing.

Shu Ha Ri is a martial arts concepts, used to describe the stages of learning to mastery.  It translates roughly to ‘Learn, Detatch, Transcend’.  Basically, when practicing to mastery, you first learn techniques (or kata in martial arts) by the book, until you have that down. Then you are able to break from tradition, introducing your own alterations to the traditional techniques, in a way that still works.  Finally, once you have mastered that level, you are able to completely transcend, perhaps breaking new ground, able to teach others to mastery.

Applying this to Agile, Shu Ha Ri can be used to describe how teams learn to use agile processes, and how coaches master the ability to teach others to use agile.  First, we teach teams by the book.   Once they master that level, they can introduce alternatives to their process, in ways that still work, because at the level of mastery they have obtained in ‘Shu’, they understand the underlying principles and ‘why’ we do what we do.  When they have obtained the ability to think about what is truly working for them and what isn’t, and making tweaks to their process in a way that still embodies agile values, they have moved on to ‘Ha’.

Finally, once a person or team has mastered ‘Ha’, and becomes expert enough to consciously use the agile values framework in decision making, and perhaps has the ability to coach and teach others, they will have moved into ‘Ri’.

Bob Galen’s talk suggested that it could be valuable to see where your organization’s leaders are on the Shu Ha Ri spectrum, since it can be useful to have at least one ‘Ri’ in every group.   With my current company, the Product Development organization functions basically as one unit, under the direction of one Director of Engineering and one VP, and we have several people at the high ‘Ha’ and ‘Ri’ levels.  But in my last company, which had several major development groups each led by a different VP, with several Directors under each, I think it would have been useful to ensure we had one ‘Ri’ in each VP’s group to mentor the group in agile practices.

For those who are interested, here is a link to Bob’s presentation from the conference: SHU-HA-RI Applied to Agile Leadership.

I myself consider my own level to be somewhere between ‘Ha’ and ‘Ri’. I am able to modify the process to suit the situation while still adhering to agile principles and not ignoring the tough bits.  I am also able to teach others.  But I feel I still have a journey in front of me of teaching others and deepening my experience to the point where I feel comfortable calling myself a ‘Ri’.   It’s good to have a goal!

Golden Circle of Agile Transformation

Today at Agile 2011 I attended a session with Jean Tabaka, an Agile Fellow at Rally, entitled ‘The Golden Circles of Agile Transformation’. I really enjoyed this session. In it, Jean challenged us to think beyond the individual practices we are doing with our teams – standups and sprint reviews in Scrum, pair programming and continuous integration with XP, etc. She led us through determining what our ‘book of guidelines’ is: what are the guiding principles that we use to tell whether the practices we are using are effective and when we need to add, modify, or remove any of them. The Golden Circle refers to concentric circles with ‘What’ (the practices), ‘How’ (how we know whether they are working and when to change them) and the ‘Why’ of using Agile.

I have been thinking a lot about this lately as well. I feel that it is so critical to really develop high performing teams and high performing organizations, to go beyond doing Agile practices by rote and to use them because they support principles and values that matter to us.

At first, I thought perhaps she was referring just to the 12 Agile Principles behind the Agile Manifesto. Instead, in addition to those she suggested considering guidelines from Lean as well:

1. Eliminate waste
2. Amplify learning
3. Decide as late as possible
4. Deliver as fast as possible
5. Empower the team
6. Build integrity in
7. See the whole

Also, from Systems Thinking, Design Thinking, Complexity Theory, Cynefin. This gave me a few new avenues to research and absorb. The point is, we want to continuously improve and adapt, and the guidelines offer areas for us to consider in making choices about what improvements will either help solve the problem at hand, or make us even more high performing and satisfied in our work.

During the last bit, Jean challenged us to answer the question of ‘Why’ we do Agile. As she said, the ‘Why’ should a BHAG – a Big Hairy Audacious Goal, or a Social Purpose, that kind of thing. Interestingly, it was very very difficult for most people to come up with a good answer to that question, and she gave us several minutes to reflect on it. I admit that I struggled with this question as well. I was reminded of a talk that Globant CTO Guibert Englebienne gave while I was at Orbitz, where he said that in his experience, technologists need to feel that what they are doing serves some purpose higher than making money (which is mostly for someone else anyway). I can relate to that. Interestingly, Rally’s higher purpose is to transform the software industry into a zero carbon footprint industry, starting with themselves. Go Rally.

3-2-1 Blastoff

What a packed day. Today was the first full day of the Agile 2011 conference. I attended sessions on how to use Non-violent communication which was very interesting. This session provided some basic tools to think about the basic needs that all humans have, and how to take a coaching problem and use the analysis of what we need as humans to understand it from different angles. It also taught us how to separate observation from (often negative) evaluation, and how to apply that back to people’s feelings. If you can understand that, you can often unlock potential means of more effective coaching. Lastly, we did some exercises to consider what our own needs are as coaches – that tends to get lost in the day-to-day work of servant leadership to our teams but it is important to know and ground ourselves in order to be effective coaches for them.

In the afternoon, I attended Christopher Avery’s session called “Coaching Success: Getting People to Take Responsibility & Demonstrate Ownership” where he taught research on the Responsibility Process and how to practice it. That was pretty interesting from a psychological standpoint, but I feel like I need to read more about it to be able to really absorb it. Luckily, Christopher has more about this on his website at www.christopheravery.com.

Those two sessions took up the bulk of the day. At 5pm, they held a ‘Reunion’ session for the creation of the Agile Manifesto, which was basically a Q&A session to 15 of the 17 original authors. The session was humorous and pretty interesting as the authors basically recalled the meeting they had here in Salt Lake City 10 years ago where they drafted the manifesto.

Finally, the night ended with a reception – dinner, drinks and socializing. It’s been fun so far, I’m really looking forward to tomorrow and the rest of the week.