When we flip the safety discussion over, we find trust. When I trust you I provide the safety you need to take risks and speak your truth without fear of ridicule, rejections or retribution. What Does Trust Mean? I like to use the following four beliefs I learned from Esther Derby to define trust in the workplace. I believe you have the ability to do the things you say you’ll do. I believe you will do the things you agree to do  – or let

Most of the time, most of the people don’t put a lot of thought into their behavior. They run an “auto-pilot” program that governs how they respond. If we examine the elements that generate behavior, we get something like this list: Physical sensations – information coming into us from “the real world”. Beliefs and Values – concepts and things important to us Feelings – both physical and self-esteem Data/facts – information I “know” Thoughts – What we do with the data/facts Intuition – Hunches based

We’ve defined safety to mean we can take risks and our coworkers/management will support us, especially if setbacks occur. We have the ability to speak our truth without fear of ridicule, rejection, or retribution. Throughout the day we will feel differently about the risks we’re willing to take and what we might say. I’ve seen conversations spin on a dime when a senior manager stuck his head in the conference room. How can we measure safety in the workplace? What does it mean to productivity?

When I talk with other coaches about teams, I  hear a lot about “creating safety” and “safe teams”. I don’t hear much about how to do that. While debriefing a coaching simulation the 2010 AYE Conference we listed things coaches did and models coaches might use. Someone said, “Create a safe environment”. I replied, “And how do we do that?” And out came ideas and suggestions on how to do that! I’ve been flipping through my agile books looking for discussions about teams and safety.

58 members of agile-RTP and I explored communication in agile teams March 2, 2010. I appreciate the turnout. The rain and temperature were falling. We kept warm and had a great time. Here’s the slide deck I had time for. Thank you again to Jeff Barschaw, the other agile-RTP organizers, and agile-RTP members!

Blog entries are posted. Should be properly linked and tagged. If you find a mistake, please let me know. I posted some articles while doing the blog. I’ll be adding the rest of the articles next.

Every so often I meet someone who asks, “Don, what do you do?” Over the years I’ve found the best way to answer this question involves asking what that person does, and then share part of my coaching experience that relates to what they do. You see, an agile coach does many things. What I do falls into one or more of the following categories: Coaching/Facilitation Consulting/Giving advice Mentoring/Guiding Training/Teaching Some Examples I once worked with a product owner who’s team hadn’t quite jelled. Four

I settled into the visitor’s chair across the desk from Nate. Looking at Nate I said “So tell me about your project.” RULE II: START WHERE THE SYSTEM IS1 Nate smiled and wistfully said: “Well, I’m the project manager and ScrumMaster. John will be the Product Owner. He works in our North East office. He should be able to represent the user community. He used to work in it. The tech lead and development team work in Europe.” Pausing he continued, “From what I’ve read,

Things change quickly in the world of software development. I started my career writing in Fortran 77. I stayed fairly abreast of languages until C++ and Java. I wandered by the Pragmatic Bookshelf to see what’s new. Languages/Frameworks I’ve barely heard of include: Erlang, ANTLR, Stripes, Cocoa, Scala, Groovy and Clojure. I see that Learn to Program uses Ruby. Maybe I should start there. And in the beginning “The learning of a thousand languages begins with a single keystroke.” (with apologies to the original author)

In Better Process, Better People I talked about retrospectives as a process for learning and improvement. My colleague Esther Derby and I will be conducting two one day workshops on Effective Agile Retrospectives. If you want to make the retrospectives you lead more effective, we would enjoy having you participate in the workshop. We’ll be in North Carolina in March.