Hi Everyone - My name is Adele. Currently, I’m a freelance coach and adviser working with Bay Area startups on Agility and Strategy. I’ve previously worked as a Program Manager, a ScrumMaster, and as a Professional Fixer (kinda like Olivia Pope on but with less scandal and less yelling.)

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My talk today is about soft skills. I’m going to assume that this room is full of active or potential change agents. Regardless of where you are in your Agile Journey, whether you are just starting to adopt Scrum or have been using it for years - we’re all agitating for continuous improvement. And that work, the work of influencing - influencing people / influencing culture - takes lots of empathy and lots of tenacity.

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Lemme begin by taking a quick poll of the room. How many of you would say that you have a skeptical nature? At least in some contexts? How many of you would say that you have a rebellious streak? Sometimes? Do you guys work in tech? Joking aside, these are very human impulses - we all both seek and resist change in mixed, messy, highly personal and context-dependent ways.

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Now in this talk I’m going to use “The Rebel” and “The Skeptic” as archetypes for the purpose of naming some patterns but I don’t want you to go home and sort your teammates and relatives into these categories. Remember that human beings oscillate. We’re mercurial, twitchy creatures. Embrace that. I don’t mean literally. Not everyone likes hugging.

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So what do I mean when I say The Rebel? Rebels break rules. They disrupt. They explore new things. “The early bird gets the worm” is a Rebel attitude. What about The Skeptic? They question. They doubt. They exercise caution. They’d remind the “early-bird” Rebels that it’s the second mouse that gets the cheese.

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You’ll start to see these patterns at micro and macro levels. You’ll see individuals behave as rebels or skeptics at retrospectives. And you’ll see that whole organizations often seem to have a rebellious or skeptical character. Most startups, for example tend to have more “Rebel” cultures. Which makes sense. They’re born of a impulse to disrupt, to challenge the status quo, to innovate.

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Now let’s look at the interactions between these patterns and Scrum. We’ll be zooming in and out, looking at individuals and at organizations. I also want to separate out the initial leap into Scrum from the later, normalized, ongoing, experience of it. For example, if we imagine Scrum as a physical boxed product, I’m talking about the different worlds of judging and deciding to buy it at the store vs. continuing to use it after you’ve brought it home.

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Traditionally, how have we marketed Scrum? At the store, on the box, we’ve highlighted it’s “newness” (for the Rebels) and it’s “provenness” (for the Skeptics).

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Traditionally - I hope you catch that I’m foreshadowing with that word - I think the Rebel appeal was the tipping point that helped make the sale. Rebel individuals and Rebel organizations have shown a natural attraction to Scrum. They love the leap. You’re asking them to go someplace new.

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But times are changing. As Agile and Scrum age and spread and become more mainstream they lose some of that rebel aura or cool factor. This may sound silly. But that perception, that narrative of being part of the vanguard of a new way of working has fueled a lot of adoption. But it’s wearing thin.

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The stronger “pitch” these days seems to be Scrum’s “provenness,” but that’s an inherently weaker position. Highlighting “newness” for Rebels is encouraging them to follow their natural tendencies. Highlighting “provenness” for skeptics is trying to do enough to dampen or mitigate their natural tendencies. You’re going against rather than along with existing momentum.

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So what do we do? How do we pitch Scrum? We change the frame. We change the conversation. Let’s move away from the descriptors on the packaging and take a closer look at what’s inside the box. To my eyes, one of the most exciting things I see is a collection of habits. I like to view Scrum as a collection of individual and team habits.

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Why is this exciting or significant? Habits are having kinda a moment. For a variety of reasons. One of which is a deepened understanding of how they work in the brain emerging from research in neuroscience. And the other is the broad publication and popularization of those findings.

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Let’s look at habits. Wildly simplified, for individuals, the creation of habits preserves mental energy. It’s like a form of automation. A mental “if this then that.” The brain treats a habit as a single unit of behavior. This is important because of the phenomenon of decision fatigue. Decisions, whether trivial or serious, sap the same supply. Whereas habits don’t tap that same resource.

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By offloading some decision work, building habits frees up mental energy that you can then pour into your core creative work. My own inner rebel and skeptic alike, find that compelling. And I’ve found it an effective way to frame Scrum conversations with my teammates. We’ve moved forward by discussing Scrum practices as habits.

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So are we done? Do we bring discussions of habits into our discussions of Scrum and enjoy a glide path to success? Not so fast! Habits become habits through repetition and before a new behavior feels automatic it will feel like following rules. And in that realm of expectations and our relationships to rules we will once again find our friends “The Rebel” and “The Skeptic.”

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Let’s take the The Skeptic first this time. They’re questioners. They need to understand the why of every rule or practice. Why do standups? Why plan? Why in that way? Why do sprint reviews? Why hold a retrospective? This is healthy. Skeptics keep us honest. As Scrum Professionals or Enthusiasts we should be able to answer those whys. We need to think critically about whys ourselves. Seek to understand the why or every rule (5 whys deep!) and try to understand not just the intention behind it but the mechanism by which it works. Why does it work?

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Now what about the pesky, rule-breaking Rebels. What do you do about them? You give them a higher-stakes arena for those Rebel impulses. There’s a Flaubert quote I love that I’m going to paraphrase for you: Be regular and ordinary is your life (in your daily routines) so that you may be violent and original in your work (your creative output). That’s the message for Rebels. Get them onboard with habit creation by pushing them to rebel where it will really count, where it will lead to technological breakthrough and/or innovative products.

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In closing, you’ve no doubt noticed that these impulses often pull in opposite directions, but it’s not a battle, it’s a balance, it’s a polarity to be managed. We all crave both security and discovery. That dance is lifelong.

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Thank you all! I finalized these slide last week (May 2015), full of sports fan hope. I still love my Spurs even after the Game 7 loss! I’m a Pacquiao fan too. Saturday was rough. This was my first Pecha Kucha and it was fun! Please stop me halls or direct message me on twitter to chat more about these topics! I’d also like to try to get a group together to go on a night hike. The Arizona desert is beautiful and we’re here during the full moon.

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