The best thing to do is to plan for the unplanned work…

That can take a few forms; one route is to leave a “buffer” for that unplanned work; in practice a buffer is *usually* a good idea anyway in a Scrum context. if you aim for the mean (average) velocity then half the time you will do more, and half the time you will do less.

Having a buffer might also give you enough breathing space to be able to actually set a Sprint Goal, and start working towards the Product Goal step by step, doing Scrum “for real”

In a Scrum sense you’d not usually ingest work that might imperil the Sprint Goal, and so a buffer allows you to pick up service tickets and still make progress.

If you don’t want to do that, then maybe look at the Kanban Method; there you just pull work from the backlog. In the Kanban Method you have “classes of service”, one of which is Expidite; that’s pretty much where urgent work goes.

However, there’s some deeper stuff to maybe unpack…

– do you triage the production support tickets? Classifying them as “now”, “next Sprint” and “backlog” might be useful. Remember the Product Owner’s role is often about saying no to things, not saying yes to everything.

– what generates the production support tickets? Can you do anything to eliminate or automate them?

I think there’s a couple of things here.

Firstly, there’s a difference between empathy and sympathy.

There’s lots of definitions out there but as part of my ICF-accredited coaching course, the ones we used were:

– empathy is being able to understand something from another person’s perspective
– sympathy is when you agree with that position, and become emotionally invested

So in that context, you are both empathic – in that you can see their perspective – and sympathetic – in that you become emotionally invested, to the extent that you lose objectivity.

The second thing is what happens when we get emotionally invested.

No matter what the emotion, the brain tends to withdraw resources (things like glucose) from the cognitive centre of the brain (the prefrontal context) towards the emotional centre, where we “pattern match” and act on instinct more. As a result, our IQ actually drops a bit. We are less creative, and therefore less able to support other effectively.

So – at a point. “climbing inside the bottle” with those we aim to serve as leaders can be a bit of a problem, and we do need to keep an eye on our own emotional state, and how we regulate that.

Some key things I find are

– a walk-and-talk is usually better for challenging subjects; we can’t get overly emotional, walk, and talk at the same time. (try it!)

– think HALT – am I hungry, angry, late or tired; if you are under going these stressors – or other stressors – then its harder to stay “out of the bottle”

– doing an ICF-accredited transformative coaching course really helped; we did months of practice coaching “in the coaching dojo” that helped to separate the context of the conversation from how someone relates to that context. Your brain retrains accordingly.

That’s not saying sympathy is a bad trait, just that it can start to limit your professional effectiveness as a coach if it starts to dominate, and that doesn’t serve your teams or organisations well….