I think the “agile industry” makes a lot of sense, but only in the light of the speculative IT boom that we have enjoyed for the last 10-12 years.

The nature of a low-cost-of-capital environment is to drive speculative investment. Speculative investment is based on some assumed future value, rather than the return (profits/dividends) that the investors get from owning the company.

The emphasis to growth metrics – more users, more events, more people, bigger brand identity and so on rather than financial ones.

You have too much money chasing too few things; things in this case include:

– skilled knowledge workers
– investment opportunities

Which tends to drive up prices and cost. Share prices and market valuations increase, and so do wages. People see the wages and a gold-rush economy kicks off.

You get boot-camps for developers, of course, but also for things like Scrum, SAFe and all of the other branded agile/lean approaches with their books, courses, gamified badges, certificates, bodies of knowledge and brands.

What has *not* been happening in many companies is a ruthless focus on lean concepts, especially around building quality in to reduce costs. In fact as the cash comes rom investors (not sales) the tendency is to keep them happy with new features, zombie-scrum style, while focussing on vanity metrics (rather than quality or cost)

A quick look at companies finances and you can sort the sheep from the goats, as it were. There are those who have billion dollar revenues but make no profit, despite a decade of cheap money to make it happen. In fact they are still spending $3 to make $2. Some of these are hailed as being “really agile”. Hmmm….

Of course those who wrote The Manifesto For Agile Software Development had ridden out this boom-bust economy before, in the dot-com boom. So they could see what was happening.

Scrum takes a lot of stick or this, but it’s a framework, and one that most people don’t really follow. They don’t give their teams product autonomy, often because they don’t have the core business and leadership experience in those teams.

And that’s back to “too much money chasing too few people”, the desire for growth at any cost, and the agile industrial complex.

And it’s also the nature of speculative bubbles….

Ah – lots off people will try and tell what you do and should not do as a Scrum Master.
They do the same when you have kids too.

Mostly it’s well meaning but not very helpful.

So yes, its better if the team can self-organise and self-facilitate their own events, however those are skills that take time to develop.

Is who facilitates the meetings the biggest impediment to your team’s performance?
Is it the biggest issue for the organsiation as a whole?

I so, then maybe think about starting towards training, coaching and mentoring them in facilitation and leaderships skills.

If not, then maybe focus on the biggest impediment first…

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….