Don’t be a Killjoy

If I am dating myself with the title of this post, it was one of the more valuable take homes from my recent CSM Training Class. I had always considered myself to be very flexible and adaptable. However, during one group exercise, I was most definitely a Killjoy. This came during one of our opportunities to learn and adapt — an extremely important agile ability. I justified this (rationalized this) by “suggesting” to the group that we were not yet ready for a change one team-mate was trying to introduce since he had introduced it very late in our short planning period. We went through one more iteration and eventually did adopt this suggested change (it was indeed a breakthrough in the team’s output) with my full support.

However, there were three important things the instructor pointed out this particular exchange:

1. Don’t be afraid to “Fail Fast” — This was indeed my greatest fear. Given how late in the planning cycle my team-mate had suggested this change, I feared that our output would be even lower that previous iterations. No doubt we would have quickly realized that we did not all know what to do. This this fast failure leads to the second point. 
2. Don’t be afraid to dynamically adapt — Even during your iterations. I saw numerous times during this and other exercises that team members were constantly giving each other feedback and were adapting their techniques and methods mid-iteration. 
3. Lastly, how you deliver the message *is*important. When I said that I “suggested” we were not ready, it came across *much* more forcefully than a suggestion. While I know the person that suggested the idea knew I liked it, others on the team might have heard in my language that it “was a terrible idea”.  As I mentioned previously it was a good idea that we eventually adopted.

Don’t mistake “binary clarity” with being a Killjoy on rapid learning.