August 22, 2025 • 46 mins
In this episode, we discuss how to re-engage Agile Communities of Practice during periods of declining participation by clarifying their purpose, fostering psychological safety, rotating facilitators, designing for active involvement, and introducing new, relevant topics to keep the community thriving.
Join Shawna Cullinan, Jörg Pietruszka, Diana Larsen, Sheila Eckert, Sheila McGrath, April Mills, Hendrik Esser, Ray Arell, and all the callers to the monthly live event as we explore this topic. For details on the next live event or how to support our show, please visit acnpodcast.org.
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Episode Transcript
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Music (00:00):
Ray Arell (00:07):
Good evening, everyone.
Welcome to the Agile CommunityNetwork.
My name's Ray Arell.
I'm the moderator and one ofthe hosts of this monthly
podcast and live event.
We go through a number ofdifferent topics.
If you're new to Agile, itdoesn't matter.
If you've been in Agile for along time, we want to hear those
perspectives.
That's what builds greatcommunity.
I'd like to thank the sponsorsof the show, as well as the
(00:30):
people who listen to thepodcast, because that's what
helps to keep us going.
We also have supporting membersthat They go up to
acnpodcast.org.
They make donations for us,which keeps our webinar system
paid for.
It helps us to be able toproduce the show on a monthly
basis.
So thank you for everyone whohas been helping us along the
(00:51):
years.
We have some sponsors that alsocontribute either in-kind
contribution in time, as well asfinancial dollars to help pay
for those things I just talkedabout.
The Agile Alliance, CicadaOrganizational Agility,
Diana Larsen.com, Engine forChange and New Agility And then
we have a handful of membersthat have actually become a part
(01:12):
of our community on NewAgility.
Those dollars also help to gosupport the show as well.
I'm joined monthly by a set ofco-hosts.
Not every one of them makes iteach time, but the co-hosts help
to get the conversationrolling.
That includes Shauna, Diana,Jorg, Sheila Eckhart, Sheila
McGrath, April Mills, andHendrick.
They have been supporting theshow for years.
(01:35):
They offer their insights andgive us an ability to encircle
the space that we're looking atand help to keep the campfire
going as we go through theconversation.
Today's topic spans from acouple of different observations
that I've had over the lastcouple of months.
I'll relate this directly tothe Agile community.
When I go to events at AgilePDX, which is here in Portland
(01:58):
or other open space places thatare typically free to go to,
I've noticed a bit of a downturnin the community.
If you went to the Agileconference over in Denver, there
were far less people that werethere this year than in prior
years.
And that's, this could be aneconomic factors.
(02:18):
It could be a whole set ofdifferent things associated to
it.
But what I've noticed is, isthat Agile as a community
appears, and I'll use the wordappear, it seems to be a little
more silent than it used to be.
And this is something I reallywant to fix.
Having built some communitiesof practice in the past, I
(02:39):
wanted to just go through myperspective on how rebuilding
community works or building anew community.
And I approach it from a coupledifferent things, which is one,
we need to have a purpose ofwhy we're getting together.
And that purpose is for us tolearn about Agile in the case of
the Agile community, or itmight be for other job-related
(03:02):
things that we're doing, or itcould be for an adjacent
community.
could be any purpose.
But it sparks us to say thatthese are the things we're going
to talk about.
This is the direction thatwe're going to go.
There's the growth phase withit, which is starting with a
group of people to get together.
And then you really want tohave a design for participation.
(03:23):
I try to keep the monologue inthe front of this kind of light
because I want to hear from you.
I want to get the participationgoing.
And really, we want to get intothe meat of the Provide
scaffolding, not bureaucracy.
We don't want to create rulesthat stifle sharing great
stories.
And really, if you think aboutwhat most communities, the
(03:47):
center of the communities arethose stories, the stories of
wins, the stories of how wemight have not been so
successful, key learnings thatwe had, and opening that up for
a lot of people to go sharethose around.
And then renew.
From time to time, communitiesof practice, I've seen the ones
that I've done internal tocompanies, they might start off
(04:09):
really strong and everyone's inhigh attendance, and then
suddenly you see it start towean.
I think that comes from thefact that we don't check the
pulse of the community thatoften and really think about how
can we experiment with theformats, how can we experiment
with the things that we do inorder to foster the evolution of
the community.
In Agile, we have a manifesto,and it's been, I would say, and
(04:35):
please don't take this wrong,but It's been pretty stagnant
for 20 years.
It's a historical document, aswe've talked about before.
The question is, are theresteps we can take to refresh it
or still point back to theoriginal document year over year
as there's new trends in theenvironment?
How can we keep it fresh?
How can we keep people comingin and joining?
(04:57):
And if people leave, how do weinvite them back?
How do we bring them back toour community?
With that, what I'd like tohear is, do you have your own
story about a great community ofpractice success or learning
and I reframe the word failureinto learning because I believe
that all there's not reallytruly a catastrophic failure
(05:18):
it's really just about uslearning together what steps
would you add to the list that Ijust gave is there anything
that you would add to keep acommunity vibrant or to grow
community what part of agileneeds to evolve to keep it
relevant I'd love to hear thatas well if this whole line of
questioning is interesting, butyou have a different purpose in
(05:40):
mind in order to come heretoday, you're welcome to ask
that question of the moderatorsand the group, and we can talk
about that as well.
So with that, to get us going,Shauna, you haven't been here
for a few months.
Love to hear your perspective.
Shawna Cullian (05:59):
Thanks, Ray.
So there's quite a few thingsto peel out from here.
I think I'm going to focus oncommunity of practice, a
community as a whole.
I have a community of practicethat I started pulling some key
people from differentorganizations that I worked in
(06:20):
that I thought were talkingabout the same things and would
be really excited to cometogether.
We started in 2021 towards theend of the pandemic.
That community of practice isstill going on today.
We do it once a month.
One of the things that I thinkwas is really important with any
community of practice is tounderstand and start with a
(06:42):
shared why.
Remind everybody why we'recoming together, ensure that we
all have the same values.
What are we here to share?
Is it knowledge?
Is it building skills?
Is it solving problems?
Why are we here and comingtogether so that we can level
step and make sure that we allhave that common purpose?
And so from there, we cancenter ourselves on what the
(07:06):
discussions every time we cometogether can really be about.
And so those having tangibleoutcomes, not just using
communities of practice to feellike it's another meeting as a
place to vent or complain.
I think that's not always greatin bringing people together and
it kind of reinforces anegative energy.
(07:27):
I really like to have peoplecome to the table with the
problems that they are trying tosolve.
Thinking ahead of time, one ofus will play the group and say,
what kind of problems are youfacing today that this group can
help you with?
And we'll use that time to dothat.
I think ensuring to keep itfresh, rotating facilitation,
(07:51):
rotating who's coming in andspeaking about or bringing their
thing to the table that theywant this group to problem solve
on is really important.
And going back to the why,revisiting that purpose every
six months.
What is every six to 12 months?
Is this working?
Is it not working?
What do we need to do to changethe format of this?
(08:11):
But I think it's reallyimportant to bring things that
you can actively talk on.
If you just show up and say,what are we going to talk about
today without having a clearpurpose, really people start
losing interest.
Those are some key things aboutthe community of practice.
Ray Arell (08:29):
I'm kind of curious when you're taking the pulse of
the group and you do that firstinitial chartering of the group
and maybe these are the five I'mcurious, how do you not make
three or four people who mighthave their idea not chosen?
Shawna Cullian (08:53):
This is why I think it's important to keep the
communities of practicesmaller.
I have found that largercommunities of practice or
communities that you arebringing to the table, together.
Oftentimes voices can feeldrawn out and heard.
My community of practice hasfour to five people at any given
(09:14):
time that attend.
If you're looking for a brownbag or a reading group or
something like that, then, youknow, that's less intimate.
That may have a differentpurpose.
Then I think it's good to bringmore people in.
But I think having an intimategroup where people feel safe to
talk about things is importantas part of the community.
(09:36):
of practice.
Ray Arell (09:37):
That makes a lot of sense.
I'm curious, as thefacilitator, are you helping to
like say those three people,they have something in common
and those people have somethingin common?
Are you encouraging themsomehow to get together and work
on that stuff and then comeback to the main group?
What is your facilitation?
Shawna Cullian (09:52):
I mean, at this point, in the beginning, it was
a little more facilitatedbecause people were just getting
to know each other.
At this point, I thinkeverybody has established pretty
strong relationships.
And so So, you know, they theyare chatting outside of the
community of practice andthey're attending each other.
You know, they all have theirown events that they'll run.
(10:14):
And within that community,everybody's participating in
each other's events.
And we've just kind of allbecome friends.
And so it hasn't been such ait's no longer a poll.
Right.
It's like we enjoy beingtogether.
OK,
Ray Arell (10:27):
that is awesome.
Thank you so much for that.
Let's see, Scott, what do youhave on this?
Hey, good to hear from you.
Scott (10:36):
So.
So I started a community ofpractice a while back with new
scrum masters that wereinterested in learning more
about the role.
In the beginning of thatcommunity of practice, we met
every other week for an hour.
I would throw out in Miro athought-provoking question,
like, how do you promotecontinuous improvement within
your team?
Or how do you buildpsychological safety within your
(10:58):
team so that we have somethingto kick us off with?
The participants were able toadd either with a written card
or verbally their thoughtsaround these topics.
If these topics morphed intodifferent topics throughout the
hour, that was fine as well.
As the group progressed, I gotthe feeling it seemed more like
a cohort than a community ofpractice.
(11:20):
So I started asking other folkswithin the team to start coming
with their own thoughts orquestions or if there were
topics they wanted to present tothe team to go ahead and do
that.
So we've been doing that latelyover the past couple of months.
And to some of the commentsalready made, right after this
(11:41):
meeting, I asked somebody elseon a team to conduct a retro
with the team to see where we'reat, where we can improve.
What should we do more of?
What should we do less of tosee if we can bring this and
iterate it to the next level?
Ray Arell (11:56):
Oh, nice.
So I'm kind of curious on theMiro perspective.
I don't think we do enoughasynchronous things in
communities of practice.
We do better in circles andface-to-face.
to face when we're together.
In your Miro model, are youactually having some of that
work go on asynchronous?
And you said as the ideasevolve, you're allowing that to
(12:18):
grow in the background?
Scott (12:20):
Well, it really all happens together.
So basically what happens, andagain, we're all remote.
So being able to do this inperson is not really something
we can accommodate.
We do the best we can by usinga tool like Miro, where it's a
question I put on the screen ina box.
And then I have a whole bunchof sticky notes.
I give the group a few minutesto say, if you have anything
(12:44):
that you want to talk aboutrelated to this question,
anything you're doing with yourteam currently that you want to
share, go ahead and put that ona sticky, put it on the board,
and we'll just go around theroom and talk about these
different things and see if wecan come up with ideas that you
may be able to bring back toyour team.
At the end of the day, it'strying to help these new scrum
(13:05):
masters generate options thatthey can go help their teams
with so that hopefully theirteams are better tomorrow than
they are today.
Ray Arell (13:13):
Thank you for that.
Diana Larson, what'd you have?
Diana Larsen (13:17):
Yeah, I was intrigued by another Scott,
Scott Sampson, who was askingabout who gets invited and
whether or not the businesswould get involved or invited.
Participation in the communityof practice is a significant
thing to look at.
Every community of practice Ihave been involved with has been
(13:38):
a community of practitionersfocused on a certain area.
You could have a community ofpractice of the business folks,
the product folks or so-and-so,but it's generally, unless
you're really enlarging the ideaof what the practice involves,
(14:01):
you're not going to includeanyone who might say, whose
presence might suppress theparticipation of the general
group you were intending tohave.
So that, and I think there'ssome important things to look at
(14:22):
there.
I mean, like you mentionedretrospectives, and if we're
doing team retrospectives, it'sonly for the team.
If we're doing a releaseretrospective, we might have
some business people there orsome you know, so on.
So I hold to the same rulesabout the community of practices
(14:42):
that I get involved in.
And mine very often aretopical.
Like I'm in a community ofpractice that meets in person
annually, but also has a, it'snot a Slack, but like a Slack
thing that we use in betweenwhen we meet annually.
(15:03):
That is all about facilitatingretrospectives.
So it's a community of practiceof retrospective facilitators.
Until someone has reallyexpressed an interest in how
they facilitate retrospectivesor how they would like to learn
more about facilitatingretrospectives, that wouldn't be
someone that we wouldnecessarily invite to be part of
(15:25):
the group.
It's how do you define whoparticipates in this particular
group?
So I just wanted to throw thatin because I saw Scott's
question there and I want tomake sure it got an answer.
Ray Arell (15:38):
Well, I thought that that's a great answer.
I'm curious.
And you are a very talentedfacilitator.
I've watched you work.
I don't know, you know, it'ssort of like, hey, Dumbledore,
how do you do this magic trick?
How do you get an individualthat invites themselves that
really shouldn't be there?
How do you deal with that?
(15:59):
I've had that happen multipletimes.
I believe in boundaries.
Diana Larsen (16:05):
As maybe you could tell from my earlier answer.
I believe that there are peoplethat inclusion is a benefit and
that inclusion has boundariesas well.
And so a person needs to have areason for being there, or I
would invite them not to come.
(16:27):
In the communities of practiceI'm a part of, it's not just my
responsibility to say, no, thisthis isn't your kind of meeting
or this isn't a meeting where wehave observers, for instance.
If you're just coming toobserve this meeting, unless you
have an intention to join itand participate later, this
(16:50):
isn't a meeting we want you.
I don't believe everybody hasstanding in every single
meeting.
So I think you have toestablish, does this person have
standing in this meeting ornot?
Do they have something tocontribute or some way to
benefit from it.
That's usually my heuristic.
Will you both benefit andcontribute to this meeting?
(17:13):
Then you're somebody that wewould love to have here.
If you just are coming to takewhat you can get, not
contribute, then you don't havea reason to be here.
Who is it that the observer isthe observed?
Likely to affect the course ofthis meeting in maybe intended
or unintended ways, but not inbeneficial ways.
(17:38):
Usually it's a groupresponsibility for who they
invite or don't invite.
It's not just one person'sresponsibility to make that
happen.
Ray Arell (17:49):
Yeah, I was more curious about when you vote
somebody off the island.
Is it the dear sir or madam,thank you very much for
attending our community ofpractice.
We'd like to inform you.
I'm not sure how formal you getthere.
You just use the personalconversation with the person.
I feel
Diana Larsen (18:04):
like Scott's comment in the chat.
Ray Arell (18:06):
You have no power here.
You have no power.
You have to have faith to usethat manifesto.
Well, thank you for that.
Dennis, what do you have?
Dennis (18:18):
Oh, hi, Ray.
Ray, you had the question, whyis engagement lower today in
some of the communities ofpractice?
And I've got a long-termobservation because I've been
involved in stuff way beforeAgile where we had to build
communities of practice to haveeffective technology transfer.
In a challenging employmentenvironment, we are all
(18:43):
reluctant to admit that we arestill learning.
We pretend that our skill setis complete.
To run off to a community ofpractice or a seminar would be a
sign of weakness.
And in the community ofpractice environment, why share
(19:03):
what we know with our potentialcompetitors?
Even if it's an internalcommunity of practice, if
layoffs are coming, other peoplein our company are potential
competitors for us.
You know, we want them to belaid off before us.
Basically, we've lost thespirit of exploration and can't
(19:27):
imagine a win-win collaboration.
I don't know what the solutionis, except maybe we need to
socialize more about some of thewin-win successes we've had,
grow from that and say, hey, youcould be part of this process
too.
I think what we're having iscycles where we're We say, oh,
(19:49):
we really want to learn, come upto speed.
And then the other part of thecycle is just fear.
That's interesting.
Ray Arell (19:56):
That's an interesting perspective.
Knowledge hoarding was aninteresting trend way back when.
I've seen it.
Maybe that is some root causeto that.
I appreciate your opinion onthat.
April Mills, what do you have?
April Mills (20:10):
I'm maybe coming from a different perspective,
thinking about a decade ago,what it looked like when we
revealed Agile community andtoday to the last comments point
about the sense of competitionwithin companies and outside of
companies that shift from weneed each other in order to make
(20:35):
this work to a scarcitymindset.
There might not be enough forall of us to do.
I think it's one of my mostconcerning trends that seems to
be happening.
And I think for those of us whojoin a call like this, it's our
opportunity to actually helpreframe that scarcity back to
(20:59):
abundance, which from myperspective, I would say there
might not be as many agile codedjobs, not agile coding, but
coded, right?
An agile coach or a scrummaster or others in
organizations of the future.
But there is an abundance needfor agile thinking and being
(21:21):
agile in order for companies tothrive now and in the future.
I would say it's an opportunityfor those of us who are
passionate about the practice ofbeing agile to lean into
community and encourage othersto join us by broadening it out
from just getting agilepositions or how to succeed in
(21:43):
agile positions to being agileand change agents and the
attributed habits, behaviors,and mindsets across
organizations.
That would help us rebuildcommunity in the places where
we've lost it and strengthen ourown confidence and our own
networks, which helps uslong-term for our own careers
(22:05):
and our own sanity.
Ray Arell (22:08):
I think it's kind of curious that our old alma mater,
Intel Corp, in their latestannouncement of another set of
layoffs, said that they're doingit to rebuild agility.
I mean, directly to be a moreagile organization.
Not quite sure how that equateswhen you have a lot more work
(22:29):
on people's plates, but it'sjust interesting.
I mean, did you read that?
Did you have a perspective onthat?
April Mills (22:36):
Yeah, I think, unfortunately, a lot of that
ends up being core We say whatwe want to say so that people
feel good about what we'resaying.
Engineering first, agile.
These are things which are goodto say, but hard to do in
practice.
And we've seen that a lot, notjust at our alma mater, but
plenty of places where the rightwords come out and the wrong
(22:56):
actions continue.
Call me a realist in thatsense, which is love it.
Show me.
Ray Arell (23:02):
So it's the marketing side of the business.
Exactly.
Well, thank you for that.
Dylan, what do you have?
Dylan (23:09):
Thank you so much.
My thing that I was going totalk about has changed as each
successive person spoke, whichis a great signifier that
there's a lot of goodinformation happening here.
But I do believe that this,it's not a silver bullet because
it's not easy.
It's not fire and done.
But the outcomes, the impact ofthe work that we do, I do think
(23:34):
will remain an area wheresomeone who is an advocate Thank
you so much.
So I don't think that the agilemovement is dying.
(24:13):
I think there is a healthyemphasis on what we contribute
when working with the othermembers of the team, which is
where our value has always been.
Ray Arell (24:27):
Yeah.
I mean, one thing just toclarify, I wasn't saying that I
believe there are just as manyagile people as there used to
be.
What I don't see them doing ishanging around each other,
sharing their stories.
Dylan (24:38):
Good call.
Good call.
Ray Arell (24:41):
I could use more of that as well.
(25:02):
Put your hand back up so I canfind you.
There you go.
Valerie.
Valerie (25:14):
Hi.
Thank you.
I just wanted to kind of expandupon with Dennis what he was
sharing.
In regards to my experience, Ifelt like as an agile coach, I
would reach out to differentareas of people's expertise or
interests.
So I would have a community ofpractice for product owners,
(25:35):
scrum managers, and agilecoaches.
And agile coaches were morelike trainers because we were
doing a lot of getting folkscertified.
With Dennis's point, my Agiletrainers and coaches, I felt
like there was a little bit ofknowledge hoarding going on.
I think that was the words thatyou used, right?
And which I was reallysurprised because I'm like,
(25:57):
okay, you all are kind of likethe top layer of, you know, the
Agile community and it's likeyou don't want to share amongst
yourselves.
So I It was just kind of aninteresting takeaway.
And the way I would keep theconversations going, I would
create a confluence page foreach of the communities and ask
(26:21):
them to create a topic.
So that way, whatever topic wasselected, when I would meet on
a monthly basis for each of thedifferent communities, it's
something of everyone'sinterest.
And then I would record it andthen post it onto the confluence
page so that those thatcouldn't make it could listen to
(26:42):
it later.
Everyone knew it was beingrecorded.
So I felt like everyone spokeopenly and freely.
But yeah, I just wanted toexpand upon Dennis that I was
surprised that my top tier,agile, knowledge base people
were the last ones engaged tomeet on a regular basis.
But scrum masters and productowners, for the most part, they
(27:03):
were really excited to come to acommunity or product test.
Ray Arell (27:07):
I'm kind of curious, because you hit on that A,
asynchronous component again.
Now, Confluence is a database,right?
It's a page library.
Valerie (27:14):
Yes.
Ray Arell (27:14):
Correct?
Yes, it is.
So I'm kind of curious.
So you have this discussion,put the video of it, and then
you're offering it wide, which Ithink is great.
I think most communities ofpractice, time zones really get
in the way.
Do you then leave the page openand allow people to put in
comments and keep theconversation rolling underneath
(27:35):
that?
Valerie (27:35):
I did leave it up for comments.
It was really more soknowledge-based.
if folks wanted to come back tothat particular community
practice, but maybe because of ameeting, because I would take
into consideration the time.
But a lot of times that wasreally hard because it was
between the West Coast and maybeAsian time zone.
Okay,
Jorg Pietruszka (27:55):
makes sense.
If I may, I want to pick thisapart so that there's community
and practice.
Very often I prefer to startoff with building community
because it allows for discoverypotential for practice,
especially if you're doing thisinternally with a company where
you don't know exactly wherethey stand on what they're
(28:17):
actually doing, bringing somepeople together who are curious
into the new stuff and openingup that discussion.
First, getting them to alignthat, yes, we want to share,
yes, we want to improve, yes, wewant to talk about it.
Keep that up, even if theytotally stray from the topic.
So somebody new comes in says Idon't know exactly how stuff
(28:42):
works and it's not about thatbut we help him that's a good
thing to open up minds fortrying something new bringing
their real talent to bearseparating a bit building the
community or improving thepractice at least at the start
of whatever gathering you'redoing it's quite helpful in a
(29:05):
way and for the practice I findworking a lot with engineers
that That is something they grabmuch more easily.
In my management role, I put inchallenges like, this is how
you can help me.
So get together and help mewith that one, which nobody has
ever asked or nobody inmanagement has ever cared of
your opinion.
But now I want you to answerthat question.
(29:26):
I'm not going to promisesomething will happen, but at
least you can sometimes ventyour frustration.
And then they come up with newpractices suddenly where they
were stuck before becausesuddenly there's interest.
Maybe then on top, there'sactually one kind of community
that has evolved.
My project team and later on, alot of people showed me that it
(29:49):
started as a simple projectmeeting.
Like, where are we?
What are we going to do?
Nothing specific.
But with success in theproject, it became much more a
community of praise.
This is what we achieved.
I'm proud of having done thisand it now goes on for years.
Nice to be here.
Tell me what has happened andmake me proud of the team.
(30:10):
Every week they come up withsomething big, surprising, but
it's really a fun thing to do.
Ray Arell (30:16):
I'm kind of curious.
Some of the thread of what I'veheard through what you've
talked about, do you think yourrole as the steward of one of
these communities is just tosometimes give people
permission?
Jorg Pietruszka (30:28):
Yeah, definitely, especially for the
community building stuff thatimmediately falls to you if
you're the first person and toset it up to write the invite.
A lot of people just, at leastin Germany, with my major
friends, they always tend to askfor permission, even ask for
(30:50):
permission to, I can only joinfor the first half of the
meeting, should I come?
And they can decide forthemselves if there's value in
they're always welcome to join.
So that one is practicallyeasy, but it isn't.
A lot of my time is spent ofpushing the responsibility to
the team.
opening this up, especially inthe new ones.
(31:11):
I always have an opener.
I have a warm-up question.
I have a topic.
I always have a visual for thetopic because some people need
something to see or read.
I try to give room first forthe really urgent things.
What's really bothering youtoday?
Can we as a community help youget along?
(31:32):
And you ask that question 10times and don't get any
response.
On the 11th, then some Somebodysuddenly says, yeah, I really
have something that I want toget out of my head and discuss
and get your ideas.
I very often find myselftalking too much in those
situations and nobody stops me.
If you have a great idea how tomore easily hand over, I would
(31:55):
really appreciate that one.
A
Ray Arell (31:57):
lot of times communities tend to be like a
junior high school dance.
People are on the walls lookingat each other.
Will they dance with me or not?
I think it does require aspecial song or something to get
people going.
It takes time to nurture acommunity.
Thank you for that. Alireza!Are you there?
Alireza (32:19):
Yes, I'm here.
I wanted to share my storyabout the CoP.
This is about a company aboutsize of 800 to 1,000 game
industry, educational gameindustry.
So, so many different practicesin there.
Animators, illustrators,engineers, QA, like about like
12 different trades in the sameteam and departments working
(32:42):
together.
I was there as the enterpriseagile coach.
We had our weekly center ofexcellence meetings that
everyone were joining.
But what I've done was going toand try to find like alliance
with someone, finding championsfrom director of animation, one
person from the engineeringteam, one person from each of
(33:03):
these trades that were actuallyjoining us to our community of
practice for Agile.
But then we started after acouple of months, we started the
community of practice inanimation where all these
animators got together on aweekly, biweekly, monthly basis,
but whatever they thought isright.
And then just talk about theirpractice.
(33:24):
That was very helpful.
Like we saw that they wereworking on silo from their
practice in one team.
So we couldn't have threeanimators in one team.
We had several of them in onedepartment, but the whole
company had about 20 animatorswho met weekly or biweekly and
shared their practice, theirsuccess, what they've done,
(33:46):
especially when we hit the AIwave, when like in 2021, 2022,
AI started coming, that helpedthem a lot to keep themselves
relevant because there was theseone or two people who learned
about AI, how to use it in thepractice, illustrators, artists,
and brought that to thatcommunity of practice to help
(34:08):
the company to change towardbecoming an AI first.
So that was a success story.
I think it was very, very greatand build up energy in
different departments, not justour project managers.
That's the start.
Ray Arell (34:25):
Well, cool.
Thank you so much for that.
I think that's a great story.
Sheila McGrath (34:28):
One of the things that I'm thinking about
is in the organizations whereI've been, I've been a
consultant.
And a lot of times thecommunity of practice is set up
intentionally or by accidentonly for employees.
Therefore, I and otherconsultants would not be
(34:49):
included.
I wouldn't even know they werehaving meetings.
I found out about the meetingsand got us included.
But in other places, I didn'tnecessarily know that they were
having, they're going off to ameeting.
They go off to a lot ofmeetings that are employee-only
meetings that have nothing to dowith me.
I don't have a lot ofexperience with being included
in the community of practice,unless it was in some
(35:12):
organizations, they call it acommunity of practice, but it's
really standards.
And they come out with astandard list of things you must
do, and that's about it.
Yeah, I know that's not whatyou're thinking of.
That's not what it should be,but that's what my reality has
been.
Ray Arell (35:30):
Well, I'm kind of curious because, I mean, there
is one, having been a formerdirector of engineering, I know
that there are laws in theUnited States that say, okay,
we've got to make sure that wefirewall consultants and regular
employees because if you makeit look like it's an
employee-only event.
Sheila McGrath (35:49):
Yeah, I've only explained about, I don't know,
eight or ten different NDAs insome organizations So obviously,
I'm a risk.
Ray Arell (35:56):
Well, I think the challenge is that I think it's
just an education of managersand people who run these events,
which is it's perfectly OK ifyou have a voluntary community
of practice that consultants canjoin.
Sheila McGrath (36:10):
The other thing you run into is if I've worked
in this organization and acompetitor's organization, I
have to think really carefullyabout what I say that might be
competitive advantage for one orthe other.
That's true.
Ray Arell (36:23):
And that's part of the NDA trick, right?
You know where the bodies areburied.
So you got to keep those thingssecret.
And I think the competitive vanis your secret sauce.
And one of the things that, andApril probably remembers this,
is when we were running anindustry consortium where we
were sharing knowledge about howwe were doing engineering with
Agile to other companies.
(36:44):
And I remember getting a callfrom the person in charge of
legal counsel for Intel saying,what the heck are you in a
meeting with?
these companies right now.
And he was pissed.
He discovered that I was inthis meeting and he thought I
was going to share like fabdetails or something.
We had to stop the meeting anddraft a document that every
(37:09):
company had to sign, which sayswe're not going to go talk about
processes or price fixing orany of those things he thought
we might be doing.
It comes down to the opennessof making sure you have good
boundaries around And evensometimes contracts.
This sometimes works reallywell.
But yeah.
Sam, are you there?
Sam (37:31):
Yes, I am.
Hi.
What do you have in mind?
So I've been practicing agilefor about 17 years, but decided
recently to find two years tojoin.
And mostly I'm motivated withthe fact that I'm actually
starting a startup to build aproduct that helps scale agile
cultures.
And I wanted to share myexperience with everybody since
(37:53):
that's it relates to this topic.
It has been very challengingtrying to find a community that
is helpful.
We'll talk about asynchronousLinkedIn groups.
forums online I didn't find alot of help in there and I
didn't find it welcoming butposting a simple question but
hey I want to talk to agilecoaches to see what pay points
(38:13):
they have so we could build wegot comments and I'm going to
read those some are simply BSsome would say we don't need
tools we could do our jobs withthickies some people touched on
that like the open-mindednessinto new things and some goes
back to something you mentionedearlier Ray which is if you want
to help us get us a job.
So I don't know if theeconomical situations we're in
(38:38):
is causing some of this, but ithas been surprising seeing how
this has been more difficultthan other things that I've been
trying to do with the startupright now.
Just trying to get involvedwith the community that I want
to help.
Ray Arell (38:52):
I've noticed a challenge getting groups
together.
I think about what are theboundaries that are inhibiting
people from coming together.
That in its own right needs asort of a brainstorming session
between a lot of people saying,well, what are the current
boundaries that keep people fromwanting to come in?
What's the hesitance?
That, I think, is a key factorwe need to explore more of.
(39:15):
Thank you for that, by the way.
Darius, are you there?
Yes, I am.
Darius (39:20):
And I am thinking about what you just said, that one of
those barriers or constraintswhich exist is conversational
capacity of people.
What Dennis mentioned earlierThe conversation becomes really
worthwhile and interesting whenpeople start talking freely.
That means that your communityof practice is not going to
(39:45):
evolve into community of mutualadoration people, which by the
way, the acronym would be KOMA.
You will be put to sleep,right?
If you only say what peopleapprove or those power strings
are inactive.
And maintaining theconversational capacity, which
(40:06):
means not only I can, but I amencouraged to say the things
things which I see are not rightor I disagree with, with the
hope that someone either willcorrect me or open my
perspective.
And you can apply this totechnical skills purely, to
programming issues, hardwareissues.
But most of the time, these aregoing to be human issues
(40:29):
related to the fact that wecannot talk with each other.
We shy difficult conversations,even though those difficult
conversations are the mostuseful.
Maintaining and caring for thison a constant basis is going to
be the key point.
And I want to give you anexample how that works because I
(40:51):
do favor totally openparticipatory organizations like
community of practice.
And if someone shows up who isinclined to use the power
strings, I will tell you a storywhich I observed this year,
completely unrelated to agile,how people handle difficult
situations.
(41:12):
It's in Rome, in Italy.
Pickpockets were reallytroubling people in the subway,
in the buses, etc.
And the police knew about it.
It was all over, but theycouldn't do a thing.
So what happened was thecommunity, the people who knew
who those thieves were, whenthey boarded the train and they
(41:33):
spotted them, they wouldimmediately say to everyone,
this is a thief.
Be careful because you may loseyour personal belonging.
This type of stigma of thecommunity works well to remedy
something which people in powercannot remedy.
If in a community of practicesomeone comes and starts
(41:54):
throwing grenades and usingpower, I think it's up to the
wisdom and ability to thecommunity to handle this so it
would not happen again.
All of this, in my judgment,will come through the ability to
talk and not to avoid difficulttopics, right?
(42:15):
Like employment, secrets,right?
My personal performances willbe hampered if I do X, Y, and Z.
All of these things, which arehardly visible to us, are
discussed because we have lowconversational capacity.
Ray Arell (42:32):
Do you think of the capacity of trust?
It
Darius (42:36):
is part of it, but it's also certain practices.
If I start the meeting everytime by saying, folks, I'm going
to tell you what I think aboutX, Y, and Z, but it's only my
point of view.
Prove me wrong, especiallyspeak up if I missed something
or when you see a hole.
I want you to disagree with me.
(42:56):
Ask yourself, how many meetingsdid you participate in where
the speaker who is presentingespecially hot topic starts like
this with those questions?
Ray Arell (43:07):
Well, I think this gets back to what Georg was
saying about giving peoplepermission.
I think that, you know, oneaspect of community, I think,
does come down to we need to bevery careful on, you know, the
ground rules.
What could be open and said,what's off topic, whatever those
(43:27):
things are.
I think we don't sometimesexplore those deep enough.
Darius (43:33):
In the open participatory organization or in
the community of practice, Ijust walk with my feet.
If they don't allow me to saythere is a problem and they
don't want to discuss it, I justwalk away.
It's very simple.
Ray Arell (43:46):
Well, I think that's the open space rules.
The law of two feet.
We are approaching the top ofthe hour.
Where'd the hour go?
I hate this.
Month by month we go throughthese conversations and these
calls and that always leaves mewanting a little bit more.
So if you want more, guesswhat?
September 26th.
That's our next meeting.
We're going to get together andhave another in-depth
(44:08):
conversation.
If you guys have any particulartopics that you want to discuss
or thread into theconversation, you can send me an
email.
If you go to acnpodcast.org,you can find my picture there,
which I noticed some people weresharing today.
As far as building community,they were sharing their LinkedIn
on the chat.
I really think that isabsolutely awesome.
(44:29):
If you go to acnpodcast.org,you'll find all of the hosts.
If you click on our pictures,it'll take you to the LinkedIn
pages.
So you're welcome to join anyof our networks at I think some
of us really value, especiallyif you're currently unemployed,
we've been doing a lot ofreferrals through our networks.
And I think it helps when youhave a couple of friends that
(44:50):
have several thousandconnections.
That makes it a little biteasier to get your name out
there.
So feel free, link in with us.
You can also go and join NewAgility.
You're welcome to support us.
Also listen to the podcast.
We've got eight years of themout there.
Be surprised if anyone couldget through eight years worth of
content but we try to keep thatknowledge up there as long as
(45:13):
we can.
I hope you all have a greatmonth and we will see you in
September.
The ACN Podcast is foreducational and informative use
only.
If you'd like to know moreabout the ACN community, please
(45:33):
come up to acnpodcast.org andsupport our show.
Music (45:40):
Ray Arell (00:07):
Good evening, everyone.
Welcome to the Agile CommunityNetwork.
My name's Ray Arell.
I'm the moderator and one ofthe hosts of this monthly
podcast and live event.
We go through a number ofdifferent topics.
If you're new to Agile, itdoesn't matter.
If you've been in Agile for along time, we want to hear those
perspectives.
That's what builds greatcommunity.
I'd like to thank the sponsorsof the show, as well as the
(00:30):
people who listen to thepodcast, because that's what
helps to keep us going.
We also have supporting membersthat They go up to
acnpodcast.org.
They make donations for us,which keeps our webinar system
paid for.
It helps us to be able toproduce the show on a monthly
basis.
So thank you for everyone whohas been helping us along the
(00:51):
years.
We have some sponsors that alsocontribute either in-kind
contribution in time, as well asfinancial dollars to help pay
for those things I just talkedabout.
The Agile Alliance, CicadaOrganizational Agility,
Diana Larsen.com, Engine forChange and New Agility And then
we have a handful of membersthat have actually become a part
(01:12):
of our community on NewAgility.
Those dollars also help to gosupport the show as well.
I'm joined monthly by a set ofco-hosts.
Not every one of them makes iteach time, but the co-hosts help
to get the conversationrolling.
That includes Shauna, Diana,Jorg, Sheila Eckhart, Sheila
McGrath, April Mills, andHendrick.
They have been supporting theshow for years.
(01:35):
They offer their insights andgive us an ability to encircle
the space that we're looking atand help to keep the campfire
going as we go through theconversation.
Today's topic spans from acouple of different observations
that I've had over the lastcouple of months.
I'll relate this directly tothe Agile community.
When I go to events at AgilePDX, which is here in Portland
(01:58):
or other open space places thatare typically free to go to,
I've noticed a bit of a downturnin the community.
If you went to the Agileconference over in Denver, there
were far less people that werethere this year than in prior
years.
And that's, this could be aneconomic factors.
(02:18):
It could be a whole set ofdifferent things associated to
it.
But what I've noticed is, isthat Agile as a community
appears, and I'll use the wordappear, it seems to be a little
more silent than it used to be.
And this is something I reallywant to fix.
Having built some communitiesof practice in the past, I
(02:39):
wanted to just go through myperspective on how rebuilding
community works or building anew community.
And I approach it from a coupledifferent things, which is one,
we need to have a purpose ofwhy we're getting together.
And that purpose is for us tolearn about Agile in the case of
the Agile community, or itmight be for other job-related
(03:02):
things that we're doing, or itcould be for an adjacent
community.
could be any purpose.
But it sparks us to say thatthese are the things we're going
to talk about.
This is the direction thatwe're going to go.
There's the growth phase withit, which is starting with a
group of people to get together.
And then you really want tohave a design for participation.
(03:23):
I try to keep the monologue inthe front of this kind of light
because I want to hear from you.
I want to get the participationgoing.
And really, we want to get intothe meat of the Provide
scaffolding, not bureaucracy.
We don't want to create rulesthat stifle sharing great
stories.
And really, if you think aboutwhat most communities, the
(03:47):
center of the communities arethose stories, the stories of
wins, the stories of how wemight have not been so
successful, key learnings thatwe had, and opening that up for
a lot of people to go sharethose around.
And then renew.
From time to time, communitiesof practice, I've seen the ones
that I've done internal tocompanies, they might start off
(04:09):
really strong and everyone's inhigh attendance, and then
suddenly you see it start towean.
I think that comes from thefact that we don't check the
pulse of the community thatoften and really think about how
can we experiment with theformats, how can we experiment
with the things that we do inorder to foster the evolution of
the community.
In Agile, we have a manifesto,and it's been, I would say, and
(04:35):
please don't take this wrong,but It's been pretty stagnant
for 20 years.
It's a historical document, aswe've talked about before.
The question is, are theresteps we can take to refresh it
or still point back to theoriginal document year over year
as there's new trends in theenvironment?
How can we keep it fresh?
How can we keep people comingin and joining?
(04:57):
And if people leave, how do weinvite them back?
How do we bring them back toour community?
With that, what I'd like tohear is, do you have your own
story about a great community ofpractice success or learning
and I reframe the word failureinto learning because I believe
that all there's not reallytruly a catastrophic failure
(05:18):
it's really just about uslearning together what steps
would you add to the list that Ijust gave is there anything
that you would add to keep acommunity vibrant or to grow
community what part of agileneeds to evolve to keep it
relevant I'd love to hear thatas well if this whole line of
questioning is interesting, butyou have a different purpose in
(05:40):
mind in order to come heretoday, you're welcome to ask
that question of the moderatorsand the group, and we can talk
about that as well.
So with that, to get us going,Shauna, you haven't been here
for a few months.
Love to hear your perspective.
Shawna Cullian (05:59):
Thanks, Ray.
So there's quite a few thingsto peel out from here.
I think I'm going to focus oncommunity of practice, a
community as a whole.
I have a community of practicethat I started pulling some key
people from differentorganizations that I worked in
(06:20):
that I thought were talkingabout the same things and would
be really excited to cometogether.
We started in 2021 towards theend of the pandemic.
That community of practice isstill going on today.
We do it once a month.
One of the things that I thinkwas is really important with any
community of practice is tounderstand and start with a
(06:42):
shared why.
Remind everybody why we'recoming together, ensure that we
all have the same values.
What are we here to share?
Is it knowledge?
Is it building skills?
Is it solving problems?
Why are we here and comingtogether so that we can level
step and make sure that we allhave that common purpose?
And so from there, we cancenter ourselves on what the
(07:06):
discussions every time we cometogether can really be about.
And so those having tangibleoutcomes, not just using
communities of practice to feellike it's another meeting as a
place to vent or complain.
I think that's not always greatin bringing people together and
it kind of reinforces anegative energy.
(07:27):
I really like to have peoplecome to the table with the
problems that they are trying tosolve.
Thinking ahead of time, one ofus will play the group and say,
what kind of problems are youfacing today that this group can
help you with?
And we'll use that time to dothat.
I think ensuring to keep itfresh, rotating facilitation,
(07:51):
rotating who's coming in andspeaking about or bringing their
thing to the table that theywant this group to problem solve
on is really important.
And going back to the why,revisiting that purpose every
six months.
What is every six to 12 months?
Is this working?
Is it not working?
What do we need to do to changethe format of this?
(08:11):
But I think it's reallyimportant to bring things that
you can actively talk on.
If you just show up and say,what are we going to talk about
today without having a clearpurpose, really people start
losing interest.
Those are some key things aboutthe community of practice.
Ray Arell (08:29):
I'm kind of curious when you're taking the pulse of
the group and you do that firstinitial chartering of the group
and maybe these are the five I'mcurious, how do you not make
three or four people who mighthave their idea not chosen?
Shawna Cullian (08:53):
This is why I think it's important to keep the
communities of practicesmaller.
I have found that largercommunities of practice or
communities that you arebringing to the table, together.
Oftentimes voices can feeldrawn out and heard.
My community of practice hasfour to five people at any given
(09:14):
time that attend.
If you're looking for a brownbag or a reading group or
something like that, then, youknow, that's less intimate.
That may have a differentpurpose.
Then I think it's good to bringmore people in.
But I think having an intimategroup where people feel safe to
talk about things is importantas part of the community.
(09:36):
of practice.
Ray Arell (09:37):
That makes a lot of sense.
I'm curious, as thefacilitator, are you helping to
like say those three people,they have something in common
and those people have somethingin common?
Are you encouraging themsomehow to get together and work
on that stuff and then comeback to the main group?
What is your facilitation?
Shawna Cullian (09:52):
I mean, at this point, in the beginning, it was
a little more facilitatedbecause people were just getting
to know each other.
At this point, I thinkeverybody has established pretty
strong relationships.
And so So, you know, they theyare chatting outside of the
community of practice andthey're attending each other.
You know, they all have theirown events that they'll run.
(10:14):
And within that community,everybody's participating in
each other's events.
And we've just kind of allbecome friends.
And so it hasn't been such ait's no longer a poll.
Right.
It's like we enjoy beingtogether.
OK,
Ray Arell (10:27):
that is awesome.
Thank you so much for that.
Let's see, Scott, what do youhave on this?
Hey, good to hear from you.
Scott (10:36):
So.
So I started a community ofpractice a while back with new
scrum masters that wereinterested in learning more
about the role.
In the beginning of thatcommunity of practice, we met
every other week for an hour.
I would throw out in Miro athought-provoking question,
like, how do you promotecontinuous improvement within
your team?
Or how do you buildpsychological safety within your
(10:58):
team so that we have somethingto kick us off with?
The participants were able toadd either with a written card
or verbally their thoughtsaround these topics.
If these topics morphed intodifferent topics throughout the
hour, that was fine as well.
As the group progressed, I gotthe feeling it seemed more like
a cohort than a community ofpractice.
(11:20):
So I started asking other folkswithin the team to start coming
with their own thoughts orquestions or if there were
topics they wanted to present tothe team to go ahead and do
that.
So we've been doing that latelyover the past couple of months.
And to some of the commentsalready made, right after this
(11:41):
meeting, I asked somebody elseon a team to conduct a retro
with the team to see where we'reat, where we can improve.
What should we do more of?
What should we do less of tosee if we can bring this and
iterate it to the next level?
Ray Arell (11:56):
Oh, nice.
So I'm kind of curious on theMiro perspective.
I don't think we do enoughasynchronous things in
communities of practice.
We do better in circles andface-to-face.
to face when we're together.
In your Miro model, are youactually having some of that
work go on asynchronous?
And you said as the ideasevolve, you're allowing that to
(12:18):
grow in the background?
Scott (12:20):
Well, it really all happens together.
So basically what happens, andagain, we're all remote.
So being able to do this inperson is not really something
we can accommodate.
We do the best we can by usinga tool like Miro, where it's a
question I put on the screen ina box.
And then I have a whole bunchof sticky notes.
I give the group a few minutesto say, if you have anything
(12:44):
that you want to talk aboutrelated to this question,
anything you're doing with yourteam currently that you want to
share, go ahead and put that ona sticky, put it on the board,
and we'll just go around theroom and talk about these
different things and see if wecan come up with ideas that you
may be able to bring back toyour team.
At the end of the day, it'strying to help these new scrum
(13:05):
masters generate options thatthey can go help their teams
with so that hopefully theirteams are better tomorrow than
they are today.
Ray Arell (13:13):
Thank you for that.
Diana Larson, what'd you have?
Diana Larsen (13:17):
Yeah, I was intrigued by another Scott,
Scott Sampson, who was askingabout who gets invited and
whether or not the businesswould get involved or invited.
Participation in the communityof practice is a significant
thing to look at.
Every community of practice Ihave been involved with has been
(13:38):
a community of practitionersfocused on a certain area.
You could have a community ofpractice of the business folks,
the product folks or so-and-so,but it's generally, unless
you're really enlarging the ideaof what the practice involves,
(14:01):
you're not going to includeanyone who might say, whose
presence might suppress theparticipation of the general
group you were intending tohave.
So that, and I think there'ssome important things to look at
(14:22):
there.
I mean, like you mentionedretrospectives, and if we're
doing team retrospectives, it'sonly for the team.
If we're doing a releaseretrospective, we might have
some business people there orsome you know, so on.
So I hold to the same rulesabout the community of practices
(14:42):
that I get involved in.
And mine very often aretopical.
Like I'm in a community ofpractice that meets in person
annually, but also has a, it'snot a Slack, but like a Slack
thing that we use in betweenwhen we meet annually.
(15:03):
That is all about facilitatingretrospectives.
So it's a community of practiceof retrospective facilitators.
Until someone has reallyexpressed an interest in how
they facilitate retrospectivesor how they would like to learn
more about facilitatingretrospectives, that wouldn't be
someone that we wouldnecessarily invite to be part of
(15:25):
the group.
It's how do you define whoparticipates in this particular
group?
So I just wanted to throw thatin because I saw Scott's
question there and I want tomake sure it got an answer.
Ray Arell (15:38):
Well, I thought that that's a great answer.
I'm curious.
And you are a very talentedfacilitator.
I've watched you work.
I don't know, you know, it'ssort of like, hey, Dumbledore,
how do you do this magic trick?
How do you get an individualthat invites themselves that
really shouldn't be there?
How do you deal with that?
(15:59):
I've had that happen multipletimes.
I believe in boundaries.
Diana Larsen (16:05):
As maybe you could tell from my earlier answer.
I believe that there are peoplethat inclusion is a benefit and
that inclusion has boundariesas well.
And so a person needs to have areason for being there, or I
would invite them not to come.
(16:27):
In the communities of practiceI'm a part of, it's not just my
responsibility to say, no, thisthis isn't your kind of meeting
or this isn't a meeting where wehave observers, for instance.
If you're just coming toobserve this meeting, unless you
have an intention to join itand participate later, this
(16:50):
isn't a meeting we want you.
I don't believe everybody hasstanding in every single
meeting.
So I think you have toestablish, does this person have
standing in this meeting ornot?
Do they have something tocontribute or some way to
benefit from it.
That's usually my heuristic.
Will you both benefit andcontribute to this meeting?
(17:13):
Then you're somebody that wewould love to have here.
If you just are coming to takewhat you can get, not
contribute, then you don't havea reason to be here.
Who is it that the observer isthe observed?
Likely to affect the course ofthis meeting in maybe intended
or unintended ways, but not inbeneficial ways.
(17:38):
Usually it's a groupresponsibility for who they
invite or don't invite.
It's not just one person'sresponsibility to make that
happen.
Ray Arell (17:49):
Yeah, I was more curious about when you vote
somebody off the island.
Is it the dear sir or madam,thank you very much for
attending our community ofpractice.
We'd like to inform you.
I'm not sure how formal you getthere.
You just use the personalconversation with the person.
I feel
Diana Larsen (18:04):
like Scott's comment in the chat.
Ray Arell (18:06):
You have no power here.
You have no power.
You have to have faith to usethat manifesto.
Well, thank you for that.
Dennis, what do you have?
Dennis (18:18):
Oh, hi, Ray.
Ray, you had the question, whyis engagement lower today in
some of the communities ofpractice?
And I've got a long-termobservation because I've been
involved in stuff way beforeAgile where we had to build
communities of practice to haveeffective technology transfer.
In a challenging employmentenvironment, we are all
(18:43):
reluctant to admit that we arestill learning.
We pretend that our skill setis complete.
To run off to a community ofpractice or a seminar would be a
sign of weakness.
And in the community ofpractice environment, why share
(19:03):
what we know with our potentialcompetitors?
Even if it's an internalcommunity of practice, if
layoffs are coming, other peoplein our company are potential
competitors for us.
You know, we want them to belaid off before us.
Basically, we've lost thespirit of exploration and can't
(19:27):
imagine a win-win collaboration.
I don't know what the solutionis, except maybe we need to
socialize more about some of thewin-win successes we've had,
grow from that and say, hey, youcould be part of this process
too.
I think what we're having iscycles where we're We say, oh,
(19:49):
we really want to learn, come upto speed.
And then the other part of thecycle is just fear.
That's interesting.
Ray Arell (19:56):
That's an interesting perspective.
Knowledge hoarding was aninteresting trend way back when.
I've seen it.
Maybe that is some root causeto that.
I appreciate your opinion onthat.
April Mills, what do you have?
April Mills (20:10):
I'm maybe coming from a different perspective,
thinking about a decade ago,what it looked like when we
revealed Agile community andtoday to the last comments point
about the sense of competitionwithin companies and outside of
companies that shift from weneed each other in order to make
(20:35):
this work to a scarcitymindset.
There might not be enough forall of us to do.
I think it's one of my mostconcerning trends that seems to
be happening.
And I think for those of us whojoin a call like this, it's our
opportunity to actually helpreframe that scarcity back to
(20:59):
abundance, which from myperspective, I would say there
might not be as many agile codedjobs, not agile coding, but
coded, right?
An agile coach or a scrummaster or others in
organizations of the future.
But there is an abundance needfor agile thinking and being
(21:21):
agile in order for companies tothrive now and in the future.
I would say it's an opportunityfor those of us who are
passionate about the practice ofbeing agile to lean into
community and encourage othersto join us by broadening it out
from just getting agilepositions or how to succeed in
(21:43):
agile positions to being agileand change agents and the
attributed habits, behaviors,and mindsets across
organizations.
That would help us rebuildcommunity in the places where
we've lost it and strengthen ourown confidence and our own
networks, which helps uslong-term for our own careers
(22:05):
and our own sanity.
Ray Arell (22:08):
I think it's kind of curious that our old alma mater,
Intel Corp, in their latestannouncement of another set of
layoffs, said that they're doingit to rebuild agility.
I mean, directly to be a moreagile organization.
Not quite sure how that equateswhen you have a lot more work
(22:29):
on people's plates, but it'sjust interesting.
I mean, did you read that?
Did you have a perspective onthat?
April Mills (22:36):
Yeah, I think, unfortunately, a lot of that
ends up being core We say whatwe want to say so that people
feel good about what we'resaying.
Engineering first, agile.
These are things which are goodto say, but hard to do in
practice.
And we've seen that a lot, notjust at our alma mater, but
plenty of places where the rightwords come out and the wrong
(22:56):
actions continue.
Call me a realist in thatsense, which is love it.
Show me.
Ray Arell (23:02):
So it's the marketing side of the business.
Exactly.
Well, thank you for that.
Dylan, what do you have?
Dylan (23:09):
Thank you so much.
My thing that I was going totalk about has changed as each
successive person spoke, whichis a great signifier that
there's a lot of goodinformation happening here.
But I do believe that this,it's not a silver bullet because
it's not easy.
It's not fire and done.
But the outcomes, the impact ofthe work that we do, I do think
(23:34):
will remain an area wheresomeone who is an advocate Thank
you so much.
So I don't think that the agilemovement is dying.
(24:13):
I think there is a healthyemphasis on what we contribute
when working with the othermembers of the team, which is
where our value has always been.
Ray Arell (24:27):
Yeah.
I mean, one thing just toclarify, I wasn't saying that I
believe there are just as manyagile people as there used to
be.
What I don't see them doing ishanging around each other,
sharing their stories.
Dylan (24:38):
Good call.
Good call.
Ray Arell (24:41):
I could use more of that as well.
(25:02):
Put your hand back up so I canfind you.
There you go.
Valerie.
Valerie (25:14):
Hi.
Thank you.
I just wanted to kind of expandupon with Dennis what he was
sharing.
In regards to my experience, Ifelt like as an agile coach, I
would reach out to differentareas of people's expertise or
interests.
So I would have a community ofpractice for product owners,
(25:35):
scrum managers, and agilecoaches.
And agile coaches were morelike trainers because we were
doing a lot of getting folkscertified.
With Dennis's point, my Agiletrainers and coaches, I felt
like there was a little bit ofknowledge hoarding going on.
I think that was the words thatyou used, right?
And which I was reallysurprised because I'm like,
(25:57):
okay, you all are kind of likethe top layer of, you know, the
Agile community and it's likeyou don't want to share amongst
yourselves.
So I It was just kind of aninteresting takeaway.
And the way I would keep theconversations going, I would
create a confluence page foreach of the communities and ask
(26:21):
them to create a topic.
So that way, whatever topic wasselected, when I would meet on
a monthly basis for each of thedifferent communities, it's
something of everyone'sinterest.
And then I would record it andthen post it onto the confluence
page so that those thatcouldn't make it could listen to
(26:42):
it later.
Everyone knew it was beingrecorded.
So I felt like everyone spokeopenly and freely.
But yeah, I just wanted toexpand upon Dennis that I was
surprised that my top tier,agile, knowledge base people
were the last ones engaged tomeet on a regular basis.
But scrum masters and productowners, for the most part, they
(27:03):
were really excited to come to acommunity or product test.
Ray Arell (27:07):
I'm kind of curious, because you hit on that A,
asynchronous component again.
Now, Confluence is a database,right?
It's a page library.
Valerie (27:14):
Yes.
Ray Arell (27:14):
Correct?
Yes, it is.
So I'm kind of curious.
So you have this discussion,put the video of it, and then
you're offering it wide, which Ithink is great.
I think most communities ofpractice, time zones really get
in the way.
Do you then leave the page openand allow people to put in
comments and keep theconversation rolling underneath
(27:35):
that?
Valerie (27:35):
I did leave it up for comments.
It was really more soknowledge-based.
if folks wanted to come back tothat particular community
practice, but maybe because of ameeting, because I would take
into consideration the time.
But a lot of times that wasreally hard because it was
between the West Coast and maybeAsian time zone.
Okay,
Jorg Pietruszka (27:55):
makes sense.
If I may, I want to pick thisapart so that there's community
and practice.
Very often I prefer to startoff with building community
because it allows for discoverypotential for practice,
especially if you're doing thisinternally with a company where
you don't know exactly wherethey stand on what they're
(28:17):
actually doing, bringing somepeople together who are curious
into the new stuff and openingup that discussion.
First, getting them to alignthat, yes, we want to share,
yes, we want to improve, yes, wewant to talk about it.
Keep that up, even if theytotally stray from the topic.
So somebody new comes in says Idon't know exactly how stuff
(28:42):
works and it's not about thatbut we help him that's a good
thing to open up minds fortrying something new bringing
their real talent to bearseparating a bit building the
community or improving thepractice at least at the start
of whatever gathering you'redoing it's quite helpful in a
(29:05):
way and for the practice I findworking a lot with engineers
that That is something they grabmuch more easily.
In my management role, I put inchallenges like, this is how
you can help me.
So get together and help mewith that one, which nobody has
ever asked or nobody inmanagement has ever cared of
your opinion.
But now I want you to answerthat question.
(29:26):
I'm not going to promisesomething will happen, but at
least you can sometimes ventyour frustration.
And then they come up with newpractices suddenly where they
were stuck before becausesuddenly there's interest.
Maybe then on top, there'sactually one kind of community
that has evolved.
My project team and later on, alot of people showed me that it
(29:49):
started as a simple projectmeeting.
Like, where are we?
What are we going to do?
Nothing specific.
But with success in theproject, it became much more a
community of praise.
This is what we achieved.
I'm proud of having done thisand it now goes on for years.
Nice to be here.
Tell me what has happened andmake me proud of the team.
(30:10):
Every week they come up withsomething big, surprising, but
it's really a fun thing to do.
Ray Arell (30:16):
I'm kind of curious.
Some of the thread of what I'veheard through what you've
talked about, do you think yourrole as the steward of one of
these communities is just tosometimes give people
permission?
Jorg Pietruszka (30:28):
Yeah, definitely, especially for the
community building stuff thatimmediately falls to you if
you're the first person and toset it up to write the invite.
A lot of people just, at leastin Germany, with my major
friends, they always tend to askfor permission, even ask for
(30:50):
permission to, I can only joinfor the first half of the
meeting, should I come?
And they can decide forthemselves if there's value in
they're always welcome to join.
So that one is practicallyeasy, but it isn't.
A lot of my time is spent ofpushing the responsibility to
the team.
opening this up, especially inthe new ones.
(31:11):
I always have an opener.
I have a warm-up question.
I have a topic.
I always have a visual for thetopic because some people need
something to see or read.
I try to give room first forthe really urgent things.
What's really bothering youtoday?
Can we as a community help youget along?
(31:32):
And you ask that question 10times and don't get any
response.
On the 11th, then some Somebodysuddenly says, yeah, I really
have something that I want toget out of my head and discuss
and get your ideas.
I very often find myselftalking too much in those
situations and nobody stops me.
If you have a great idea how tomore easily hand over, I would
(31:55):
really appreciate that one.
A
Ray Arell (31:57):
lot of times communities tend to be like a
junior high school dance.
People are on the walls lookingat each other.
Will they dance with me or not?
I think it does require aspecial song or something to get
people going.
It takes time to nurture acommunity.
Thank you for that. Alireza!Are you there?
Alireza (32:19):
Yes, I'm here.
I wanted to share my storyabout the CoP.
This is about a company aboutsize of 800 to 1,000 game
industry, educational gameindustry.
So, so many different practicesin there.
Animators, illustrators,engineers, QA, like about like
12 different trades in the sameteam and departments working
(32:42):
together.
I was there as the enterpriseagile coach.
We had our weekly center ofexcellence meetings that
everyone were joining.
But what I've done was going toand try to find like alliance
with someone, finding championsfrom director of animation, one
person from the engineeringteam, one person from each of
(33:03):
these trades that were actuallyjoining us to our community of
practice for Agile.
But then we started after acouple of months, we started the
community of practice inanimation where all these
animators got together on aweekly, biweekly, monthly basis,
but whatever they thought isright.
And then just talk about theirpractice.
(33:24):
That was very helpful.
Like we saw that they wereworking on silo from their
practice in one team.
So we couldn't have threeanimators in one team.
We had several of them in onedepartment, but the whole
company had about 20 animatorswho met weekly or biweekly and
shared their practice, theirsuccess, what they've done,
(33:46):
especially when we hit the AIwave, when like in 2021, 2022,
AI started coming, that helpedthem a lot to keep themselves
relevant because there was theseone or two people who learned
about AI, how to use it in thepractice, illustrators, artists,
and brought that to thatcommunity of practice to help
(34:08):
the company to change towardbecoming an AI first.
So that was a success story.
I think it was very, very greatand build up energy in
different departments, not justour project managers.
That's the start.
Ray Arell (34:25):
Well, cool.
Thank you so much for that.
I think that's a great story.
Sheila McGrath (34:28):
One of the things that I'm thinking about
is in the organizations whereI've been, I've been a
consultant.
And a lot of times thecommunity of practice is set up
intentionally or by accidentonly for employees.
Therefore, I and otherconsultants would not be
(34:49):
included.
I wouldn't even know they werehaving meetings.
I found out about the meetingsand got us included.
But in other places, I didn'tnecessarily know that they were
having, they're going off to ameeting.
They go off to a lot ofmeetings that are employee-only
meetings that have nothing to dowith me.
I don't have a lot ofexperience with being included
in the community of practice,unless it was in some
(35:12):
organizations, they call it acommunity of practice, but it's
really standards.
And they come out with astandard list of things you must
do, and that's about it.
Yeah, I know that's not whatyou're thinking of.
That's not what it should be,but that's what my reality has
been.
Ray Arell (35:30):
Well, I'm kind of curious because, I mean, there
is one, having been a formerdirector of engineering, I know
that there are laws in theUnited States that say, okay,
we've got to make sure that wefirewall consultants and regular
employees because if you makeit look like it's an
employee-only event.
Sheila McGrath (35:49):
Yeah, I've only explained about, I don't know,
eight or ten different NDAs insome organizations So obviously,
I'm a risk.
Ray Arell (35:56):
Well, I think the challenge is that I think it's
just an education of managersand people who run these events,
which is it's perfectly OK ifyou have a voluntary community
of practice that consultants canjoin.
Sheila McGrath (36:10):
The other thing you run into is if I've worked
in this organization and acompetitor's organization, I
have to think really carefullyabout what I say that might be
competitive advantage for one orthe other.
That's true.
Ray Arell (36:23):
And that's part of the NDA trick, right?
You know where the bodies areburied.
So you got to keep those thingssecret.
And I think the competitive vanis your secret sauce.
And one of the things that, andApril probably remembers this,
is when we were running anindustry consortium where we
were sharing knowledge about howwe were doing engineering with
Agile to other companies.
(36:44):
And I remember getting a callfrom the person in charge of
legal counsel for Intel saying,what the heck are you in a
meeting with?
these companies right now.
And he was pissed.
He discovered that I was inthis meeting and he thought I
was going to share like fabdetails or something.
We had to stop the meeting anddraft a document that every
(37:09):
company had to sign, which sayswe're not going to go talk about
processes or price fixing orany of those things he thought
we might be doing.
It comes down to the opennessof making sure you have good
boundaries around And evensometimes contracts.
This sometimes works reallywell.
But yeah.
Sam, are you there?
Sam (37:31):
Yes, I am.
Hi.
What do you have in mind?
So I've been practicing agilefor about 17 years, but decided
recently to find two years tojoin.
And mostly I'm motivated withthe fact that I'm actually
starting a startup to build aproduct that helps scale agile
cultures.
And I wanted to share myexperience with everybody since
(37:53):
that's it relates to this topic.
It has been very challengingtrying to find a community that
is helpful.
We'll talk about asynchronousLinkedIn groups.
forums online I didn't find alot of help in there and I
didn't find it welcoming butposting a simple question but
hey I want to talk to agilecoaches to see what pay points
(38:13):
they have so we could build wegot comments and I'm going to
read those some are simply BSsome would say we don't need
tools we could do our jobs withthickies some people touched on
that like the open-mindednessinto new things and some goes
back to something you mentionedearlier Ray which is if you want
to help us get us a job.
So I don't know if theeconomical situations we're in
(38:38):
is causing some of this, but ithas been surprising seeing how
this has been more difficultthan other things that I've been
trying to do with the startupright now.
Just trying to get involvedwith the community that I want
to help.
Ray Arell (38:52):
I've noticed a challenge getting groups
together.
I think about what are theboundaries that are inhibiting
people from coming together.
That in its own right needs asort of a brainstorming session
between a lot of people saying,well, what are the current
boundaries that keep people fromwanting to come in?
What's the hesitance?
That, I think, is a key factorwe need to explore more of.
(39:15):
Thank you for that, by the way.
Darius, are you there?
Yes, I am.
Darius (39:20):
And I am thinking about what you just said, that one of
those barriers or constraintswhich exist is conversational
capacity of people.
What Dennis mentioned earlierThe conversation becomes really
worthwhile and interesting whenpeople start talking freely.
That means that your communityof practice is not going to
(39:45):
evolve into community of mutualadoration people, which by the
way, the acronym would be KOMA.
You will be put to sleep,right?
If you only say what peopleapprove or those power strings
are inactive.
And maintaining theconversational capacity, which
(40:06):
means not only I can, but I amencouraged to say the things
things which I see are not rightor I disagree with, with the
hope that someone either willcorrect me or open my
perspective.
And you can apply this totechnical skills purely, to
programming issues, hardwareissues.
But most of the time, these aregoing to be human issues
(40:29):
related to the fact that wecannot talk with each other.
We shy difficult conversations,even though those difficult
conversations are the mostuseful.
Maintaining and caring for thison a constant basis is going to
be the key point.
And I want to give you anexample how that works because I
(40:51):
do favor totally openparticipatory organizations like
community of practice.
And if someone shows up who isinclined to use the power
strings, I will tell you a storywhich I observed this year,
completely unrelated to agile,how people handle difficult
situations.
(41:12):
It's in Rome, in Italy.
Pickpockets were reallytroubling people in the subway,
in the buses, etc.
And the police knew about it.
It was all over, but theycouldn't do a thing.
So what happened was thecommunity, the people who knew
who those thieves were, whenthey boarded the train and they
(41:33):
spotted them, they wouldimmediately say to everyone,
this is a thief.
Be careful because you may loseyour personal belonging.
This type of stigma of thecommunity works well to remedy
something which people in powercannot remedy.
If in a community of practicesomeone comes and starts
(41:54):
throwing grenades and usingpower, I think it's up to the
wisdom and ability to thecommunity to handle this so it
would not happen again.
All of this, in my judgment,will come through the ability to
talk and not to avoid difficulttopics, right?
(42:15):
Like employment, secrets,right?
My personal performances willbe hampered if I do X, Y, and Z.
All of these things, which arehardly visible to us, are
discussed because we have lowconversational capacity.
Ray Arell (42:32):
Do you think of the capacity of trust?
It
Darius (42:36):
is part of it, but it's also certain practices.
If I start the meeting everytime by saying, folks, I'm going
to tell you what I think aboutX, Y, and Z, but it's only my
point of view.
Prove me wrong, especiallyspeak up if I missed something
or when you see a hole.
I want you to disagree with me.
(42:56):
Ask yourself, how many meetingsdid you participate in where
the speaker who is presentingespecially hot topic starts like
this with those questions?
Ray Arell (43:07):
Well, I think this gets back to what Georg was
saying about giving peoplepermission.
I think that, you know, oneaspect of community, I think,
does come down to we need to bevery careful on, you know, the
ground rules.
What could be open and said,what's off topic, whatever those
(43:27):
things are.
I think we don't sometimesexplore those deep enough.
Darius (43:33):
In the open participatory organization or in
the community of practice, Ijust walk with my feet.
If they don't allow me to saythere is a problem and they
don't want to discuss it, I justwalk away.
It's very simple.
Ray Arell (43:46):
Well, I think that's the open space rules.
The law of two feet.
We are approaching the top ofthe hour.
Where'd the hour go?
I hate this.
Month by month we go throughthese conversations and these
calls and that always leaves mewanting a little bit more.
So if you want more, guesswhat?
September 26th.
That's our next meeting.
We're going to get together andhave another in-depth
(44:08):
conversation.
If you guys have any particulartopics that you want to discuss
or thread into theconversation, you can send me an
email.
If you go to acnpodcast.org,you can find my picture there,
which I noticed some people weresharing today.
As far as building community,they were sharing their LinkedIn
on the chat.
I really think that isabsolutely awesome.
(44:29):
If you go to acnpodcast.org,you'll find all of the hosts.
If you click on our pictures,it'll take you to the LinkedIn
pages.
So you're welcome to join anyof our networks at I think some
of us really value, especiallyif you're currently unemployed,
we've been doing a lot ofreferrals through our networks.
And I think it helps when youhave a couple of friends that
(44:50):
have several thousandconnections.
That makes it a little biteasier to get your name out
there.
So feel free, link in with us.
You can also go and join NewAgility.
You're welcome to support us.
Also listen to the podcast.
We've got eight years of themout there.
Be surprised if anyone couldget through eight years worth of
content but we try to keep thatknowledge up there as long as
(45:13):
we can.
I hope you all have a greatmonth and we will see you in
September.
The ACN Podcast is foreducational and informative use
only.
If you'd like to know moreabout the ACN community, please
(45:33):
come up to acnpodcast.org andsupport our show.
Music (45:40):
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