#2 – Manoel Pimentel on Coaching
This is the transcript of the podcast. Download it here.
On the last episode I talked a little bit about Martin Fowler’s first talk at the Agile Brazil 2010 Conference. In this episode, still about the conference, I would like to talk about Manoel Pimentel’s presentation on coaching.
Pimentel was a pioneer in coaching agile methods down here in Brazil, he is the chief editor of the brazilian magazine Agile Vision (in portuguese, Visão Ágil).
Manoel Pimentel by Woompa
Pimentel did a great job introducing the coaching concepts and its essence. He started his presentation with a little joke, asking people to close their eyes and try thinking positively to make a paper in their laps levitate. Nothing happened. Why? Because of the lack of action, he explained. The message here, is that the same happens with us in real life, when we want something to happen, but do not take action to make it actually happen. The essence of coaching according to him is to help people discover the right actions to take and then act in order to achieve their goals.
The coaching process has two main roles. The coach and the coachee. The coach is the one who conducts the process and coachee is the one who is being coached. The coachee could be a person or a group of people, like a software development team, for example.
The coach should help the coachee to discover how to achieve his or her goals instead of telling him or her what to do.
Talking about goals….
- Do you have one? Think a little bit about that. What’s your goal?
- What motivates you to achieve it?
- Once you have a goal in mind, think about the forces in favor and the forces against your goal. Identify those forces. What you help you achieve your goal? What would make it hard?
- What is important for you?
- Does you goal have any relationship with that?
- Are your current actions connecting you with your goal?
- Are them adding value to your goal?
- What do you gain if you achieve your goal?
- What do you loose?
Well, I think you got the idea. Those are some questions that a coach asks the coachee, focusing on helping him or her to have a good return on the energy invested in order to achieve a goal. You should invest your energy, your effort, and your time in actions that connects you to your goals, said Pimentel. Asking those kind of questions in agile retrospectives could be really helpful.
Another good advice is to have milestones. Divide your path, so your can better visualize it. That’s something that is done through the iterations in agile software development, isn’t it?
The strongest point of the coaching process is that it generates responsibility in the coachee. When someone just tells you that you should do something, and then it goes wrong, you can blame the person who told you, but when you are the one who actually decide the path your are going to take, it is a totally different approach, there’s no one to blame. It’s your own choice.
Well, I guess this is it for today. Thank you very much for listen, and please post your comments, questions and feedback. I’m André Faria, great to have you listening. I’ll talk too you next week.
Read More#1 – Martin Fowler at the Agile Brazil 2010 Conference
Last week we had the Agile Brazil Conference, which gathered more than eight hundred people from different states of Brazil, England, France, Canada, and the United States. Martin Fowler, David Hussman, and Philippe Kruchten were here.
Fowler at the Agile Brazil 2010 Conference
Today I would like to talk a little about Martin Fowler’s key note. He divided it in three talks of 20 minutes each. The first he called the essence of Agile. After talking about the origin of the agile manifesto, he explained a phenomenon that he calls semantic diffusion and according to him it is happing in agile software development right now.
After getting popularity the ideas can easily get lost. People are just thinking about what the process suggest them to do, and in fact, a lot of people says that they doing agile for 3 or 4 years, but then, when we go to see what they are really doing, we see something that we would never call agile.
Fowler talked about the changing nature of software, and that the difference of agile is that planning and execution is done in a very high frequency, and then it is possible to learn from what happens in each iteration. This is not a chaotic approach because there is still a lot of planning on it. The difference is that agile doesn’t try to predict everything, and releases early and often. Agile focus on how much value is delivered instead of being concerned about up-front plans.
Adaptive plan needs evolutionary design, and this needs as much design as the other approaches but in a different way (refactoring, self test code, continuos integration, simple design). Read Fowler’s article “Is design dead?” for more information.
Another aspect of agile, according to Fowler is that the process should change over time. Evolve. That’s self adaptability. That’s, for example, is the importance of agile retrospectives. Its an ongoing exercise to improve our work continuously, said Fowler. He mentioned a quota from Kent Beck that says “i n software development perfect not an adjective it’s a verb”.
Well, I guess this is it for today. Thank you very much for listen, and please post your comments and feedback. I’ll talk you again next week.
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