Foundation Skills for Agile Consultants

The skills of a mature consultant fall into three categories. Consultants require advisory skills : the capability to engage with the enterprise at all levels, diagnose problems, diplomatically and sensitively explore solution options, persuade clients to make informed decisions, and build a trusting relationship that enables productive interactions. This includes our ability to communicate effectively, facilitate teams and organizations to decisions, and influence decision makers to follow a fruitful path. We also obviously require the agile domain skills to lead clients to those informed decisions. The latest agile theory from a book or article is available to anyone; the experience and wisdom to fit the solution to the circumstances is a deeper level of advisory capability. Business skills are the final component. Every business model is not amenable to the same set of practices and techniques, and every enterprise has a distinct language, market, culture, and set of processes. Our agile mantra of “inspect and adapt” should make it clear that one size does not fit all, and that business context skills are a differentiating factor for consultants. We’ve addressed business skills throughout this book, and we’ll look at agile domain expertise in Chapter 15. Here, we’ll focus on the advisory skills that ensure consulting competence.

Advisory skills cover a wide gamut. Everything from communication to facilitation, and from negotiation to persuasion and influence, falls into this category. Communication is at the center of this group of competencies. Our ability to understand what the client means rather than merely what she says, to listen with our whole mind rather than formulating our rebuttal while the client speaks, to speak in the client’s language and in the language of her business—these are the central skills that form the foundation for our advisory capabilities.

In the interactive and human framework of agility, the need for communication skills is elevated. The many different perspectives within our teams and the enterprise pose a challenge to our capabilities. Can we communicate with the product owner, who brings a business mind-set to the conversation, as well as the coder, who is thinking about the technical issues? Can we explain to the executive and client why they should adopt agility, and also stand in front of a team and train in user story writing or relative estimating? Can we engage in the give-and-take of a cultural evolution without expressing frustration, blame, or surprise when the client is resistant or its processes are clearly counterproductive?

Communication has long been a challenge for the information (IT) professional, and the jokes about the introversion and “geekiness” of computer specialists are legion. From the programmer hiding in the “glass house” of the 1960s data center to the Star Wars nerds of Silicon Valley, the stereotype of the ­uncommunicative techie is pervasive. The migration from the mainframes of the 1960s, hidden in the basement, to the computer on every desk of the client-server migration , required technical experts to learn how to listen to the client and help diagnose their problems and build the systems it required. The migration to agile has raised the communication stakes again. Now we must persuade our clients, and their customers, to speak in the language of user stories and to participate directly with our teams as they build and refine systems and products. We go from the remoteness of “over the wall” specifications and requests for proposal (RFPs ) to the direct communication of story workshops and client demonstrations. We often have to bridge the gap from the project management language of traditional predictive programs to the agile language that rules today. Our tone and content must change as we navigate the enterprise, conversing with everyone from the chief executive officer (CEO) to the business analysts. From interviewing candidates to reporting on the team’s progress, sharp, concise, and clear communication underlies all of the advisory skills we’re advocating.

Discovery and exploration, for example, rely on our ability to ask the right questions, interpret the responses, and develop a theory based on what we hear. If we’ve been engaged to guide an enterprise or team through agile transition, we need to have clear and revealing conversations about their current practices, their exposure to agile, their organizational or team structure, and their pain points with their current methods. If we’re applying agile consulting techniques to a technical project, the only way to understand the client’s needs is for the client to tell us, as the giant specifications documents of the past give way to user stories. These conversations require delicacy, as we don’t want to imply that the client is broken or “doing it wrong” before we understand the full circumstances. They require active listening, by which we gauge inflection and body language , and focus on the speaker to read between the lines of what we’re hearing. Fran Lebowitz, noted wit, has said that “The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.”² I would submit that the opposite of listening is often formulating a rebuttal, and that the struggle for many rookie consultants is shutting off the internal dialog and just hearing what’s said. While I believe that every interview should be a conversation and not an interrogation, the consultant should be mostly listening, gently sparking the conversation rather than dominating or directing it.

In my years as a technical consultant (I managed global data center implementations for Intel) I witnessed many ineffective solution presentations that merely served to confuse the client and sabotage the sale or implementation. At Intel we called these “speeds and feeds” presentations . Of course, the domain specialists representing the client want to understand these technical details; executives, not so much. Solution definitions, pre-agile, were often communicated in the language of “Here’s what we geniuses came up with. If you’re smart, you’ll take it!” I’ve spent many hours mentoring and coaching technical specialists in the art of setting up the conversation by identifying the problem we’re solving and why it matters, including the client in the conversation, offering options rather than mandates, and, especially, taking the ego and emotion out of the response to the client’s decision.

The emotional element is often the hardest to overcome. Domain experts expend a lot of time and creativity developing elegant solutions to their client’s problems. When the client questions or rejects them, immature advisors will often become defensive or demotivated. We become ego-attached to our own ideas, and then the client that rejects them becomes an enemy or a fool. Overcoming this emotional response and replacing it with a productive dialog is a crucial step in the journey to maturity for a consultant. In the agile environment, where every solution is experimental, negotiable, and temporary, emotional attachment to our ideas is a real obstacle to progress.

The Facilitative Mind-Set

Facilitation is a skill, but it’s also a mind-set. Facilitative management rejects the concept that the best ideas come from the top down, from those in authority, or from appointed gurus. It’s a cliché to say that the intelligence of the team is better than that of the expert, but, in my experience, it’s accurate. The practice of facilitating teams to the most creative solutions, the best methods, and the appropriate adaptations to our practices is core to agility. The scrummaster is, essentially, a facilitator. She has no authority to order the team to any conclusion, and no power except that of the agile techniques. Every scrum ceremony is an exercise in facilitation. From the stand-up to the retrospective, the scrummaster is gently guiding the team members to their own conclusions. The facilitative role is one of neutrality, service, and clarity. Strong facilitators bring the Zen quality of emptiness to their practice. We have no stake in the outcome except to ensure that all voices are heard and that the team owns its decisions. We’re there to try and bring order to the turmoil of conflicting perspectives, points of view, and ideas. We can attempt to capture, record, and gain consensus on ideas that arise in our sessions, but we can’t prioritize or discard any ideas; that’s up to the team.

It may seem obvious to anyone with exposure to agility that facilitation is key, but in fact facilitative management can be a revolution in the traditional enterprise. Managers and executives accustomed to issuing mandates must now engage in facilitated deliberations across the enterprise, and must let go of the idea that they have the sole keys to wisdom. Team leaders must migrate from a foreman role, enforcing diktats, and embrace a collaborative role as a servant-leader facilitating the team’s own deliberations. Agile consultants must not only be strong facilitators themselves, they must be prepared to train and mentor facilitative skills across the enterprise, and encourage the entire leadership structure to migrate from a culture of authority and directive to one of participation and group ownership. Facilitative skill is at the heart of agility, from the team to the executive level.

To perform as a strong facilitator, agile consultants must adopt more than the mind-set. They must strengthen their facilitation skills. The beginning facilitator works to master the skills of active listening, paraphrasing, summarizing, and questioning. As the team begins to brainstorm or design a solution, the facilitator is ensuring that she is capturing the contributions clearly and accurately, consolidating ideas that coincide, and maintaining the momentum by following the flow of the conversation and gently probing to get to the underlying ideas. She must include everyone, even the back-row wallflowers, into the conversation, and respect the opinions of all. She must be completely focused on the entire room, noting expressions, silence, and enthusiasm level as well as verbal contributions. The skilled facilitator has a bag of tricks to apply in different situations, from brainstorming to matrix diagrams and from flowcharts to fishbone diagrams. She knows how to apply decision techniques such as multivoting, quadrant diagramming, and force field analysis.

As usual, I’ll remind readers that this is not intended as a tutorial. To sharpen your technique in these areas I strongly recommend the books of Ingrid Bens,³ the acknowledged expert in this domain. My intent is not to teach you the basic techniques but to make the connection between facilitation and agility. If the ideas and techniques I’ve described in this section are new to you, you’ll struggle as a scrummaster, let alone a coach or consultant. If you are already an experienced facilitator, you should seek to expand your skills to the realms of conflict resolution, complex group dynamics, and the design of facilitated sessions for controversial or complex situations. The stronger your skills in facilitation, the more impact you can have, from the team to the strategic level. I commonly facilitate executive strategic planning sessions as well as standard agile practices, and the lesson is that anything can happen, and the more prepared we are with techniques and attitude, the more likely the success of the session. The ability to remain neutral, focus on your facilitation role, and avoid taking sides or allowing debate to degenerate into conflict or argument is a mature skill that requires experience and Zen. Like agility, the practices are easy to learn but hard to master, and similarly, as we advance our maturity the focus shifts from ceremonies to mind-set.

Agile Negotiation

Agilists know that INVEST is the acronym that defines a well-formed user story: stories should be independent, negotiable, valuable, estimable, sized appropriately, and testable. In what ways is a user story, the atomic unit of agile requirements, negotiable, and in what other areas of agile practice is negotiation required? In any consultative engagement, negotiation is required throughout the process, from the initial rate and vision-setting conversations to the negotiation of a definition of done-ness. What’s unique about agile negotiation, and what is the negotiation skill set required for agile consulting?

We’re all familiar with the common ideas about negotiation; go for win-win scenarios , make sure all sides have a chance to express their needs and concerns, come in knowing your bottom line, iterate through a compromise process until all sides benefit, leave no “sore losers” in the aftermath. We’re also familiar with the dark side of negotiation; the “used car salesman” who tries to con us into a bad deal, the imbalance of information, the tricks like “he who speaks first loses” or “good cop, bad cop.” Negotiation can be a tool that ensures all parties exchange value and leave satisfied, or a scheme that manipulates us into a raw deal, triggering buyer’s remorse and bad feelings. It all depends on intent, of course, but technique also plays a role. Let’s leave the tricks of negotiation to the scammers and con artists. In the agile world, our intent is to ensure that all parties understand each other, achieve value, arrive on a solution that’s fair all around, and can continue to collaborate without hurt feelings.

For those who need a basic foundation in negotiating techniques, I recommend reading Crucial Conversations ⁴ or Getting to Yes, ⁵ the classic primers on successful negotiating skills. These works focus on more than the “tips and tricks” of negotiating . They delve into the psychology of the negotiating process, and discuss the emotional as well as the substantive content of this stressful process. To illustrate the high emotional and ego content of negotiation, let’s examine a well-studied phenomenon known academically as “The Bidder’s Curse.”⁶ In the influential paper cited, the authors analyzed data from eBay auctions and found that “in the majority of auctions, the final price is higher than a fixed price at which the same good is available for immediate purchase on the same webpage.” Why would buyers pay more at auction than they would to simply purchase the identical item? The answer, the paper suggests, is “competitive bidding, or ‘bidding fever.’” Overbidders become emotionally attached to the item they’ve bid on, even if an identical item is available at a fixed price. They become ego-involved: “I’m not going to let bidder ‘USisBest479’ beat me for that guitar I want!” Even if the bidder on the other side is an impersonal Internet handle, our competitive instincts kick in, and those of us most inclined to be concerned about “winning” actually lose by competing ineffectively. This effect illustrates precisely the challenges of negotiation. Once emotion is riled up, and competitiveness and ego flare, our worst negotiating behaviors kick into gear, and cause us to lose by “winning.”

In agile negotiation, the only win is trust, collaboration, and mutual benefit. We negotiate to understand clients’ needs, not to sell them something, or sell them on something. We negotiate to match our commitments to our capacity, so we can promote sustainable development. We negotiate to ensure that we are delivering what the client needs now, so that we can adapt as the marketplace changes. We negotiate to ensure that we are continuously improving both the product and the process. Most important, we negotiate with our ego and emotion in check, enabling us to reach mutual value without competitive instincts infringing on the process.

What do we mean, for example, when we say user stories must be negotiable? User stories aren’t fixed, since we understand that, as we iterate toward a vision, that vision or the external circumstances will change. As these changes occur, we frequently renegotiate the meaning of individual stories, renegotiate the scope or backlog, and renegotiate the acceptance criteria to fit the new situation. While agilists agree that stories, once committed to a sprint, should remain constant, that doesn’t mean that, during the sprint, the team won’t discover new technical or functional obstacles or conditions that require internal negotiation to reallocate tasks and resources. Whether the agile team’s customer is an internal department or an external client, the entire purpose of constant collaboration is to keep the door open to renegotiating every aspect of the project to ensure that it meets the needs of today, not yesterday.

Negotiation is a key element of the agile concept of variable scope. If product backlog items fall below the prioritization line and will not be delivered, due to time box constraints, budget constraints, or new learnings, we need to negotiate with the customer to ensure that we’re still delivering the highest-value product. Those very constraints can also be renegotiated, if, say, the customer agrees to extend the timeline or budget to ensure that new or low-priority items are included. As we walk through these scenarios it becomes clear that the agile principles point toward deep negotiation skills as a key success factor for coaches and consultants, as well as product owners.

The idea of constant negotiation, like that of constant collaboration, is disruptive to many organizations. The common cry from the executive team is “I thought we landed on a solution. Why is this changing every time I look at it?” while the cry from the team is “scope creep.” The agile advisor must be prepared to address these concerns, persuading executives on the benefits of participative decision making and change readiness, while helping teams understand that the built-in constraints of time box and cost box, and the idea of variable scope, enable us to deliver high-value projects without gold-plating or “just in case” features. The workday of the typical coach or consultant is one of constant negotiation, making these skills a core competency of the agile consulting role.

Influence and Persuasion

The foundational work in the science of persuasion and influence is Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. ⁷ Dr. Robert Cialdini, a Columbia University-trained Ph.D. in social influence, has written an accessible and fascinating study that combines research and anecdote to uncover the factors that make us both persuadable by others, and persuasive ourselves. His thesis is that we are programmed by evolution and social structures to automatically respond to certain influences, and that these influences can be used for good or ill, to persuade us to make healthy and productive choices, or to lure us into traps for the benefit of others. Let’s look at a list of these influencers, and then, rather than rehash the material from the book, we’ll review how these ideas relate to agility.

Cialdini’s six influential factors are:

• Reciprocation is the impulse to repay in kind what someone has provided to us, whether we asked for it or not. Cialdini cites the university professor who, as an experiment, sent Christmas cards to total strangers and received a reciprocal response from people who had never heard of him. He also cites a 1960 study by Alvin Gouldner⁸ determining that all human societies follow this rule of reciprocity. From the free address labels in a charity solicitation letter, to the free samples at the ice cream shop, the expectation of reciprocity is built in to many of the conventional interactions of life.

• Commitment and consistency are powerful intrinsic motivators. Why do political attacks on “flip-floppers” work so well? For the same psychological reason as bettors at the race track become more confident in their horse’s chances after they bet. We have an innate desire to be consistent with previous decisions or behaviors, and we prefer those who honor their commitments. Once we make a commitment ourselves, we’re reluctant to repudiate it, even if it’s not in our interests currently.

• Social proof is the psychological trigger that spawned the laugh track, the advertising meme “1 million clients trust our product,” and the salted “tip jar” found in many restaurants and bars. When we see (or hear) others performing a behavior, like laughing at lame jokes on TV, we’re more likely to exhibit that behavior ourselves.

• Liking the influencer is, unsurprisingly, a strong motivator toward compliance with his persuasions. What may be surprising is how often this trigger is used in our daily interactions. Liking, for example is one of the success factors of social networking. When we see an advertisement on Facebook, or read an article posted by a friend, we’re more likely to click because we’re surrounded or encouraged by “friends” we know and like. From Tupperware parties to the “chain of friends” sales technique, we’re more likely to buy or comply when the influencer tells us “your friend Jim thought you might be interested in . . .”. We know Jim, we like him, so the influencer invokes Jim’s name in hope that some of that liking will stick to him.

• Authority as a motivator is familiar to every human being, from the first “because I said so . . .” response we get as kids to the “following orders” defense proclaimed in every war atrocity trial. The impulse toward responding to authority is inherent because it has worked for many species for millions of years. From the alpha dog to the silverback gorilla, and including the modern corporation, the variety of rewards, punishments, and incentives that authority figures can convey, and our inherent motivations, drive us to comply with authority even when, absent that authority, we would find their orders abhorrent or ridiculous.

• Scarcity is the persuader that leads to the perennial “going out of business” sales that have lasted many years, the velvet ropes at “exclusive” clubs, or the “Act now! Only 100 left!” ads that show up on late-night TV. It also is responsible for the propensity to keep old newspapers or record albums; they might be valuable someday because of their scarcity. Scarcity drives the club-goer seeking the status of exclusivity as well as the collector of baseball cards or comic books, because, especially when they are flawed and scarce like misprinted postage stamps or coins, their value soars without any intrinsic difference in value.

The triggers of authority and consistency are familiar to many consultants. Teams and individuals follow outdated and ineffective practices because they are told to, or because they always have. Command-and-control organizations use authority as the motivating factor to keep their employees compliant and obedient. “The way we do things here” is often cast in concrete by the desire to remain constant to the decisions we’ve already made, even when circumstances change drastically. These motivators have enabled the growth of the modern corporation and society, and contributed to some of the worst tragedies in human history. They also pose some of the biggest challenges to agile consultants as we encourage organizations to move away from command structures, with which humans are inherently comfortable, to participative cultures that seem fraught with uncertainty and risk. They challenge us to demonstrate the inconsistencies in seemingly consistent behaviors when they are counterproductive. Understanding the pull of these hidden motivators is a key differentiator for mature consultants.

Many of these persuasion factors are also immensely useful in agile consulting and agile practices. We work well as a team when we honor the idea of reciprocity; if a team member helps us in this sprint, we have an obligation to help her the next time. Once our team commits to the agile framework, its initial resistance and hesitation is often allayed, like that of the bettor or speculatorwho commits to a wager. The concept of visible success relies on social proof for its power; if those guys are doing it, and it works for them, maybe it’ll work for us too. Liking, of course, is an integral part of team “storming, forming, norming and performing.” As we get familiar with our teammates, and as they display reciprocity and commitment, we learn to like them more, thus reinforcing our motivation to cooperate and succeed together.

The wise consultant uses these motivators for good, not ill. We renounce the manipulation of these triggers to persuade our clients to do what we want, and instead use the positive elements to encourage behavior that is positive and sustainable. Social proof, as noted, is a great way to use the successes of one team to spread enthusiasm and belief in the power of agility . Commitment, rather than reward and punishment , is the driver of agile performance. The authority of the domain expert, earned instead of conferred by title, can be used to help teams push through technical challenges. The scarcity of accomplished agile consultants drives our rates to their market value, and our authority as domain experts can persuade enterprises to follow our advice.

One warning : persuasion can be a slippery slope. Unlike the huckster or con artist who uses our impulses against us, we must maintain the purity of intention that lies behind lean and agile concepts. We’re not there, as scrummasters, coaches, or consultants, to persuade the client to do things our way (except for following the basic principles of agility). I’ve seen respected consultants become dictators, taking a “my way or highway” approach to advising, so sure of their superior knowledge, and so competent in their use of persuasion that they leave behind solutions that are inappropriate and unsustainable for the client’s culture. We use our persuasive skills to help guide the client enterprise toward the right path for the client, not to demonstrate our mastery of manipulation or impose our own vision.

These advisory skills, mingled with the five fundamentals of consultative behavior, prepare us to navigate the tricky paths of agile evolution with the purity of intent and competence that encourages sustainable relationships. As our competence and maturity in these consultative behaviors grows, so will our usefulness to the clients and teams that engage us.

Summary

We’ve stepped out of the purely agile focus and looked at the consultative skills and behaviors that drive success. The advisory competence expected of a consultant must be applied to the benefit of the client enterprise, and not to impose the consultant’s vision or preferences. By gaining control of our egos and emotions, and by displaying the neutrality of the facilitator, we enable teams to make, and own, their decisions and commitments. We use the power of persuasion to guide teams and enterprises to adopt the agile principles, and adapt them for their best fit. The agile consultant must demonstrate the openness, candor, and respect that they encourage in their clients, and must model the Zen qualities of emptiness and empathy that agility requires. Agility is a mind-set, and so is consulting; together, they inspire consultants and their clients to achieve things they never thought possible.