• Agile Transformation

Be happy with resistance!

I am coaching a Scrum team and ask, “Honestly, who here finds the day’s start boring?” Silence. But then the responses start coming. At first hesitantly. “I keep sitting around waiting for everyone to be had. ‘Actually, I’d just rather get started.’ After these first tentative comments, it’s OK to really say what you’re thinking. Now more and more responses are coming. “Sometimes I get some use out of it, but mostly I’m sitting around checking my email.”

Playing nice weather

A clear case of resistance! No one feels like the Daily Scrum, but no one names it. Everyone is playing nice. Because that’s how it should be from the Scrum Master. There is resistance but it is not overt. A sleep-inducing 15 minutes at the beginning of the day? Choose your battles most people think.

Dogs learn to be helpless

It’s like that awful experiment with dogs on an electric floor. One half of the dogs get shocks and can’t jump away. The other half get shocks but can jump away to a place where they are safe. What turns out? If you later give the trapped group of dogs shocks again, but also the opportunity to jump away, they just sit and whine. They have learned to be helpless.

The key

Somehow we have also learned in our working lives not to jump out of deadly boring meetings. Or to turn off the figurative flow. We don’t even feel it anymore. Yet that is precisely where the key is: because feeling the shock again and opening the door will get you moving. That’s the beauty of resistance.

The team I coached has rethought how they want to work together. Their day start is no longer a must. Because after each day start, the team asks itself how it can be more interesting and fun. That way, everyone is motivated and engaged.

Do you also suffer from resistance?

Usually there really is something going on. Time to investigate! We’d love to help you with that, because in all the Agile Transformations we’ve experienced, we’ve seen many different forms of resistance. So you can definitely say that we as coaches at Scrum Academy have developed a nose for it.