Title:
Pitching the Agile Antagonist

Initiator: 
Brian Burke

Notetaker:
Curtis Michelson

Participants: 
Abbie, Adam, Rene, Salena, Mary, Steven, Curtis, Nicole, Vicki, Shashidhar, Tammy, Steven

Discussion / Key Concepts.etc.:

Talked about how the problem occurs, what happens when we encounter “the antagonist”.  usually someone that has been “burned before” by a failed agile project, or have heard of bad failures at other companies, sometimes they present passive/aggressive behavior, and they want to hear the “business case” for this change.

the pictures of the white boards capture a lot of the key takeaways from the sessions.  Here are a few more…
– reverse engineer processes, target naysayers, voluntary attrition, set up a space for self-realization, leave the door open for exits. (but what if these naysayers are your best talent?) Be ready to let your top talent go, otherwise they hold you hostage. maybe we can create a longer adoption curve to ease them in, be sure to always show flexibility in approach (not Scrum Nazis). Agile can have many different expressions and animations. Dig into the past failures, tell culture stories, seek first to understand, model demonstrate wins, walk the talk

Recommendations / Next Steps / Actions:
Boiled down the ideas above into a 7 part checklist.

1) Listen for culture, hear the pain

2) Get an open-ended conversation with “how might we?” or “how could we improve?”

3) Define the key problems to get ‘alignments’ with leadership and other objectives

4) Crystallize those alignments in their own language.

5) Find a way to ‘demonstrate’ or model an agile success in their context.

6) Get a commitment, even if a small one, a next step

7) Leave the exit door open (fall thru case).. allow them to leave gracefully

Final retrospective on the session:
great session, well facilitated, nice to have concrete list to land on. and great to have a real antagonist amongst us (thank you Mary!)