A short video conversation I had with Mervin Chiang from Procensol for his “In Conversations” series.
Agile master Craig Smith in conversation with Mervin Chiang on all things “Agile in Business”. Craig, Director of the Agile Alliance and Unbound DNA is one of Australia’s premier Agile trainers, coaches and practitioners and a significant contributor to the Agile community.
“Coaching can be a very lonely role, because you’re the one dealing with the dysfunctions,” said Craig Smith, an Agile coach from Brisbane, Australia. For this reason and many others, Craig set out to try to improve the overall coaching experience. Craig was collaborating with a colleague on this one night when he saw an episode of Gordon Ramsay’s “Kitchen Nightmares”. Craig was instantly struck by Gordon’s “coaching” style, and the gears went to work. In his Agile2016 session “Coaching Nightmares: Insights We Can Learn from Gordon Ramsay”, Craig shows snippets of Gordon Ramsay at work in the kitchen and asks participants, “What can we learn from this? As a coach, what would I do?”
One of the big things about Ramsay’s style is that he calls it like it is because he has no stake in the game. However, coaches may resist the urge to do that, maybe because they are tied to the company or are working for a consultancy that would rather they not. But, Craig says, “In order to get people to really change, we need to call it [like it is].”
SolutionsIQ’s Mike Alexander hosts at Agile2016 in Atlanta, GA.
At Agile Australia 2014 in Melbourne, Jim Benson of Personal Kanban fame takes some time to talk with Craig, Renee, Tony and (a very silent) Kim Ballestrin and along the way they talk about:
early work implementing David J. Anderson’s Agile Management which resulted in Jim focussing on the person (Personal Kanban) and David focussing on the organisation (Kanban method) – two different viewpoints on the same solution set
XP, Scrum, Kanban method and Personal Kanban exemplify the people who created them
At Agile Australia 2014 in Melbourne, Craig and Tony grabbed the microphone and scoured the conference foyer in one of the breaks looking for interesting people in the Australian Agile community to ask them about what they are working on and their views of the conference.
The people they harassed include:
Maxime Groenewoud – Project Manager, enjoyed hearing about new practices including microservices architecture
Nigel Dalton – CXO at REA Group, Agile Australia advisor, highlight of the conference was an Ellen DeGeneres moment getting a selfie with Brant Cooper, excited to hear about holocracy at Zappos, at REA have been disrupting through bringing virtual reality to real estate, “there is one innovative startup in real estate in Australia each week!”
Steve Lawrence – Agile Coach and Agile Australia stream chair – has been watching the scaled agile debate and the learnings allowing us to take the message into the business
At Agile 2013 in Nashville on a park bench, in a garden, near a waterfall that is ever present, Craig catches up with Alan Bustamante to talk about his Agile expedition. Along the way they chat about:
Tony asks a philisophical question , whilst Renee harnesses her nineties pop star – Ice Ice Baby and Craig marvels at Tony’s cool intro – probably the coolest intro he’s done since the eighties.
Craig entices us to save the environment by using Octopads instead of sticky notes – with Luke Stephenson
Renee get us game playing with the Lean Startup game”Snowflake” from TastyCupcakes.com
At Agile 2013 in Nashville, TN, Craig catches up with Kenny Rubin, author of “Essential Scrum” and Scrum trainer and coach at Innolution. While sitting in the corridor, they talk about:
Essential Scrum – the success and background of the book
Visual AGILExicon® – free image library to describe Scrum and Agile in a visual way