Let's talk about the elephant in the room

A month has passed since I started this new adventure. A lot of things have happened, but now it's time to start acting. There is a hundred of ways to start working after trying to diagnose. My way: grab the biggest one, the toughest one. Disclaimer: it will be very uncomfortable to tackle.

Maybe we are in some way prepared to ignore things that hurt us, or avoiding the anxiety that confronting some issues could cause. But, at the end, these things and issues are there, and professionally speaking, they are stopping us from being as effective as we can be and, above all, to deliver value living on a psychologically safe environment.

From the Agile point of view, you will be tempted to start working with the common toolbox: ceremonies, frameworks, techniques and so on. Maybe teach a team to do "good Scrum", TDD workshop or helping QA to be part of the team and not of a process. And all these is great, maybe necessary also, but the elephant will be there, creating a huge shadow meanwhile.

The elephant could be very different at your place, but in any case, it is bigger than all other issues to be address. If I had to bet, your elephant will look like something leadership related, people related, relationships related. Maybe key people who do not talk each other, team fits, different soft skills degree of expertise...

Companies are all human abstract ideas. Maybe brands transcend this idea a bit, but companies do not. They are not P&L, accounts and buildings. Companies are all about people, they way they behave and the way they relate to one another. Having this into account, addressing tool-related problems previous to people-related could seem a waste itself.

And, in any case, if you have to stuck with the Agile Manifesto, first sentence is Individuals and Interactions over processes and tools. So, after all, talking about the elephant in the room is maybe the most Agile approach to start solving issues.