The benefits of time

I recently learnt first-hand the benefit that time brings, by that I mean how time for people to think through ideas and try it for themselves is crucial to success.

Usually when I give advice to someone, I spend a fair bit of my own time thinking about how they are progressing and generally worrying about the situation. My recent experience has shown that by do that I am doing myself a disservice.

The experience was as follows; a couple of teams that I had been coaching were both in tough situations for different reasons which I will not go into. I gave both of their Scrum Masters a couple of pieces of advice regarding some practices to change. Normally this is where I would have spent the coming days stressing about their progress and thinking of contingency plans. However some rather big impacts occurred in my personal life and work was the last thing on my mind. When I returned to work, I was surprised to find that both teams had achieved solid success with the suggested changes, all with no stressing on my behalf. I should not have been surprised; these were two very capable teams lead by intelligent and effective Scrum Masters.

What I took away from this event was that I need to allow more time for people to think about and trial new ideas before I check back in with them. In the mean time I can find other people and teams that I can help.

As a personal mantra: Plant the seed, don’t stress, just sit back and wait.

Photo by: Earls37a