here we go again

learn forwards and backwards

I've built my career by being ahead of the curve.

I was a front-end developer before the term existed, and I embraced html5 and css3 when they were still drafts. I blogged about Angular back when its version number was zero.

As agile rose in popularity, I had been working with scrum and kanban in development for years. My employer at the time paid for me to take the CSM and supported me in becoming a Scrum Master.

For both of these roles, I found myself browsing job boards with dozens of new jobs listed every day. My salary was behaving according to Moore’s Law! If I didn’t want to work somewhere, I didn’t have to. If a contract fell through, I’d be working again by the end of the month. This is no longer the case, to any extent.

And so many agile coaches are looking to the future and wondering what roles will exist for them. And like many agile coaches, I’m looking at genAI as the next big shift and wondering how I can bring value in that space. I believe some of these points may be relevant to many of my readers, so I hope you can find some inspiration within them should you need it.

· Understanding of iterative incremental cycles and supporting practices, and the ability to pass that understanding on

· The ability to implement them

· Various transformational change experiences and the lessons they’ve taught me

· Facilitation skills

· Coaching skills

· Training skills

I’m sure this list should be longer, but I want to finish writing this issue today.

This is good news. The previous two times I rode the ‘next big thing’ wave, I was confident in my abilities, but I had far fewer transferable skills from my previous life stage. This time around, I enter with a sense of self-assurance that younger versions of myself did not have the privilege to experience.

It feels different this time around. I'm more conscious of the cycle of technological hype. I've seen it play out twice before, and the excitement that I would normally experience when allowing myself to hyperfixate (and go down a rabbit hole, without feeling guilty about it when I emerge on the other side) is mixed with weariness. Once again, I’m going to expend all my energy to learn a great breadth very quickly, become competent at telling the stories that explain the new thing, and then watch others build a depth that I can only lust after.

I love the idea of becoming a topic expert because I’ve learned all there is to learn about a subject, but there are too many subjects to choose just one from. Just as I learn the breadth of a given topic, I also learn the breadth of all the topics.

This time, though, my focus and commitments are different, divided. I’m a permanent employee, and so my work has to fit within a more structured paradigm. I have young twins, and I want to spend time teaching them the things I know and the lessons I’ve learned. I want to be actively involved in my communities in the real world.

Two lessons stand clear as I look towards the past to learn about the future:

1. Always meet people where they are. (I bet you’ve never heard that before!) Every organisation, department, team, and individual has its own unique history and context, and change occurs most effectively through acceptance and understanding rather than criticism. Even criticising the system directly could distance someone from you before you’ve started. Celebrate how well they’re doing, let them reflect upon it, and see if you can find any areas for development.

2. Remember that as one voice among thousands, you need to accept the odds. It’s not just the other people in your organisation you’re trying to move on; it’s also their friends, families, and many other random influences they experience during the day. Your message has to be small enough to slip through the gaps that all the rest of the voices leave. No one thinks they have the time to slow down in the hope of speeding up in the future, so we support improvements as small as possible to achieve as little friction as possible.

The AI train has left the station, and I'm comfortable where I am on it: neither rushing to the engine nor hiding from the inspector in the toilet. This time, I'm sitting comfortably in a carriage and enjoying the ride.