Hey there, Agile Adventurer. Just a quick question. What if, for the price of a fancy coffee or half a pizza, you could unlock over 700 hours of the best Agile content on the planet? That's audio, video, e-courses, books, presentations, all that you can think of. But you can also join live calls with world-class practitioners and hang out in a flame war free and AI slop clean slag with the sharpest minds in the game. Oh, and yes, you get direct access to me, Fashko, your Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. No, this is not a drill. It's the Scrum Master Toolbox membership. And it's your unfair advantage in the agile world. So if you want to know more, go check out scrummastertoolbox.org forward slash membership. That's scrummastertoolbox.org forward slash membership. And check out all the goodies we have for you. Do it now. But if you're not doing it now, let's listen to the podcast. Hello, everybody. Welcome to one more week of the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. This week, we have Alf Dobert Baums joining us from Germany. Hey, Alf. Welcome to the show. Hello. Nice to have me here. Absolutely. It's a pleasure to have you. So Alf lives in Berlin. At least he told me so. A city I love, by the way. Amazing city. He studied theater and religion at Freie University Berlin. And he's a systemic organizational consultant, a scrum master and agile coach. He has also been a freelancer for usability and requirements engineering for car manufacturers. And at Verti, he led the Agile transformation. So, Alf, undoubtedly a lot of experience you have there. Tell us a little bit more about yourself and how did you end up becoming a Scrum Master? Okay, well, it was not a plan. It seldom is a plan. And so basically when I started, I started here in Berlin and I knew that theater was kind of like a no money show. So I had to find a way to get some money and the Internet came up, came upon us. And so I learned some HTML and was quite good in CSS and JavaScript. And so I was freelancing with that. and pretty quick I learned that usability is a much more better better way to get the user on on board and from usability then I started to get into the requirements management because a lot of time when usability started it was already done because it was specified in the requirements so I I wanted to go into that and change some things there. And after that, I also did some project management with Sony. So there are some shops and stuff like that. And about 10 years ago, I did a training one and a half years as a systemic organizational consultant, which I really loved. loved and basically what systemic organizational consultant is, is the applied theory of systems. So it's kind of like the communication systems that emerge and how you can interact within that communication system. And yeah, it was really interesting. And from there it was really not so far not such a big step to go into the Scrum Master role because it also is very much within the communication and how you can interact with a communication system yes yeah and this idea of systems especially when it comes to people working together in companies or businesses or whatever kind of organizations. It's a very interesting angle for our role as Scrum Masters and Agile coaches. So I don't know if you're going to tell us a story where the understanding of system was critical, but of course now we talk about the failure as it is Fail Monday here on the podcast. So Alf, share with us that story, a story of a difficult moment you had as a Scrum Master. We'll dive into the details and the take, sorry, we'll dive into the takeaways later, but walk us through the story now okay the story um i go with the with the first thing uh i got kicked out of a team so that was really really disappointing um but um the takeaway is later but it was a complicated setup it was a couple of years ago it was i was a scrum master in a wide a big team 18 persons It was part of a bigger product, which consisted of 50 persons. So we had a couple of more Scrum Masters. And it was also B country. So we had a team, the development team in two countries. And we were in two locations here in Germany. so it was kind of a complicated setup. The thing was, I was new in the company at that point and I was already on a different Scrum team and my boss came up to me and said, yeah, I have this complicated setup and I want you to also be part of that Scrum team and that you have two teams And by the way, the PO is very difficult. So do you want to take it? And I was like, sure, why not? Great introduction right there. Yes. And yeah, it didn't go really well. There was kind of like, I don't know if the German word is Anschlussfähigkeit, which means kind of like the connection or the rapport, where you kind of like have a connection with the team and with the individuals in that team. And, well, it did not quite go as planned. So, but yeah, that was really disappointing for me. I was really humbled. But yeah, I learned a couple of things, I guess. So let's dive into that story and its own takeaways. Let's start with what I guess might be a simple question to ask, but not so simple to answer. When you think back at what happened at the time when you were engaging with the team and each of the individuals involved, including stakeholders, of course. When you look at it from today's perspective, what do you think made it hard to develop that rapport with the team members and the stakeholders? I think the video connection. So because we were always online and always chatting and that was quite hard actually. And one thing that I would do different was just go into the other location and just meet up, meet and greet, and maybe even have a workshop with them and build some real, what is it, physical connection with the team. And yeah I think that was basically the very big thing why I failed So when you look at it why would meeting people face be meaningfully different than meeting them online? Well, one thing is that you know much more the habits and the little twinkle in the eye and the gestures, you see it much more differentiated. You see much more how they are behaving, so to say. So if someone is like with their arms crossed, you can see that. You can see if that person is engaged or not. You can see it if that person is writing an email, basically. And all that, you don't see it in the video chat. And in the video chat, you're usually just close the window, the video, and then it's gone. When you do a workshop, there's a workshop ending, but you still are together and you still connect with each other. You then suddenly have a private conversation. You probably want to go out for a drink with a beer or just eat some food and then you can talk about more private stuff. With a video, you just close the window and it's gone. So that would probably would have made it a little easier. So let's imagine Luke, our faithful scrum master out there, potentially facing a similar situation to yours when you were kind of meeting and getting to know that team. And maybe they get that intuition. Maybe it would be a good idea to have this face to face connection. Should I visit the site? And what's the angle? Like if you were to advise Luke in considering how do I get this face-to-face or more personal connection to the team, what are some tips you could share with Luke about creating that connection that you ended up missing in this case? You mean what kind of workshop or just go there? Anything that comes to your mind. Luke is unsure. He doesn't know yet. How could I approach this? What would be the reason for us to meet face to face? And what if they don't want me to go there? Like, walk us through. How would you reflect on that together with Luke? Well, I would first say, okay, let's have a goal for that meeting. So I wouldn't go there and say, okay, let's build some rapport and I'm just going to go there and we have a beer. No, I would definitely use it to have a workshop kind of like, okay, how are we going to, for example, how are we going to work together? Or what do you see as a difficulty in our setup? Like, because whatever I felt were difficulties, I'm sure the other saw the same difficulties. And then if we just talk about those difficulties and how we could maybe overcome those, that would also make a very strong connection. So, yeah, that's basically what I would talk with Luke through. If he has some anchor points for it where he says, OK, yeah, we had this discussion. I almost forgot and maybe he can just grab it and take it there. So one thing I would add to that is that for Scrum Masters and Agile coaches especially, it's always good to have every now and then kind of a reset. And I don't mean reset as in starting over, but reset as in, let's see where we are, right? And if you already had a working agreements workshop which might have already happened reviewing the working agreements with what you learned the past few sprints might be a good excuse in the good sense meaning that it's a really valuable workshop, but it also sets us up for having that more personal rapport and tackling specific things, because then we can bring the things that are not so easy to talk about, Like the commitments that were missed, the information that didn't flow, the product owner that wasn't available enough. Those can come up in a working agreement workshop. And then the other thing is to, I would at least explicitly discuss, hey, let's have an after work event. Let's meet for a dinner. Let's go play bowling, whatever the preferred off-of-work activities are in your region, and create that ability to connect with people outside the formality of the work environment. Definitely, definitely. But one very important thing that you just mentioned, just that I had an idea, you should not go there and come up with a topic kind of like, okay, here are your failures. How are we going to address those? because especially in the beginning you should just say okay we have a positive uh i'm going in with a positive vibe and uh let's build on that and not kind of like i saw you fail your vpo was not there and you didn't you missed your sprint goal let's talk about that i wouldn't definitely not recommend that absolutely uh focus on the positive the connection and and create that positive energy that will hopefully kind of jumpstart that rapport. So great suggestion. Thank you for sharing that with us, Alf. Sure. All right. I hope you liked this episode. But before you hit next episode, here's the deal. This podcast is powered by people like you, the members who wanted more than just inspiration. They wanted real tools and real connection to people who are practicing agile. every day. We're talking access to over 700 hours of agile gold, CTO level strategy talks, summit keynotes, live workshops, e-courses, deep dive interviews, books. And if you're into no estimates, we got the pioneers of no estimates in those deep dive interviews as well. Agile business intelligence, creating product visions, coaching your product owner courses, you name it. You'll get invites to monthly live Q&As with agile pioneers and practitioners, plus a private Slack community, which is free of all of that AI slop you see everywhere. And of course, without the flame wars. It's a community of practitioners that want to learn and thrive together. 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