Atul Gawande is a surgeon and author who has written some excellent books and New Yorker articles reflecting on the state of modern medicine. Recently, his writing has gone beyond medicine in interesting ways. As he looks for lessons for medicine from other disciplines, he ends up with things to teach both medical professionals and skilled knowledge workers more generally. His book The Checklist Manifesto manages to be a riveting 224 pages on what ought to be one of the least interesting topics possible: the checklist.

So I was intrigued to see a link to a New Yorker article from Dr. Gawande on my own specialty, coaching. It’s as good as I might have hoped. Noticing that his own performance as a surgeon seems to have plateaued, he wonders whether a brief experience with a tennis coach might apply to surgery:

One July day a couple of years ago, when I was at a medical meeting in Nantucket, I had an afternoon free and went looking for someone to hit with. I found a local tennis club and asked if there was anyone who wanted to play. There wasn’t. I saw that there was a ball machine, and I asked the club pro if I could use it to practice ground strokes. He told me that it was for members only. But I could pay for a lesson and hit with him.

He was in his early twenties, a recent graduate who’d played on his college team. We hit back and forth for a while. He went easy on me at first, and then started running me around. I served a few points, and the tennis coach in him came out. You know, he said, you could get more power from your serve.

I was dubious. My serve had always been the best part of my game. But I listened. He had me pay attention to my feet as I served, and I gradually recognized that my legs weren’t really underneath me when I swung my racquet up into the air. My right leg dragged a few inches behind my body, reducing my power. With a few minutes of tinkering, he’d added at least ten miles an hour to my serve. I was serving harder than I ever had in my life.

Not long afterward, I watched Rafael Nadal play a tournament match on the Tennis Channel. The camera flashed to his coach, and the obvious struck me as interesting: even Rafael Nadal has a coach. Nearly every élite tennis player in the world does. Professional athletes use coaches to make sure they are as good as they can be.

But doctors don’t. I’d paid to have a kid just out of college look at my serve. So why did I find it inconceivable to pay someone to come into my operating room and coach me on my surgical technique?

The rest of the article wanders through a history of coaching; interesting examples from sports, music, and education; and describes his own experience engaging a coach. He concludes,

There was a moment in sports when employing a coach was unimaginable—and then came a time when not doing so was unimaginable. We care about results in sports, and if we care half as much about results in schools and in hospitals we may reach the same conclusion.

I value coaching enough to spend my own money on it. I’ve hired a mountain bike coach, Lee McCormack, to help me prepare for this summer’s Trestle All Mountain Enduro race. It’ll be my first downhill race. I don’t expect to win, but I want to get a result I can be happy about and enjoy the experience.

I used to do cross-country mountain bike races, and I have a pretty good idea how to train for an event. I have Lee’s books. I could probably do this on my own. But I know from my own experience as a software development coach how much faster a good coach can help you improve.

Lee McCormack on his backyard pump track

After just two hours of coaching—working on things I would have said I already knew how to do—I could see a marked improvement in my skills. And I had a nice list of things to practice on my own.

This brings me back around to software development. Our world today runs on software. But most software teams struggle to deliver anywhere near as quickly and reliably as they could. A software profession living up to its potential would transform the world. So, to paraphrase Gawande: If we care half as much about results in software development as we do in sports, how is it imaginable that so few teams engage a coach? How is it imaginable that so many teams with access to coaching fail to make the most of it?

What about your team? Do you have a coach? If so, do you make the most of the coaching you have available to you?

Related posts:

1. Refactoring Things Other Than Software
2. How to Invest Less and Make More From Your Software Projects
3. UI Sketches for Distributed Teams

Kathy Sierra tweeted: “The big Q: how much does the *perception* of working in tech need to change, and how much does the *reality* need to change?”

I’m focusing my career on the belief that tech work is *really* messed up and that it doesn’t have to be. If a team I coach gets more productive but doesn’t get happier, I haven’t done my job. The big win with agile/lean/TOC is that they align work with how humans actually function: limited attention span, need for community, continuous learning and limited ability to predict the future, need for frequent positive reinforncement.

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In my experience, the daily Scrum serves two purposes:

1. for team members to make and follow up on commitments to one another, and
2. for team members to raise and start resolving impediments.

Both these purposes are directed towards reaching the Sprint goal.

I started coaching a development team in an IT department this week. Most of the team is officially full-time on their project, but unlike the consulting teams I often work with, no one is ever really full-time on a project. There are production apps to support, people management issues, requests for technical help from other projects, non-project meetings, and a variety of other distractions.

Observing this team’s daily Scrums, I noticed that they talked a lot about what they did in the past 24 hours and what they would do in the next 24. Everyone seemed busy and could account for their time. But I had a hard time connecting their busyness to the work they’d committed to do in the Sprint.

So, I suggested a slight change to the three questions that I learned from Mishkin Berteig. Instead of answering the questions, “What did you do in the last 24 hours?” and “What will you do in the next 24?,” I had the team answer the questions, “What did you complete in the last 24 hours?” and “What will you complete in the next 24?” I recommended that they point at tasks and stories on the task board while answering the questions to keep them focused on the work for the Sprint.

There were some objections:

“But I’ll feel uncomfortable saying I’m not going to complete anything today…” To which I say, “Good. You should feel uncomfortable if you’re not helping the team follow through on its commitment for the Sprint.”

“But our tasks are too big to complete in a day…” “Many of them are. This will give you an incentive to make them smaller in the next Sprint, which will increase your visibility into the state of the work.”

Nonetheless, they agreed to try it, and I’m glad they did. The change in the daily Scrum with the new questions was striking. Conversation was more focused on their commitments. Since team members couldn’t use work from outside the project to show how busy they were, they were motivated to fight the distractions and find project tasks they could commit to. The few team members who are spread across multiple projects now can see clearly where the multi-tasking is hurting their commitments to this team.

If your daily Scrums seem unfocused, even though everyone has lots to talk about, consider changing the questions to change the team’s behavior. Just one word can make a big difference. Try asking each other:

1. What did you complete since we last met?
2. What will you complete before we meet again?
3. What impediments are keeping you from completing something?

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