During a rich team coaching session, the team decided to move forward and change their working habit. They had heard a lot about other teams stepping into an agile process and wanted to follow that lead.

They had read and heard how many teams had implemented that approach and assumed that it would be easy to implement it. The team hadn’t made itself aware of a simple possibility: most of the reports they had found focused on implementations that had worked out or that the ones describing were still very enthusiastic about. However, there is only a very restricted amount of people who are willing to come back to such a publication and share the difficulties they had met since then or the trouble they had come into.

Social media is a place where people focus on providing recipes and describing how well one is handling one’s work.

After deciding to become an agile team, some of the old problems reappeared. Deadlines were in danger; the team was nervous and inexperienced in the agile methodology. In the face of what seemed to be a danger, they panicked and reverted to their old habits.

Since then, they started over again and have done so a few times. Every time with a new learning and a growing acceptance of possible problems. However, when problems loom on the horizon they regularly wonder about how to change the process and rarely ask themselves how they contributed to drifting back into old habits.

The idea that that might be happening is too foreign to a perfectionist’s mind.