There’s a saying that I haven’t heard in awhile:
“A good scrum master should be able to tell what’s happened in the room just before they got there.”1
I think this “training mantra” (a koan?) was an attempt to answer the question “How do you know who will be a good scrum master?” This was a major hook for me when I was starting out, because I knew exactly what it meant and I already could do it. Maybe I was cut out for this weird job after all.
It also validated something much more personal: Hypervigilance2 might have a positive form.
I’m going to sidestep what this “training mantra” might mean about the psychological underbelly of agile coaching3. But it’s worth a think. Maybe that will be a later post.
Instead, I’ll focus on my personal experience, at the risk of sounding, um, eccentric. Readers, please bear with me through the rough parts, because there’s an important point coming. Mostly importantly, I want those of you out there who have similar experiences to see that you are not the only one.
(mild trigger warning)
For my whole adult life, I have been coping with the ability to feel the emotional energy of people in a room. It’s one of those “double-edged sword” gifts from complex PTSD, which began for me when I was 19, when I watched my sister die in a really bloody way. It put me in a near-constant state of hypervigilance, scanning everything and everyone for the next random fatal event. Part of it was a very strong sense that I must keep all my relationships emotionally clean (nothing unsaid, emotional tangles immediately surfaced and dealt with) because any of us could die at any moment. Add to this that I didn’t get proper treatment, and you have more than a decade of Erika being super intense, super anxious, and super exhausted.
By the time I started in The Agile in my mid-40s, I had received lots of TLC and healing. But the “scanning” wiring was still there. It had turned into moments of reading emotional states that people were hiding… and the ability to walk in the room and feel the emotional soup.
Untrained, the experience of “feeling people” is like having 100s of people whispering intensely to you at the same time—discombobulating, hard to understand, triggering, exhausting. Trained, it can be quite beautiful—a symphony of voices in a percolating in a large, lively room. The melody rises, there’s a counterpoint, some syncopation, and the music becomes coherent and meaningful. You might even be able to pick up the baton and encourage a swell here, an accent there, while the players do what they do so well: behave like humans.
This is probably why Wim Wender’s movie “Wings of Desire”4 moved me so deeply in my early 20s. It showed a positive version of knowing what lies beneath—something I wanted very much.
In the movie, angels walk through the streets of Berlin, hearing the thoughts of everyone they pass by. The angels are very calm, because they’re good at listening. Their raison d’etre is to observe and preserve the facets of reality found in people’s inner experience. It’s moody and literary and gorgeous. (Turn up the volume on the clip below. The film itself has subtitles, but you can get the gist without them here.)
Being a Jedi
I’m definitively not an angel. But I have had clients call me a Jedi. And people tell me that they feel safe with, accepted by, and seen by me. These are the benefits of healing PTSD and wanting to be a decent human.
Like anything you practice daily, I got pretty good at reading other people’s insides through body language, verbal language, micro-expressions, and whatever that kinesthetic sense is that some people call “energy.” This skill is hugely useful when facilitating group process or coaching a team.
It’s important to say here that it’s an imperfect tool. My psychotherapist mama says intuition is right about 80% of the time. Reading another’s emotional state has to be a lower percentage, because it’s so hard to shut off your biases and projections. So when I can, I verify, verify, verify, especially when interacting with a single, unique person. But when working in the flow of a large group process (say, big room planning), a quick scan can help you stay ahead of confusion, exhaustion, suppression, and more.
Through my time as a coach, the hypervigilance turned into a poignant sensitivity that I still work hard to aim in the right direction. Often the things I “feel” on people — sadness, anger, anxiety, fear, joy, excitement — are things they want to keep private, which is their right. Even the best intended empathy can be cruel, if it opens people up at work when they don’t want you to. And manipulation, even a little bit, isn’t cool. (I’m talking to you, coaches using NLP.) You have to be really clear about who’s agenda you’re serving. Good advice for any coach.
I don’t remember where it came from originally…was it Schwaber’s club? Adkins? Because I entered the community more than a decade after the manifesto and more than 15 years after Scrum, these training mantras usually came my way online or through several degrees of separation. I hope someone reading can tell me the lineage.
Hypervigilance is a chronic state of heightened alertness and awareness. When you're hypervigilant, it can feel overwhelming and exhausting and affect nearly every part of your life. Hypervigilance is often a symptom of anxiety and PTSD.
Now that I have more historical context, I realize that this kind of approach to growing scrum masters may have been a sign of early distortion of the role, from “expert in Scrum” to “minder of culture”.