In the ever changing world of Agile, on of the most powerful tool an Agile Coach or Scrum Master possesses isn’t a framework—it’s vulnerability. Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead provides a powerful mandate for how we can operationalize vulnerability to build the trust necessary for true organizational agility.
My key takeaway from Brown’s work is that daring leadership begins with clarity and ends in curiosity.
Be Kind: The Power of Clarity
Brown bring us down a very simple but profound truth: “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” In an Agile environment, this means eliminating the ambiguity that breeds resentment and speculation. When we are clear about expectations, feedback, and roles, we act with kindness, even when the message is difficult. This clarity creates a safe foundation from which we can then be genuinely curious about others’ perspectives and challenges. Without this initial clear communication, any attempt at curiosity will feel performative or even manipulative.
Building Empathy Through Emotional Exploration
True connection and trust are the currency of high-performing Agile teams. This trust isn’t built on happy hours; it’s forged in shared emotional exploration, time and tough conversations. Brown’s work emphasizes that to build empathy, we must explore the emotions that live within our experiences. As coaches, this means moving past a simple “What happened?” to “How did that experience make you feel?”
By slowing down to acknowledge the fear, frustration, or even joy tied to a project, we build a deeper human connection. This exploration shifts the team from merely processing tasks to genuinely understanding and supporting the people performing them.
📜 The Danger of the “Story I’m Making Up”
The core danger in the absence of clarity is the human tendency to fill the void. Without clarity, people will create their own stories, their own truths. Brown calls these internal narratives the Shitty First Drafts (SFD)—the often negative, self-protecting stories we invent to make sense of uncertainty. These SFDs quickly become an organization’s unofficial, detrimental truth, leading to misaligned efforts and eroded trust.
A daring leader recognizes the patterns and behaviors that lead to the SFD phenomenon and intentionally creates a space to expose and process these stories.
Applied Daring Leadership: The SFD Retrospective
To combat the chaos of unmanaged SFDs, I came up with the SFD Retrospective as a powerful tool for coaches and Scrum Masters following a rocky period or project:
- Present the Situation: Clearly and neutrally define the event or project period being reviewed.
- Draft Your SFD: Ask each team member to individually draft their personal SFD—the story, assumptions, and emotions they privately held.
- Fill the Gaps: Invite team members to look for elements in others’ stories that help fill in the blind spots or gaps in their own.
- Collective Story: Use dot-voting to select key elements and phrases from the shared drafts to construct a more accurate, collective story of what actually happened.
- Capture New Awareness: Facilitate a dedicated section to record the team’s shared “Aha!” moments and new understanding.
- Move Forward: Collective actions are then gathered based on this shared truth, not the previous conflicting narratives.
The bottom line
This process is a deeply human way to integrate the principles of Dare to Lead. By encouraging clarity, engaging with emotion, and giving shape to the SFDs, we transform uncertainty into powerful collective action.
Agile506 