Blog
2011
Apr
15
Awesome Coach of the Week: Richard Lawrence

Awesome Coach of the Week: Richard Lawrence

15 April 2011 OlafLewitz

We’ve known Richard Lawrence for years and worked with him on numerous occasions, mainly on one of the largest agile transition projects in Europe. Through this work, we came to value him as an Awesome Coach and chose to appreciate his contributions to the Agile Coaching community by honoring him with our first ever Awesome Coach of the Week award.

Olaf Lewitz
agile42 Coach. Visiting Business Influencer and Linchpin. My motto is that of NannyMcPhee: "When you need me, but do not want me, I must stay. When you want me, but no longer need me, then I have to go."

On: 15 April 2011
In: Scrum & XP, agile, Awesome Coach of the Week
Tags: awesome, awesomecoachoftheweek, coach

We’ve known Richard for years and worked with him on numerous occasions, mainly on one of the largest agile transition projects in Europe. Through this work, we came to value him as an Awesome Coach and chose to appreciate his contributions to the Agile Coaching community by honoring him with our first ever Awesome Coach of the Week award.

Richard

ATDD

Richard’s most obvious contribution to the Agile world has been to the methods and tools of ATDD. He contributed to Cucumber and is the creator of Cuke4Nuke.

An Agile Family

Richard and his wife use a lot of agile principles and practices in their boys’ education (e.g. multi-level rolling planning, eliminating waste). Traveling abroad when Richard works far from home, they teach the boys using a backlog and let them self-organise their tasks on a board. They use ideas from the Theory of Constraints to resolve conflicts and make decisions in their family ( their boys even use tools like the evaporating cloud to solve conflicts among one another).

Theory of Constraints

Talking about ToC— pair coaching with Richard is hard. Using the ToC thinking tools is so natural to him that sometimes you don’t notice he flips into it. You feel like entering a completely different world, making it hard to step in if you have less practice yourself. We’re finding that we’re using ToC more and more...

Awesome Coach of the Week

This is why we think Richard Lawrence is an Awesome Coach. If you can add an awesome experience with Richard, please do so in the comments. We’ll honour one Coach a week, starting now. Suggestions welcome!

Discussion 1 Comment

16 April 2011 at 01:04.44 paoloperrotta

"If you can add an awesome experience with Richard [...]" - well, if you mean "frustratingly awesome", here is one. It's 2010 and I'm working with Richard and a bunch of other coaches on a large-scale agile rollout. I've grown used to a number of things - for example, the simple fact that Richard is never ever wrong, and he knows every technical and/or coaching trick that any of us can mention. After a while, you just take stuff like that for granted.

At one point, me and another coach have a problem with a smart, charismatic and overly protective SM. We want to pair with his team and teach them TDD, but he clearly doesn't want us too close to the team. We suggest, we advocate, we ask, we blackmail. Nothing - the SM clearly doesn't trust us near his boys. We finally retreat, hoping to get back on the subject later on.

After a few days, I hear that our suspicious SM has asked Richard to pair with his boys and teach them TDD. I feel 50% relieved, 50% frustrated. I go to Richard and I ask him: "Listen, we tried every trick in the book to convince that guy to let us pair with the team, and we failed. Then you happen to pass by and he *begs* you to pair with them. May I (frickin') know how (the frick) you convinced him?".

Richard watches me with that Spock-like attitude of his, and he plainly states: "Oh, I didn't convince him. I just waited until they had a user story rejected because of a bug, and at that point I mentioned that they may want to do some testing. They jumped at it."

Damn you, Richard Lawrence. Damn you.