Once I got lost driving to the airport and kept driving for so long before asking for directions so that I missed my flight home…

With people in nothern Europe returning from their vacations I have two questions for all of you that are using daily standup meetings in your teams:

1. How long were you driving this vacation before admitting being lost and asking someone for directions?

2. Did anybody report an impediment being in their way at your daily Scrum this morning? (This is question 3 in a standard daily Scrum meeting)

I recently read an article by Yves Hanoulle where he comments on how hard it is for most of us to ask for help. Either we don’t want to bother others or we want to be able to work things out by ourselves. And it may take a while before we realize that we might need help.

Yves’ advice is to change the third question in the standup meeting to “where do you need help?”. This sounds like a great idea.

I think I would like to try a variation and change it to “With what could someone best assist you?”. If you do that everyone has to think of something, and you cannot routinely just say “all is fine, no help is needed”

Try it! I know I will!