Partnership & Possibilities

Michael Tardiff (@mjt) tweeted:

Forget pleased & surprised: I’m astonished at the energy & number of seat-switches in “Park Bench” when tackling “creating insights.” Wow.

I’ve used “Park Bench” at the end of workshops as a way of reflecting on the day or as a debriefing technique after a training exercise to uncover group discoveries. You may be surprised that I hadn’t thought of it for retrospectives. I was. Luckily, Michael thought of it.

“Park Bench” a great technique to engage a team in the “Generating Insights” segment of the Agile Retrospectives framework. It injects fun into the session with a bit of “role-playing” on everyone’s part, though no real acting talent is required.

Set Up the “Park Bench” Activity
Start with a set of data gathered from all the team members - a timeline, team radar, FRIM, charts with effort or velocity data, or other substantial sets of events, attempts, accomplishments, tasks, that happened during the iteration or release.

Line up 4-5 chairs in the middle of the seating circle or across the open end of the seating “U”.

Envision an imaginary “park” and visualize the line of chairs as a “park bench.”

Describe the Park Rules:

There must always be at least one open seat on the bench. Anyone may join the bench (and talk) whenever there is an empty seat. If the last seat fills, someone else must leave the bench. People who are not on the bench may not comment, only people on the bench can talk. People who are not on the park bench listen closely to the conversation, take notes, and join the bench when they have something to contribute to the discussion.

In the Park
The retrospective leader (RL) sits in one of the chairs and begins to talk about a few observations of the (imaginary) park, the day, and the data, while wondering out loud what meaning other people might have made of it. The RL hopes that someone will sit on the bench too, to share and discuss their insights, thoughts about implications, and other interpretations of the data.

In the imaginary park world, people walk by, then join the RL for a while on the park bench (i.e., in one of the chairs). They share their insights, discuss, and go on their way. There may be several people on the bench at the same time. The RL may leave the bench to make room for someone new. The rotation of keeping an empty seat gives more people the opportunity to share their thoughts.

Eventually dusk falls in the park (the flow of comments slows) and everyone leaves the park bench, including the RL.

Moving into Action
Choose the next activity to help the team synthesize their insights and ideas from the Park Bench into proposals for improvement or impediment removal actions if ones have not already emerged.

Michael offers a great reminder! And not only about this activity. It’s a reminder of how many activities can serve multiple purposes in supporting groups of people learning and thinking together if retrospective leaders think creatively about applying them in new situations.

Today I invented a phrase (at least I think I invented it because I haven’t heard anyone else say it): “Avoidable Heroism.”

I invented it in response to a question, “Should my team work on the weekend to meet a commitment made under their control?”

Now, I don’t know the background behind this question. Maybe it’s perfectly reasonable for them to work on the weekend. Maybe they have no agreement about sustainable pace. And, it raises a few questions in my mind. How often does this happen? How far from the commitment are they? When was the first, best opportunity to re-negotiate the commitment? How did it slip by? What else is happening that affects their ability to commit and deliver?

Avoidable heroism happens on teams when the system pressures the team into committing to “stretch” iteration goals (rather than evidence-based goals) and someone (or more than one someone) has to work nights and weekends to meet the commitment.

Avoidable heroism occurs when unit test coverage goes down, team members focus on cranking out quantity of code rather than quality code and “forget” TDD, so that at a certain point a team member throws themselves on the technical debt grenade and begins to clear away the debris.

Avoidable heroism ensues when team members hand the new code to the testers on the last day of the iteration, rather than including them as part of the cross-functional teamwork from the first day.

And so on.

In the 1980’s (yes, I know that was before many of you were born), Tina Turner sang an anthem, “We don’t need another hero!”. Make it your own, your team anthem.

N.B.: I hope someone out there who’s into writing anti-patterns will collaborate with me on documenting this one.

Sometimes teams get stuck at the point of “deciding what to do” in retrospectives. Team members may begin to point fingers and describe things that the ubiquitous “they” must do before the team can move forward or make improvements,. This may lead to a team-as-victim, “poor us, we’re stuck” syndrome, or blame and finger-pointing. “It’s their fault we’re in this mess!” Blame kills retrospectives and the perception of persecution stalls any hope of forward motion, so the retrospective leader has to shift this conversation, and fast! Team members also may perceive so much room for improvement they become paralyzed and can’t decide where to start improving their lot.

When victim-talk, blaming or overwhelm surfaces, I reach into my retrospective leaders toolbox and pull out a technique to help teams identify the kinds of action the team can take. I draw three big concentric circles on a whiteboard or flip chart page, making the middle one as big as I can and leaving space wide enough for sticky notes in between each ring.

Label the middle circle “team controls”, label the next ring “team influences”, and
the third “The Soup”. I borrowed the useful concept of “The Soup” from David Schmalz, meaning all those elements of organizational climate & culture, policies & procedures, and other systemic factors in organizations that have become so embedded in “the way we do things around here” that the team has little hope of shifting them without considerable help and political will on someone’s part. (James Shore explores “The Soup” in a post.)

When I have prepared the chart, I explain that everything that affects the team falls into one of these categories, and every action they take also falls into one of three categories:

In the middle, they have control so they can take direct action.

In the next ring, they have influence, so their action would be a persuasive, influencing or recommending action.

In the last ring, they may have no control or influence, but they can choose actions for how to respond collectively when they find themselves swimming in the soup.

I share a couple of illustrating stories for this one.

I invite team members, in pairs, to write the issues and challenges the team faces on sticky notes – one per note, of course. When they’ve finished, pairs bring their notes to the chart and stick each note in the appropriate ring. As a next step, the whole team takes a step back to look at the completed chart and identify what kinds of actions they can take for each note: direct, influencing, response. This activity leads naturally into planning specific actions that will have the greatest beneficial impact. In early retrospectives, it’s more effective when the team takes on direct actions to remove impediments or create improvements within its control. When the team has experienced success with direct action, it becomes easier to develop plans for influencing actions for impediment removal or choosing actions in response to systemic constraints.

The Circles of Control & Influence activity helps the team sidestep the “someone should,” “if only they would,” “only those guys can” “we’re doomed!” conversations (which generally go nowhere), and shows individual team members that they have more scope for action if they act as a team.

(This technique was adapted from Stephen Covey’s book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, also described by Jim Bullock as CircleofInfluenceAndConcern )

I’m attending Agile 2010. Are you?

If you’re serious about adopting, grounding, or extending Agile mental models, values, principles, methods, and practices where you work, you’ll find answers to your current concerns, and stimulate new questions to consider, at Agile 2010. With 214 sessions ranging across 5 days and 16 thematic stages, you’re sure to find many colleagues who face similar challenges.

In Open Jam, the self-organizing area of the conference, you’ll find thought leaders whose deep curiosity and desire to learn leads them to sit with you and explore your situation. You’ll also find peers and colleagues who have been there and want to share their experience with you. You’ll have the opportunity to share your experiences with them as well. I’ll spend quite a lot of my time in Open Jam. Please look for me there and say, “hi!” Who knows, we may have a lot to talk about.

If you’re looking for outside support, you’ll find that too, among many sponsors and exhibitors who eagerly await the chance to discuss their approaches, services, tools and products with you.

Among the sessions on the “Building High Performance Teams” stage, you’ll find our FutureWorks Consulting session. (We’re proud to have been selected as the competition was fierce among nearly a thousand compelling submissions.) Sharon and I have developed a new presentation for the conference on a topic of critical importance to effective collaboration and team functioning: “Trust, Authenticity & Forgiveness: Workplaces Where People Thrive & Produce,”. I look forward to sharing it with you on Tuesday afternoon, August 10, from 1:30-3:00 pm.

Take advantage of this once-a-year opportunity to experience all the “tribes” of the Agile community coming together in Orlando, Florida, USA, August 9-13. Register now! If you’re involved in adopting or implementing agile in your organization, you can’t afford to miss it.

Diana

P.S. Sorry. You’ve missed Super Early Bird and Early Bird rates. The good news: there’s still time to save over 10% by registering with a Group Pack of 5. See you in Orlando!

In a comment on an article about Pixar in The Economist, Tom Agan from the Nielsen Company, writes:

“At The Nielsen Company we have just completed a study of the major consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies operating in the U.S. and those with standardized post mortems for new products, like Pixar, average almost 100% more revenue from new products compared to those that don’t…I think through articles like this and new research that quantifies the impact, we are coming much closer to uncovering the universal truths of innovation.”

I’m willing to put up with The Economist (and Pixar) using the term “post-mortem”, when it results in such lovely and validating statistics as those above. “…the universal truths of innovation”…Indeed!

When the rains came down and the flood waters rose in Nashville TN one month ago, it became clear the Agile Alliance would have to “respond to change” rather than “following the plan” for our annual Agile 2010 conference–with the conference scheduled to open in only 14 weeks.

Leaders and the conference team at the Agile Alliance faced a daunting set of challenges. We needed to:
• Assess the implications of the flooding
• Act with integrity and thoughtful consideration of all parties
• Identify reasonable alternatives
• Move without delay to reduce the uncertainty
• Deliver value to our customers and partners

When Phil Brock (Agile Alliance Managing Director) and I (Board Chair) discussed the news of the weekend floods on Monday morning May 3, we quickly determined that the last responsible moment for making a site decision was upon us. Nashville was under water, and we had no time to lose. Conference attendees were already making flight reservations and family plans. The conference organizers were set to announce the program. Speakers needed the program schedule to make their plans. Many potential conference goers awaited the program to make their decisions about attendance. Sponsors and exhibitors needed to understand their space and resource constraints with plenty of time. In Nashville, the Gaylord Resort staff needed to resolve their contractual obligations and get on with the business of restoration without distractions. And every day we delayed potentially was a day of lost registration income - income that the Agile Alliance counts on to fund other programs.

Coordinating with Todd Little (Conference Steering committee chair) and Jim Newkirk (Agile 2010 Conference director), we all pulled together a meeting of the conference steering committee on a day’s notice. The steering committee members all agreed that our priority was to preserve the conference dates if at all possible, in order to minimize the disruption. Preserving the dates was no slam dunk. Conference venues that match events of our size are typically booked 18-24 months in advance, and finding locations that still had our dates open was a long shot.

In those first few days, Jim maintained constant communication with his organizing group who prepared themselves for re-thinking the program. I jumped on Twitter to begin disseminating information about our actions as early as possible. Agile2010 Twitter followers helped to pass along the news. Between Agile Alliance staff, Steering committee members, and Conference organizers, we self-organized a crisis team to handle many different aspects of the work.

Meanwhile, Yvonne & Jessica, our Elastic conference planners, were earning their name - stretching their capabilities to get accurate information from the staff at the Gaylord Resort in Nashville while also identifying other potential sites for the conference, just in case. By our Steering committee meeting, they had discovered: a) the Gaylord was no longer an option, and b) three site possibilities in two cities. The Steering Committee decided that Yvonne, Jim and Phil would visit the viable sites over the coming weekend (Mother’s Day weekend in the US). Agile Alliance board members voted to trust the site visitation team with decision authority, so that they could take advantage of opportunities to negotiate the best possible terms. In addition, the Gaylord staff appreciated the collaborative understanding and care we extended to them in their dire situation.

Once the visitation group toured all the alternative venues and selected the Orlando site, the rest of us moved into our part of the action. I worked with Phil to get the contracts signed and delivered to relevant parties within a 24-hour window. (Another event was also looking at the site for the same dates. We closed the deal first!) The conference organizers promptly got to work on the formidable task of re-mapping the program schedule to the new spaces. In the end, we announced the new location on May 11 and the whole conference program announcement was delayed by only a week, from May 6 to May 13.

And though we all felt the urgency, everyone stayed focused on their part. The team worked through the process deliberately, checking our quality standards and maintaining our values every step along the way. While much was out of our control, we attended to the things we could and kept the process moving forward. All of us committed to our collective ownership of the event.

Maybe the best part was the support we felt from our Agile community as we worked through the crisis. We asked for patience and we got it. We appreciate our colleagues for showing their confidence in our ability to meet the challenge.

While in Washington D.C. last month, for the first time I visited the U.S. Library of Congress. Guided by writer and experienced LoC researcher David Schmaltz, I received a temporary library card to research early management thought.

In the glorious reading room under its amazing dome, I held two precious books. One, an (out of print) copy of Mary Parker Follett’s Creative Experience is so old it didn’t have publication date or place data printed in it. However, a little diligent searching told me the edition I held was published in 1924. The book contains ideas offered to the world of management and leadership nearly 90 years ago.

I’d like to share some of her writing with you. These are excerpts that I copied down (by hand! with a pen! on paper!) during my visit in the Library.

“…compromise sacrifices the integrity of the individual, and balance of power merely rearranges what already exists; it produces no new values.”

“It is the ethics of the sentimentalist to say that men’s [sic] interests are the same; if they were, life would stagnate.”

Follett invented several management and organizational concepts. One of my favorites is “interact and co-act.”

“Genuine power can only be grown, it will slip from every arbitrary hand that grasps it; for genuine power is not coercive control, but coactive control. Coercive power is the curse of the universe; coactive power, the enrichment and advancement of every human soul.”

And, did anyone ever say, we value “Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools” better than this?

“What we care about is productive life, and the first test of the productive power of collective life is its nourishment of the individual. The second test is whether the contributions of individuals can be fruitfully united.”

Follett stands at the roots of behavioral sciences and the study of human relations in the workplace and society. In the concluding section of Creative Experience, she discusses conflict.

“What people often mean by getting rid of conflict is getting rid of diversity, and it is of the utmost importance that these should not be considered the same. We may wish to abolish conflict but we cannot get rid of diversity. We must face life as it is and understand that diversity is its most essential feature…fear of difference is a dread of life itself.”

“It is possible to conceive conflict as not necessarily of wasteful outbreak of incompatibilities but a normal process by which socially valuable differences register themselves for the enrichment of all concerned.

“One of the greatest values of controversy is its revelatory nature. The real issues at stake come into the open and have the possibility of being reconciled. A fresh conflict between employees and employers is often not so much an upsetting of the equilibrium, really, as an opportunity for stabilizing.”

“…if we could look at social conflict as neither good nor bad, but simply a fact, we should make great strides in our thinking. On every level the movement of life is through the release of energy.”

Follett also has thoughts on the useful role of power and freedom in conflict.

“…the social process may be conceived either as opposing and a battle of desires with the victory of one over the other, or as the confronting and integrating of desires. The former means non-freedom for both sides…the latter means a freeing for both sides and increased total power or increased capacity in the world.”

“We seek a richly diversified experience where every difference strengthens and reinforces the other. Through interpenetrations of spirit and spirit, differences are conserved, accentuated and reconciled in greater life which is the issue…the activity of co-creating is the core of democracy, the essence of citizenship, the condition of world citizenship.”

She also observes our interdependence and interconnection as humans.

“…the essence of experience, the law of relation, is reciprocal freeing.”
“To free the energies of the human spirit is the high potentiality of all human association.”

Mary Parker Follett inspires me more than most authors who take organizational life as their topic. Holding her book, I felt I had something precious in my hands. Its page edges had crumbled, several pages fell loose from the binding. I had an impulse to find white archival gloves to handle it. My eyes misted as I felt regret over how her words have met widespread disregard by later influential management advisors. However, I also discovered that people whose thinking I admire (like Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Peter Drucker, Douglas MacGregor and others) were also inspired by Follett.

Postscript:
As a culminating wonder of my visit, as the cherry on the top of my research sundae, a reddish-brown hard bound book arrived at my reading desk. It was the Library of Congress copy of Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great! I admit it gave me a tremendous thrill to discover our inclusion in such company.

In Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great! Esther Derby and I include a collection of activities we called, “Short Subjects.” (page 122)

After Gathering Data, these useful activities provide relatively quick ways to review event, effort, and response data; reflect on the implications of the data; and Generate Insights about team experiences.

We listed these activities into a single section because they follow a similar process.
1) The retrospective leader posts labeled flip charts (or sections on a white board).
2) Team members take a few minutes (typically 3-5 minutes) to reflect on the data and identify items or ideas for each category.
3) The retrospective leader describes a method for getting ideas on the charts. She may ask team members to write on sticky notes (1 per item) and post them on the appropriate chart. He may lead a brainstorming session and record the comments on the charts.
4) Team members identify and cluster similar items, then filter and prioritize them to determine what comes next.

In the book, we describe several Short Subjects including the familiar:
What worked well/ Do differently next time
Keep/Drop/Add
Stop Doing/Start Doing/Keep Doing
Mad/Sad/Glad

Now we can add two new Short Subjects activities to the list:

SaMoLo
SaMoLo (Same of/More of/Less of) comes from a Scrumology post by David Bland. David says, “I’ve discovered that SaMoLo can also be the sweet spot for easing new teams into iteration retrospectives.” For more on how David led his team through this activity, read his informative post.

Liked/Lacked/Longed For
From the Deep Agile conference in Boston, Tobias Mayer used Twitter to highlight this variation. He tweeted, “#deepagile bringing poetry into retrospectives… liked, lacked, longed for.” I think of this as the Jane Austen version of Short Subjects. I look forward to bringing it to a team that has just experienced a difficult or poignant iteration or retrospective. (Late breaking news: Ellen Gottesdiener tells me that Mary Gorman was the person who introduced LLL at Deep Agile. Thanks, Mary!) (Even later breaking news: Ellen and Mary give a fuller description of their 4L’s activity.)

Tip: Short Subjects can also provide variety in Closing the Retrospective, as a way for the retrospective leader to ask for feedback on the retrospective.

Lately I’ve reinforced my interest in learning to learn. I get several benefits from it. First, I learn how to learn better for my own purposes. Second, I learn more about how other people learn. Third, if I apply what I learn about how other people learn, I can become a better consultant/coach/trainer. And, magically, fourth, I am liberated from needing to find a teacher to learn the things I’m interested in learning.

The reinforcement for my learning to learn comes in the form of “Where Are Your Keys?” or The Fluency Game. (Full disclosure: My son introduced me to this new idea. It’s good to learn from family.) While exploring WAYK (abbreviation and twitter hashtag), I’ve acquired a set of techniques for learning. Many of them are not new; however, most of them have not been used in just this way before. I’m reminded of remarks about the Agile Manifesto – not new ideas either, but collected and presented in a new way.

All together there are more than 100 WAYK techniques for learning, and the list is growing. The community invents and adds new all the time. I’ve only become fluent in a few, and I’m working on others. One of my favorites is the technique for dealing with “mistakes” or unexpected outcomes. When WAYK-ians notice that they’ve done something other than what they meant or didn’t do it the way they hoped or didn’t get the outcome they wanted, they fling both arms into the air (it’s important to include the arm movement), smile widely, and say, “How fascinating!”

“How fascinating!” keeps me, as the learner, in the flow of learning and prevents my stumble from stopping the flow. It notices that any result is a useful result and carries with it an opportunity to learn something new.

Next time you think you’ve made a mistake or had a failure, try the “How Fascinating!” technique to continue your flow/gain fluency in your chosen skill.

For some time, I’ve been ruminating on how to answer folks who ask, “How do I convince people that [Agile/Scrum/XP/Lean/Kanban] is better?” I’ve even heard, “How can I get them to drink the Kool-Aid?” (I have an unfortunate tendency to lapse into a rant in response to this one. Maybe it’s because I was a thinking adult when the Jim Jones massacre happened, and it’s real, sad history to me. I won’t rant more here.)

My response to both queries goes something like, “Why would you want to?” I gave up on butting my head into brick walls some time back and feel perplexed when others want to do so.

Last Spring, I read a couple of blog posts by some alt.net guys that also capture my feelings. Jeremy Miller posted “Coalition of the Willing” and Ian Cooper posted “Why people do not see how smart your idea is at first” over a span of a few days. They wrote about alt.net; however, their arguments apply in the Agile world too.

To paraphrase Yoda, “Do or do not, don’t try to convince anyone else.”