Work Different

[Updated on further reflection – originally published 8/12 10:21 am)

Now I’d like to reflect a bit on Kevlin Henney’s excellent keynote.  People didn’t ask so many questions at the end, but as I heard from people around me, his talk was a lot to absorb and operated on many different levels (makes me think of Alistair’s Jazz conversations).  He challenged some of the fundamental assumptions that had been at work throughout the week.  These have to do with “value” as a motivator for workers and whether or not we learn from failures, as the “fail fast” methodologies seem to imply.

Kevlin began his talk saying it was about Code and then talking about how Code reveals itself when it breaks.  Below is an image of broken code on a sign in the Madrid airport.

The second level this operated on for me is that sometimes in failures people reveal themselves.  Look at the failure closely and you learn much more about what that software object, or, that person, is constructed of.

(more…)

I attended this very interesting session with Pete Behrens from Trail Ridge Consulting.  Really liked this session.

I liked that he first he asked who we are ( what level) and what session we liked.  He wanted to get an idea of who he was talking to.  I was the only manager in the audience!!  He did something very useful which was identify particular companies as having these cultures and then talk about how this works.

The main point of this talk was to use analysis of the culture of a business and figure out, from there, what Agile tools might be appropriate and maybe how to influence change within the culture itself.

Here is his deck – my notes follow.

What we do to succeed…

Culture is to an organization is like personality is to a person.
– shared within an organization and developed over years (more…)

I am finding this session to be too basic for someone like me – better for programmers, I would guess. Decided to bail out and go to Al Shalloway Session.

Moved to Al Shalloway session – Jim Highsmith appeared making me feel validated, a bit, but he ran out. I am guessing to Jeff Sutherland session. I am not going to that because, well, I have attended amazing Jeff Sutherland sessions. (more…)

I had promised Carsten to attend his presentation, so I only attended half of Esther Derby’s.  I am so happy I saw her speak.  She’s incredible.  These were my rough notes, but I’ve gone in and edited to give my own reactions.

60 percent info in the start – build foundation, real team, goal, information.

Enabling conditions: info, expertise, material support, connection to org

Adapted from Thomas and Kilman, she showed a grid for to use as tools for analyzing how we respond to conflict.  These words below were dimensions on a grid and you would place yourself on one of the squares.

Proactive
Collaborate
Compete. Compromise. Accommodate
Avoid
Reactive
……..

Next Esther took a look at sources of conflict.  She had a great diagram that had:

Structure (as the top layer)

Task (a column header)
Missing or misunderstood communication
Hardened positions

Interpersonal (a second column header)
Values
Preferences
Past history

When negotiating conflict, just getting clear can solve a lot of issues.

………

Another source of conflict is lack of transparency.  Withholding from the team members.

[This I view as a major teaching for traditional advertising, which tends to follow the Broadcast paradigm through and through.  We think up information and Broadcast it at you.  It is not so much a conversation.]

………

(ran over to hear Tom Poppendieck and Carsten Jakobsen Lean team fixes)

Main recommendation in this talk was to use A3 Demming approach, as recommended too by Jeff Sutherland. I’ve also tried this with my teams and have found very effective.  For more info on A3, see here.

-spoke about root cause analysis
-A3 problem solving with teams facing the same problem

“simplify critical decision making”

Only way to get improvements is to ask people to solve their own, not other’s problems.  Judoka

Ready velocity > done velocity