me.andering – Willem van den Ende

I’m enjoying and making sense of Dan Russell’s posts on sensemaking:

What’s always struck me about sensemaking behavior is this: People just don’t seem to be all that good at it. They take notes on the topic, then never go over them, or lose them in the shuffle of life.

I resonate with that. I’ve learnt a couple of approaches to make sense of where I am, where the organisation is, and where it’s context is, for instance systems thinking tools such as the Cynefin model. Whenever I’m confronted with a problem, I may or may not reach for my tools. Often, I get stuck in a situation, and _then_ reach for my tools and think “why did I not think of that before…”
For instance, I’m working on a product where the self-organizing team has not been able to agree on a direction and a planning method for a while. I look at the context – it is new product development, something like whatever we are going to make does not exist. If I get the Cynefin model out of the box, we find ourselves in the “Complex” domain, where cause and effect are only coherent in retrospect and do not repeat. The appropriate approach (according to the Cynefin model) is to create a bunch of products instead of one.

So it may not be a wonder that the team can’t agree on an approach – we shouldn’t. We are not blind men looking at different sides of an elephant – we are looking at several elephants, and each may require their own approach…

Agile Open NorthWest gave me a lot of energy. The participants were amazing, newbies and old hands alike – because everyone was actually doing stuff with it in the real world, following the theme “Agile for Real”. I got some answers on questions I had and I came out with stuff to continue working on.

This blog entry is a bit late, which is in no small part due to the fact that I’m still buzzed by this event…

I did not take many photos during the event, as I was too busy participating. I enjoyed most of the sessions I went to, and at several timeslots wished I could be in multiple places at the same time, so I could go to other sessions.

Sessions I enjoyed & gave me almost instant business value:

FunctionalTestingTools, Agile Testing with Testers, TDD for Managers (I still have to post the notes for that one… a session on how to let non-technical people experience Test Driven Development), Green Eggs and Ham, Tools/Techniques for Distributed Communication, Filling out SCRUM with XP, CoEvolutionPicnic. Two sessions I wished I could have also gone: AppreciatoriumProject, and FutureOfUnitTesting .

The action planning at the end of the event turned out to be pretty succesful. Future of Unit testing is getting its’ own workshop (hosted by Kent Beck), some people started preparing a product owners’ workshop, to collect experiences from product owners and… yet another Agile Open got initiated – a group from the San Francisco Bay Area got together to plan one .

This goes to show that open space can be very goal- and action-oriented, and that whatever happens in the sessions is actionable – because people do what matters most to them, just in time.

Some of the few photos.

Elizabeth Hendrickson hosting a session on educational games

Charlie Poole welcomes the participants