It all depends on what significance people assign to a particular “thought”. And whether or not we need/have an authoritative source to refer to, or work from our own related recollections of experiences which can be rather vague, or hard to distinguish well enough, and hard to explain, for becoming (re)useful in an other context.

We often call such recollections “internal babble” or “irrelevant”, in order to more easily ignore associations and messages bubbling up.

By the way, her entry links to beautiful snowflakes under the microscope. Like snowflakes, no two situations are exactly the same, but they can be very similar.

Nynke e-mailed me about the relevant use of a reaction. In case of an emergency, like seeing people in a burning car, careful deliberation is usually not the preferred choice of action, we can trust ourself / our memory telling us that rescuing the shocked people in the vehicle is the best choice.

Other situations require a response, and some thinking before doing. Nynke says “Stop the world… and check possible causes and effects: [...] thinking BEFORE intiating a change, THEN action, that is a response”
I was thinking of how to apply the Satir interaction model in situations where “people” (or me) give a reaction when a response would have been appropriate.

Usually the interaction model is drawn for one person. That kind of misses the point for me; an interaction involves at least one other person. When we prepared the first run of balancing act, I drew the interaction model for two persons:

Seen through the lense of this model, what happens if I give a reaction, is that I speed through the meaning and significance stages, going straight to response. If the other person does the same a fight is the likely result.

“Stopping the world” is a way to break through this. Each person in the interaction can decide for him or herself to slow down. Take a time-out, ask yourself what you saw or heard, and if the situation allows, ask the other. Say “maybe we’re getting in over our head here” or “I need some time to think about this”, or “I’m puzzled”.

Dale Emery uses the interaction model as well. I like what he wrote in Untangling Communication :

By applying the same level of awareness and problem-solving skills that you use in catching problems in software, you will begin to notice the signs of trouble in communication just a little bit earlier. In many cases, that will be enough to trigger you to slow down, walk through the communication process, and get your communication back on the right track.

I’m having fun “debugging” sessions with someone. We share keys from recent events, seeing where we mis-interpreted each other. “What did you see?” “Oh?” “What did you make of that?” “Right… that is not what I intended…”.

“Debugging” sessions are a lot of fun. They help me generate more responses that generate the responses I desire. They do require a level of trust and openness, thatseems to be rare (according to what I see, and what I hear from others) .

When the required trust is not present, I have a debugging session with myself, or sometimes with a third person (e.g. a friend, coach or colleague, in my circles often rolled into one ).

I guess stopping myself in the moment or having a debugging session afterwards helps me create more trust and openness in situations that deserve it. And create more deserving situations over time.

I’ll be co-hosting

• The drawing carousel – a pair programming eXperience
• Simple tools for communication – a Balancing Act
• Systemsthinking workshop – using the Diagram Of Effects (DOE) to effectively change your work environment.

Together with Marc Evers, hopefully supported by (in various configurations, depending on the session and what suits our co-hosts in the schedule) Laurent Bossavit, Emmanuel Gaillot, Rachel Davies and Lynne Azpeitia.

I’ll be supporting in preparation and/or running (tool words is in the same slot as systems thinking unfortunately):

• Tracer Bullets (an experiential session on feedback) by Rob Westgeest and Tjakko Kleinhuis
• Tool Words, Weapon Words by Laurent Bossavit and Emmanuel Gaillot
• Writing on the Walls (about the use of information radiators) by Laurent Bossavit and Emmanuel Gaillot

Writing on the Walls is new, Tracer Bullets revamped – I haven’t had the good fortune of attending it so far.

Pascal mentioned the princess risk – the risk that a princess arrives at the conference. To him it signifies risks we did not anticipate in the past. These things will happen. For me, the princess risk entry in the risk table now also signifies as a call for myself to stay vigilant. The probability is stated as 50%. After three xp days benelux and one Agile Open, we should really have updated it to 25%, as a princess arrived at only one of those four events… (we introduced the risk after the second xp days benelux, at which a Belgian princess showed up, and threw us into chaos).

Unanticipated risks happen. Preparing scenarios prepares us mentally – we are aware that there are things that will not go as planned. Last year there was also at least one good thing that happened unexpectedly for me. Agile Open helped someone change his life.

It changed mine too. Co-facilitating an experiential workshop on congruent communication made a deep impression on me. I couldn’t really believe I was doing that, and yet I was doing it . We’ve continued to develop this workshop as we are making the tools we use our own. We’ve ran it in various configurations, most recently at SPA and xp days france. We’ll be running it again at agile2006, where it has been accepted as a tutorial (“Balancing act – simple tools for feedback, communication and courage” – I would include a link, but the programme seems to be online as a PDF only).

I’m glad. Risk is only a Princess – Value is King (or Queen ) at Agile Open.

All of the sessions were in French. It was cool to see an american (Charlie Poole) and a canadian (J.B. Rainsberger) do presentations in French :

The thursday night dinner / boat trip was also very nice.

To introduce the sessions, all presenters did one minute presentations, which worked very well to warm up the audience.

I co-facilitated a run of Simple tools for communication (‘des outils simple pour le communication’) with Marc Evers again (also known as Balancing Act), this time supported by Laurent Bossavit and Emmanuel Gaillot, who helped us out with translating to French, doing roleplays and facilitation.

We scaled this workshop in several dimensions. Doing it in French was more difficult than doing it in English or German, turnout was the largest we had so far for this workshop (between 25 and 30 people). As it requires quite a bit of facilitation and safety, we are very careful not to scale it too quickly.

We did exercises and demonstrations about coping stances, self other and context, the satir change model, and as a roundup we did a Temperature Reading. Near the end, the audience was pretty much exhausted. Judging from the reactions, the laughs, and the stories participants roleplayed, the workshop was a success.

I haven’t much to say about it right now, still recovering from excellent dinners, wine, conversation and enjoyable sessions. And I’m preparing for the next workshop, this afternoon I’m co-hosting the ‘these are just some of my favorite tools’ workshop at SPA with Marc Evers and Emmanuel Gaillot. I hope the pictures speak for themselves.

1. Tell a short story to give an overview of the situation.
2. Select the most interesting story (In a multi story workshop)
3. Ask (the storyteller) detailed questions on the selected story
4. Collect variables (observables or measurables) variables and other elements based on the current situation. Interventions come later.
5. Draw arrows between variables. does a variable have a positive or negative impact on an other? Start with the most interesting variables.
6. Simplify. strive for 7 ± 2 variables. Remove all variables that aren’t related to others. Keep only the most interesting variables. If there are still too many, split up the diagram. Try step 10 if there are still too much.
7. Look for loops in the relations. are the loops reinforcing or balancing/stabilizing?
8. Add intervention points
9. Draw a ‘new system’ diagram (in case intervention points are not sufficient)
10. Present the diagram to a group
11. Adjust the diagram based on the feedback (use any of the previous steps as you see fit)
12. Store the diagram so you can easily retrieve it later (digital photos of flipovers, or use a diagramming software).

I did write every day (virtually) since march 8, only not much in public. I made a couple of fieldstones, and I’m busy writing a report for said client – this time using a lot of systems thinking.

A diagram of effects makes it easier to get the writing juices flowing, as well as connecting the dots in clients’ stories and (help them) find holes in my understanding.

The first XP Day France is going to happen on March 23d! I’ll be running another incrementally improved Balancing Act – simple tools for feedback, communication and courage. For our french friends, it has been renamed Des outils simples pour la Communication . My french is a bit rusty, so I’ve started watching TV 5 (a french tv channel) every once in a while.

At SPA2006 (the software practice advancment conference, formerly known as OT) I’ll be co-hosting two sessions with Marc Evers and Emmanuel Gaillot: Balancing Act – simple tools for feedback, communication and courage and a new session we came up with especially for the sunday on SPA, These are just some of my favourite tools

These are just some of my favourite tools is an open space session, where we invite the participants to show and/or tell one of their favourite tools, things that make (work) life a lot better. Marc, Emmanuel and I have a preference for ‘people tools’ (e.g. meeting formats, retrospective exercises, iteration choreography), but if you have a more technical tool that’s made you more productive, we’d welcome that too.

As for Balancing Act, we’ve completed the hand outs for the three parts, and are now thinking about running the session in french, as well as perhaps doing the wrap-up of the session slightly differently.

In case I haven’t met you yet this year – happy new year!

I haven’t been blogging for a couple of weeks, as I was busy writing on other sites, together with Marc Evers. Marc also has finally started his own business (currently besides his day job).

The new sites are for showing and selling workshops and courses we already have – instead of inventing new ones, we decided to spend some time consolidating what we already have – more to follow . Both sites feature other facilitators we run these courses with. Agile Workshops is dedicated to a number of beginner and intermediate courses on agile software development. Satir Workshops is a place for workshops based on the work of Virginia Satir, currently featuring Balancing Act.

For Agile Workshops, I got into making some artwork, to give a better feeling for what these workshops (and agile software development) is like:

And, finally, we reorganised the Agile Open wiki, so it is ready for the 2006 conference. We hope you’ll bring many ideas for sessions (and eventually, yourself to the conference ).

To me, a couple of years ago wikis attracted me for those two main features:

• Easy associative, serendipitous linking by using WikiWords (use a word with several capitals, and it becomes a link. If the corresponding page doesn’t exist yet, you can click on the ? link that appears after the word to create it).
• Easier text formatting than plain html (e.g. by using a * to make a bullet).

With the growing number of wiki implementations that each seem to have their own preference for text formatting, the second one became less and less important. Actually, all those different text formatting engines became annoying. I even developed a prefence for writing in html directly, as that is at least standardized.

I have ranted before about how content management systems can get in the way of my writing process. These days I get to work more often with casual users, for whom the venerable ‘blank text box’ is threatening. You can see a ‘traditional wiki edit screen’ in this screenshot (taken from systemsthinking.net which I co-host):
 

Notice the subtle finger lifting at the text in the bottom ("if you edit, please remember to do it in GoodStyle"), making the bar for a passer-by to edit even higher.

I was ranting to Ira Weinstein about the lack of hospitality in editing websites. He pointed me to fck editor (I find the name a bit dumb, but who am I). Basically, it looks like a regular word processor inside your html place. I was so intrigued by this, that I had to do an experiment with it. Rob Westgeest and I spent half an hour on a spike to add it to an existing wiki. That was enough. It worked. Five different lines in the ‘edit’ template of a wiki, and adding an fckeditor directory on the webserver and that was it. We spent another half an hour trying out the various features, going ‘this is cool, and this, and this…’.

The following is a screenshot from the private wiki on satirworkshops.com, one of several new sites I’m building. I am working with Marc Evers on a handout for the Balancing Act workshop:

(the Satir Change Model picture and the site layout in this screenshot are provided by Nynke Fokma.)
Notice the three rows of icons on the top of the edit box. The ‘page title’ box and the ’save’ and ‘undo changes’ buttons are the same as in the previous screenshot. Otherwise, the page is pretty much shown as it appears when you’re not editing it:

I find editing a wiki page like this much more comfortable. I often used to click ’save’ every couple of seconds to see if I formatted bullets correctly, or if the links looked as expected. Now I can keep on typing and adding images, and I save when I’m done, or when Marc wants to take over the keyboard.

What I like most:

• WikiLinks still work.
• Pasting to and from OpenOffice (or the other word processor) works without visible differences.
• I can see the images in the page while I am editing.
• Text layout changes are instant and wysiwig.
• I can still get at the html source if I want to, by clicking on the Source button (unfortunately still necessary, as most, but not all, formatting changes work from within the editor).
• I only needed to modify an edit template to get started, no modifications to the core wiki software were necessary.
• Look and feel, including keyboard combinations, is much like word processors, so the barrier for casual users to edit pages is much lowered.

Having all pages in html can make it fairly easy to convert existing websites to wikis. A small downside is that existing wikis also have to be converted, pages have to be html, rather than wiki formatting. I made a 40 line script for that in ruby that seems to do the trick, converting complete wikis at once. So now I’m converting the closed wiki’s I’m having to see how stable it is. After that, some public wikis are likely to follow.

If you want to try it out, seedwiki hosts free wikis that use the same editor. The fck editor site also has a try out box. If you host wiki’s yourself, I’d suggest you take half an hour to change an edit template and install the editor!

(I know this editor is 100% javascript. Some people who know me may say huh? Well, I changed my mind based on this. With effort, it is possible to make very useful things with javascript. I love ‘voortschrijdend inzicht’ (‘advancing insight’) ).

As Dave Pollard wrote last week

Some audience members volunteered these reasons why people love playing

these games: (a) to become a member of an interesting group, (b) to meet

new like-minded people, (c) to find an outlet for stifled creativity,

(d) to step outside one’s normal personal identity and ‘try on’ a new

one, (e) to master a challenge, (f) to do things anonymously they

wouldn’t dare do in real life, (g) to establish a personal reputation

and hence increase self-esteem. How many of these things do business

collaborations allow employees to do, and how could collaborations start

offering more of these attractors?”

Traveling the XP Days, I find many of these qualities in the community, except for being anonymous. XP Days Benelux saw many new session presenters this year, people roleplaying (things they normally don’t do) during the balancing act, people writing during the freewriting workshop (even those who normally don’t get around to writing) and at the end of the conference participants were happy and hopefully more confident.

So I’ve experienced real organisations, like the xp days, can be as collaborative as virtual games. I’m looking forward to visiting xp days london next Monday and Tuesday .

On monday, I visited Karslruhe to attend XP day Germany . I made some pictures of balancing act, making sense of agile, and the scrum 59 minute game.

Balancing Act:

‘I don’t want to hear about it.’

‘It’s all your fault.’

Making sense of agile:

‘Where does this event fit in the Cynefin model?’

Scrum 59 minutes game:

‘integrating is hard work…’

’…and this a happy customer’s testimonial of Dans’ Doggy Daycare.’

All pictures