me.andering – Willem van den Ende

I prefer to be fully present in the here and now, with the people around me. Nevertheless, I’m puzzling on something Jerry Weinberg wrote :

“There-then-them is in contrast to here-now-us, which are the problem-solving conditions expert consultants try to establish and maintain. When people are responding to something that happened somewhere else (there), or at some other time (then), or with some other people (them), you’re not going to have much luck dealing with problems.”

I disagree. Sometimes I can not prevent reacting on something based on what happened in the past. I used to be embarrassed about that, believing that reacting like that was irrelevant or inappropriate. I should have recognized a situational similarity in time, then assign appropriate meaning and significance to it, and only then respond.

However, more often than not, it turns out that there is a reason I’m reacting like that. Reflecting on it, and/or opening it up for dialogue with those around me often surfaces things I haven’t completely processed. Reflection and discussion enables me to raise awareneness of it, and eventually change my behaviour (If I want to).

Denying a likeness of a current situation to a past situation, you’re not going to have much luck dealing with problems.

I participated in the presentation zen session at agile open hosted by Pascal van Cauwenberghe. Pascal already did a writeup on the session as a whole.

The main reason for me to attend this session is if I want to be better at creating and giving presentations, I might as well go all the way, look what works for other people and see what fits for me.
This is the group I was in, with (left to right) Vera, myself, Kristel and Lieven.

This session worked very well for me. I took some things away that I applied the next monday, while making a presentation for a client – for those of you who wonder whether going to conferences contributes to the bottom-line, agile open did to mine, and quickly .
I’ve been to several presentation and communication trainings, when done badly, they had the opposite effect – one made me more afraid of giving presentations rather than more relaxed. So hats off to Pascal for making space for a relaxed and fun session. I guess creating and presenting in groups made it a lot more fun and less scary than it would have been experimenting individually.

Practicing in a group was also very productive. in about twenty minutes we created a presentation with three co-presenters, did a trial run with feedback in a few more minutes , and then a re-run for the other participants a few minutes later.

The second run went already noticeably smoother, even though we had no opportunity to update the slides based on the feedback and new ideas we got from the first run.
We started with an anti-slide, extra filled with bullets in an illogical order. Vera told a long story somewhate unrelated to the bullets.

To see if the participants read the slide or listened to Vera, we inserted some jokes at the end – if people laughed, they were reading, otherwise they were listening to Vera. Our hypothesis was, that people could either read the slides, or hear Vera speak.

Some participants were laughing, others were not, so we concluded that some were listening, and others were reading. We verified it with questions after the presentation, our assumption seems to have been correct. The next slides were in lessig / takashi style: just one to a few words per slide.

That gives much more…

Slides like this are much easier to read from a distance, and are also friendlier to older people (It’s not called senior management for nothing… ) .

In our group we discussed about what presentations are used for. In-company presentations are often used as ‘discussion documents’ ‘process documentation’, and more in general, presentations are often also used as handouts (I do that too in courses). It seems presentations are better considered a separate medium from those. Presentations are less cluttered, and handouts, process documentation and discussion documents are better served with more detail than can fit in a slide.

Getting better at presenting takes practice (lots!) and fresh ideas from elsewhere – this session provided both.

Remembering names and faces after a conference can be difficult. At agile open Raphaël Pierquin suggested we make a group photo, so everyone could add their name to the photo.

To make it easier to find ourselves back in the picture Raphaël used gimp and his daughter’s felt pen to create numbered outlines:

Getting this outline was a nice surprise. If you were at agile open, please add your name to the pictures page on the wiki.

I managed to get the agile open photos online, a big thank you goes out to Marc Evers , who put my camera to good use. Having someone else take pictures as well freed me up to be more present during sessions. (draw parallells with pair programming).

Some photo’s to give a taste (there are many more photos from agile open than I can fit in a blog):

participants making the program

Coding Dojo (Randori)

break

break

Current reality trees don’t bite

round table discussion

Zen presentation

drawing carousel

drawing is released, even though it is not really finished…

thursday’s schedule

Friday’s schedule

Tom and Marc discussing

Bernard and Raphael discussing

xp game

waiting until the closing session wants to start.

I’m recovering from agile open, still feeling somewhat unconfenced / conferenced out . I liked it a lot, biased as always, because I co-organize it… Unlike at some other conferences I visited recently, I was able to attend a couple of sessions I didn’t organize

last and not least, the planned unprepared session, and after that the unscheduled unprepared session, outside on the terrace with wine and excellent conversation.

I believe we succeeded to strike a balance between structure and un-structure, keeping in mind the goal for this conference is openness, and maximum participation from everyone. On the second day we changed several things in the structure based on suggestions made during the opening that day. I had the feeling everyone was feeling more comfortable on the second day, because everyone knew each other a bit better. We may add some get-to-know-your-fellow-participants activity for a next event.

Raphaël suggested we make a group photo, so we can remember who’s who later. Unfortunately, when we got around to it, some people had already left. The mostly broad smiles say more than I could about this event. Wonder full:

Having Agile Open, is like having a birthday. A big surprise, and i’m not sure what I’m going to get…

It seems we are not slacking off (as I feared in Princess Risk ). We had a standup meeting over skype yesterday, that gave a lot of focus. We have virtual ‘standup’ meetings in a chat window. They last a bit longer than ordinary standups, passing the ‘talking stick’ is more difficult. But they are usually good fun, and quite effective.

One thing we were puzzled about, was wether to do a last-minute marketing effort. With twentyfour participants and seventeen ideas for sessions, it is looking to be a fun-filled conference. Maybe more participants would be even more fun? I don’t know. Today is the last day you can still join though

Ideas for sessions will be welcome until the start of the conference, and possibly on the second day of the conference as well.

I participated in (re)writing a bunch of discovery session and tutorial proposals for agile2006. That turned out to be interesting, as all but one of them got selected, amidst fairly stiff competition. We decided not to run the xp game – running too many sessions is bad for the quality of individual sessions, and there are similar sessions in the programme already.
As this conference is going to be large, we tried to let our sessions scale to larger audiences, amongst other things by having more co-hosts per session than normal. That leads to a web of sessions, where some sessions share almost the same set of hosts, but not quite. After acceptance, I had a hard time deciding how to give my best effort in running the sessions. I decided to take responsibility for running the sessions where I am first or second organizer, and support other sessions in a ‘best effort’ way, where I’ll do whatever I can based on time and energy that I have.
Participating in many proposals with many co-hosts is slightly confusing. But fun.

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.

As Agile Open is drawing near, pascal writes about how we manage risk. We use a simple brainstorming process, filling the risk table from left to right (event/what , probability, impact, mitigation). This has proven very effective. I believe it also helps us to relax, and share our concerns. The biggest concern for me right now is meta – after organizing a couple of conferences (three xp days and now the second agile open), we risk becoming unfocused.

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.

I’m still at SPA. Marc Evers and I co-facilitated the ‘these are just some of my favourite tools workshop yesterday. We go to SPA to meet our peers, and each year we take something with us we hadn’t seen before. With a group of ten people we spent a quiet afternoon sharing the tools that help us kick ass.

Interesting tools that were new for me:

Soft Systems Methodology, Most Generous Interpretation (if someone says something during a meeting that makes you angry, find the most generous interpretation and use that to create a response) and Moo Cow (a cow toy, that makes a moo noise when you twist it, can be used to stop discussions when they go nowhere, or when someone feels uncomfortable. It can also be used as an ‘integration token’ in a software development team)
Most puzzling for people that were only looking at the session output: Moo Cow and Mandala.

We had a variety of high-tech, low-tech and ‘people and process’ tools, some high-tech (digital cameras and scanners) supporting low-tech (index cards, mindmaps and mandalas).

Marc Evers demonstrating Watir

Process
As often we didn’t follow the process we had set out to use. We let the workshop self-organize around a form of discussion that gave us most energy. We went round the table with introductions, each stating what brought us to SPA (since this was the first session) and our favourite tool. Then we did another round, which took most of the afternoon, where everyone talked about their favourite tools in-depth, the others asking questions (‘how does that work, why is it valuable, oh, that reminds me of this … I’m using). As we went round, more and more tools made their way onto indexcards. We ended by speeding up the rounds (three minutes per tool) and then an affinity grouping, yielding a sort of thematic (mind)map of the tools we discussed.

and then it was time for beer (as it is now). Marc Evers and Rachel Davies having a beer (the night before, but who cares)

So I got to xp day france, on thursday and friday.

it’s cool to see people get together, share experiences, try out new ways of presenting and simply connecting.

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.