Systems thinking about software development
(updated, as I posted some broken links)
I’m in Karlsruhe, Germany right now, on the eve of XP Day Germany. Looking forward to another fun installment of Balancing Act – Simple Tools for Feedback, Communication and Courage together with Marc Evers (Nynke Fokma has called in sick, unfortunately).
I’ve just uploaded some XP Days benelux photo’s separated in Thursday and Friday . Enjoy!
Here are some samples, to liven up the blog visually:
I’m running around this week, so just a quick update on events I’m involved in.
xp days london have accepted Temperature Reading. That means I’ll go on tour again in November, to XP days Benelux, then Germany and finally London .
The Software Practice Advancement Conference has accepted These are just some of my favourite tools and Balancing Act – Simple tools for Feedback, Courage and Communication
I’m co-sponsoring the next agile seminar , which will be held in Nieuwegein on October 26th. We’re having an interactive session on the Toyota way and a talk on agile outsourcing, and of course… drinks.
On October 27, 28 and 31 Rob Westgeest and yours truly are organising the fourth eXperience Agile training here in Eindhoven. We have a few places left, contact me if you’d like to participate.
Nat Pryce wrote me about the previous entry:
I just read your blog post about the review processes for XP Day Benelux and London. I just want to assure you that all submissions will get feedback. If the review process doesn’t provide feedback to some sessions the programme committee members will write three (or more) reviews for those sessions before deciding the final programme and informing the presenters of acceptance or not.
I’m glad to hear that all sessions will get feedback. In the past, feedback on session descriptions has helped me improve both the session itself and its description. See e.g. the differences in the way we described Balancing Act the first edition written more from an organisers perspective and the second edition more compact and focused on tangible outcomes for the attendees.
How and when to involve the program committee in the review process was/is a puzzle for xp days benelux. This year some of us waited for the other reviewers to get started, and then the committee reviewed the remaining sessions. For next year, we’re toying with the idea on starting first, to encourage other reviewers to also start early.
After a fairly open review process and animated discussion in the program committee, the XP Day Belenux 2005 Program is now online.
The only ‘regret’ I’m having about the program, is that I’m not going to have time to attend many sessions, since I’m co-hosting three fun-filled active sessions myself 
:
I’m proud of our more open review process this year, where we invited every session organiser to participate in the review process. We did the reviews on a wiki, so that everyone who bothered to review could see how others were working on reviewing sessions.
We were also happy to have plenty of sessions to fill two days instead of one. I’m hoping the program has a bit more air, and the participants have more time to meet each other (e.g. during the conference dinner on Thursday night).
XP Day London is taking this a step further, they are experimenting with a voting system (everyone who sends in a session gets five votes) and have made reviewing obligatory if you want to have a session accepted. I applaud their courage and am curious to find out how this worked for the program committee.
Sending in and reviewing was fun anyway. The program is not finished yet, reviews have closed yesterday. So far it looks like Balancing Act and The Agility of Domain Specificic Languages seem to stand a good chance of being accepted, since they each attracted five votes. Temperature Reading got three votes so far.
As a session organiser, I see one drawback in the voting approach – the Gummibears session description didn’t attract votes in London. It also didn’t attract any feedback, so it’s difficult to learn something for a possible next description.
Some sessions seem to have attracted feedback without votes, possibly because they are more controversial, or don’t fit well with the theme of the conference.
Anyway, exploring what works and what not in sessions, their descriptions and creating a conference program remains fascinating. I hope to write soon about how Rob Westgeest and I use mini-retrospectives to incrementally improve the eXperience Agile course.
The incrementally improved Balancing Act workshop has been accepted for xp day germany. It’s quite likely that it’s also going to run at xp days benelux, as it got a top rating after the first round of reviews.
While reading getting things done
It is easier to act yourself into a better way of feeling, than to feel yourself into a better way of action. – O.H. Mowrer
Marc Evers made me aware that Bernard Notarianni wrote about Balancing Act in his report on Agile Open. Nynke Fokma said, that this session would have impact on some participants long after the workshop, perhaps even months. I’m still learning from facilitating it. Apparently, impact came relatively quickly for Bernard:
The session was very interesting, however I did not get the “aha!” effect during it. The effect came later:
I always had the feeling that it what not possible to improve my communication or management skills. It was possible to improve the technical skills, but not the “soft” skills: one was a communicator or was not. Actually, this is false. It is possible to improve your communication and your management skills: that’s what did the Balancing Act for me.
At Agile Open, we ran only part of Balancing Act (the part on congruent action, how to actively balance self, other and context ). . I’m working with a group of facilitators to co-market this as a self-contained course. We’re now working on making a description that is more suitable for marketing it. Seeing the feedback we got from the trial run, this seems time well spent.
I’m recovering from two fun, intensive and moving days at Agile Open . During the conference, at one of the temperature readings we held, there was a little discussion about the usefulness of session writeups. Since there were many experiential sessions, it is very hard, or maybe impossible, to put into words how it felt to have been there. The same probably holds for this conference as a whole. I’ll try to give my impressions here, with quoted conference photos kindly collected by Marc Evers.
The closest I could come in one word is special. In the closing Temperature Reading participants appriciated the open atmosphere, where they listened and where heard, as well as respected. Seeing the level of engagement of everybody inside and outside the sessions, we succeeded in creating an open environment, safe for experimentation and risk-taking.
To my pleasant surprise, the conference turned out to be even more self-organizing than I hoped. Before the conference, we weren’t exactly sure on how to run the opening session. The main goal of that have all participants to co-create the conference program. One of my biggest fears beforehand was that not everybody would have noticed that Agile Open is an open space conference, where the participants are responsible for the program. In a way, we created a sort of hybrid between an open space and a planned conference, by creating an ideas for sessions space on the conference wiki.
It turned out that my fear was on the mark, as about five people reported they weren’t aware of the open space character. Pleasantly enough, they didn’t feel this was a problem. It feels natural to start an agile conference with a planning game. They immediately took to the idea and participated actively in selecting the sessions.
Deciding which sessions to vote for is hard…
The way to vote and prepare the program emerged during the opening session. We envisioned this would be the moment to create the program for Friday as well as Saturday. After arranging sessions for the first day on two tables (one table per room) we found that the most popular sessions were scheduled on day one. The participants decided to have another planning game at the beginning of day two, so we could use what we learnt on day one, and choose the sessions we felt most strongly about on that day.
I facilitated the opening session on friday, the Temperature Reading in the afternoon and co-facilitated a few track sessions. I was quite exhausted after that, and excellent conversation at the bar. As Rachel Davies points out in her weblog we succeeded in moving the usual bar conversation to the sessions. I partook in conversations on music, fashion, philosophy, history and friends that couldn’t make it to Agile Open, amongst others.
On Saturday, I overslept, falling straight back to sleep after switching of the alarm clock. I believe this turned out to be a good thing, as the conference became more self-organizing. I couldn’t facilitate the planning session like on day one. On the other hand, I was scheduled to co-facilitate two of the most popular sessions on day two – Balancing Act on thre of the Satir tools and Structured Crystal Ball Gazing, on scenario planning. Vera Peeters phoned me to ask what I wanted to do. Both Nynke Fokma and I didn’t have the energy to do a long session, so I asked Vera to put on either one of the sessions.
What happened, was that one session was planned in the final slot, but not decided which one, so we could delay the decision whether to run Crystal Ball Gazing or Balancing Act to the last moment. That was cool. We felt that the playful, experiential and active nature of Balancing Act would fit most at the end of the conference. I’m glad we did that, since it was a lot of fun!
Balancing Act / Structured Crystal Ball gazing session back to back on the lower left
I gained some more experience in facilitating with several Satir tools. On Friday and Saturday we held a Temperature Reading to appreciate each other and things that were accomplished, as well as to gather information to steer the conference, and the future after it. For me it was a good exercise to facilitate more temperature readings.
half of the circle during the Temperature Reading. I’m the only one not laughing, on the left. Probably focusing…
In the last block on Saturday afternoon, we ran the Congruent Action part of the Balancing Act session. We had a blast during this session. I had prepared it with Marc Evers and Nynke Fokma, and they asked me to be lead facilitator. Scary. Exhilarating. Rachel Davies agreed to be co-facilitator as well. We were well supplied with facilitators about one in five. And then we had Vera Peeters, who spontaneously performed some skillfull covert facilitation, keeping participants on board who otherwise might have left.
Make no mistake, this was a scary session, since it involved mime acting with strangers. We first let the participants explore coping stances in pairs(blaming, placating, superreasonable, irrelevant and loving / hating) as described by Virginia Satir. The facilitators demonstrated most of the stances, and then we let the other participants experiment.
Trying out the coping stances. Not sure what Rob and Marc are modeling here, but it looks fun
After this round, I was not completely convinced we had everyone on board. That changed after a round of questions. I asked how miming the coping stances felt, and if the participatns experienced a ‘favourite’ stance – some stances feel more relaxed or natural than others. In the final round, everyone was very much involved, even though it was more difficult. We asked the participants to we split in two groups to model the eXtreme Programming values. Below is a picture of one of the groups modeling an XP value. After twenty minutes rehearsal we let each group perform, and have the other one guess which value was shown. Can you guess which one is shown in the photograph below?
This would look better on film, where you’d see the hands waving…
That was great fun! After this, it was time for the closing. I felt a bit sad that it was over, and at the same time very glad for having co-organised it. Marc is already thinking about follow-on events, and judging the reactions of the other participants, this seems worth wile to do.
I extracted this text from communication skills are hard skills in order to let the point I’m trying to make stand out more clearly. I realized I’ve been using (at least) two ways towards communicating more effectively – ’simple’ techniques (examples in the previous posts) and models.
Models indirectly modify my communication, because they help me make better sense of the world around me, so I can be more aware, fully present and (re)act more effectively. For me the most powerful in the past three years have been Systems Thinking and the Satir tools.
Recently Nynke Fokma, Marc Evers and I co-created a tutorial around three Satir tools (congruent action, the interaction model and the Satir change model ): Congruence in action
I find the idea of congruence especially powerful – actively balancing self, other and context.
It helps me to be hard, as in tough when it is right to do so. It is also hard, as in difficult, to master. With the people from agile systems we play blame games, making fun of our own incongruence, or be incongruent in another style dan the persons ‘default incongruence style’ – aka coping stance.
If you want to know more about coping stances, I recommend the book Congruent Action by Gerald Weinberg, or a trip to Agile Open, where we hope to run a trial version of the tutorial.
Playing the blame game probably only works with a small group of people you trust. As time goes by, practicing and playing games make it easier for me to recognize my own and others’ coping stances, and adjust my reactions to that.
Willem van den Ende
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