It has behooved the XP Days Benelux conference to allow playing of devious political games in its program. Join Emmanuel Gaillot and me on November 23 or 24 so that you can (re)find the (dirty?) politician in you.

“Cheney Satan ‘08″ by futureatlas.com

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(Well, you don’t have to get as dirty as the photo suggests, but you will have to put up a fight for your cause )

We will play politics – in a game you will represent a political faction that tries to get an alliance of agilists to spend money the way you prefer.  Convince others to vote for you so you can carry out your program, or choose another party to do what you want for you… Will you be trying to convince the voters to spend money on conference organization, advanced agile research, business 2 business schmoozing, or something else entirely?

After playing the game we will debrief our experiences and draw parallels with everyday work. It may be that you are already aware of the politics around you.  In that case the game can help you understand more about your behaviour.  It may be that you believe your work has nothing to do with politics.  Think again… it may be that you are a “spoiltician” – someone who has “delegated” that dirty politics to others (e.g. your boss . This game will show you how political many common project decisions are. Whether you care about corporate politics or not, they have an impact on your worklife. Regardless your status, be it an opinion leader, a reckless reformer or “just a programmer” in the silent crowd, this workshop is for you!

Benefits:

• Learn when politics happen
• Get a better grasp at why politics happen the way they happen
• Experience your own behaviour and that of others – it is the situation that is politically charged more than you
• Try out various political strategies and safely observe their possible outcomes
• Have fun!

In case we haven’t convinced you to join, maybe we can offer you a bribe or a kickback? (In case you are american, we may also have some pork available for projects in your home state, to be executed by the companies you love )

Agile Politics Workshop, November 23 or 24, XP Days Benelux, Mechelen

The source has a 15 point list of things to pay attention to when listening. That’s a bit much when you’re in a frustrated or other emotionally charged state and looking to cool down… However, there is always the old ‘no silver bullet’ to give you some hope to get started:

[..] developing quality listening habits. There is simply no silver bullet for doing this. Countless studies have shown that NOT using old habits atrophies the neural net that produces the habit and REPETITION develops new neural nets that create new habits. So the first step is to bring cognition back into the picture.

snowshoe hike at Mt. Rainier by Troy Mason

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Some of these things I already know in other forms, but it doesn’t to hurt to see similar things worded differently, it makes it stick better with me under stress. Creating new habits is something that works, even for a hard skill like communication. It ‘just’ takes lots of deliberate practice. And mistakes learning from events is part of the ‘fun’.

Be aware that the list from the source is a list of habits, numbered lists habitually give me the impression of a series of prescribed steps…

Habit 1) “establish your motives upfront” was working for me, more or less. Since I had debated this before I ‘just’ needed to establish whether my motives had changed. It seems my motives for my opinion have not changed, I’m just not sure whether I am as motivated to participate in the discussion again.

I got that from examining habit 2) “Be present” I just could not get myself to be present and stay on the game. If I had been a little more present earlier, I could have followed the suggestion:

If you have pressing needs it may make sense to jot them down quickly so that your mind is not trying to “remind” you to deal with them.

Trouble was, I had plenty of time and no pressing needs on a sunday. So I procrastinated jotting stuff down. Staying around the house with a continuing cold, a lack of sleep that won’t go away. Well, that explains why I was not present… I also felt a burning desire to write, and I  haven’t felt that in a while… Maybe it was just fever

Didja Ever Have One Of Those Days . . . also published as ‘Let Sleeping Dogs Lie’ by Faith Goble

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Of course, all of these habits are interdependent. I was experiencing lots of emotional spiking, and was not prepared (4. be prepared for emotional spiking).

Emotional spiking is the result of the introduction of an emotion that is relationally dissimilar to your present state due to the conveyance of emotionally stimulating content or verbiage. This is unique to each person and can really be represented by everything under the sun. Cursing, certain value thresholds, particular subject matter such as sex or violence, etc… The key is to know your own hot buttons and MENTALLY PREPARE yourself with respect to how you will handle them if they arise

Emotional spiking is a strong indication that I’m not being fully present. I’ve been told that people who have been trained to kill go for a walk when this happens – an unpredictable action by a well-trained killer can be lethal…. David explains the reason for this:

The spike in emotion is your body preparing you for protection because it thinks it is in danger and the result, as of that moment, is unpredictable. So it fires up the engines to get ready for the worst.

There is a solution, but that takes lots of training. By now I’ve learnt that through training I can generate the results I want in more situations. However I expect there will always be situations in which I can not. I ‘just’ strive to reduce them. This is one of the ways it can work:

By mentally rehearsing how you will handle any of these situations, you can and do INSERT predictability into that scenario and your subconscious will go easier on the hormone release and cooler heads will indeed prevail.

What works for me is talking to another person (say, my triad or my partner), that usually helps to get some perspective.

A drunken view of a Sydney apartment block by Ian James Grant

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If and when I did something unpredictable, I reflect on it with people I trust. I can then use the experience from previous situations constructively.

I took lots of breaks. Watching the judo world championships (I don’t watch sports normally) on tv. Habit 15) seems to be working for me:

Keep a clear channel – Breathe, focus and take breaks if necessary. Realize that your mind is going to be working very diligently and frantically during a prolonged discourse. Keeping a clear head can become increasingly difficult as time wears on.

Applying habit 12) Constantly seek rapport online is still a puzzle for me. It might be why I shy away from contributing to mailing lists for instance. Commenting on weblogs and responding to comments here seems doable. The space seems more confined and most people I write to I’ve met in person. Twitter seemed to provide that for me as well, but it might be more treacherous than I thought at first…

Without good rapport you will only receive inhibited information with a ton of gaps, so constantly seek to establish and keep rapport.

On to habit 11) Seek effectiveness rather than validation. It may be that in social media the balance between effectiveness and validation is different than in other ‘media’ (e.g. face to face). This seems like kicking in an open door (I’ll have to look up the british or american equivalent of that dutch saying later..), but doing is easier than knowing…

[...] Realize that it is OK to be wrong, we all are at one time or another. By seeking to learn and grow rather than win a pyrrhic victory at all cost you will exponentially improve your communication effectiveness and the quality of your life.

I’m curious what your strategies and experiences are for dealing with (online) debate, or if you’re attracted to some of the listening habits I did not mention. I was bad at listening for quite a while, but I seem to be improving. One habit at a time.

William K. Black, the former litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board who investigated the Savings and Loan disaster of the 1980s, discusses the latest scandal in which a single bank, IndyMac, lost more money than was lost during the entire Savings and Loan crisis. He will examine the political failure behind this economic disaster, in which not only massive fraud has taken place, but a vast transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class continues as the federal government bails out the seemingly reckless, if not the criminal. Black teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and is the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One. (Run Time: 1 hour, 38 min.)

It’s a long video. I don’t normally watch these poststamp-sized videos on the web for long, but this one is worth it. If you’re wondering why I’m posting it here: it’s systems thinking in action, you can almost see the diagrams of effects while he’s talking. An other thing that struck me (once again) is the power of “go out and see for yourself” (called genchi genbutsu in lean), and what happens if you don’t do it, or even worse, if the hierarchy in a company prevents it… Mr Blacks’ example of the S&P auditor who was forbidden by his boss to go and look at actual loan files, but instead had to create a credit rating out of thin air is striking. I won’t spoil any more, just go and see this video for yourself .

I found this to be one of the better researched sources I’ve found recently about the financial crisis and its’ consequences. I’d be interested to hear what you think of it, as wel as more sources.

Marc suggested to do part of the upcoming newsletter as a Temperature Reading, so besides getting some information, our readers also learn a technique, and it helps us structuring our own reflection over the past year. It’s been about a year since Marc, Rob and yours truly sat together after xp days london to discuss closer collaboration with courses and coaching (but still as loosely coupled as possible, because we like our independence).

A Temperature Reading has five questions, the order of which you can vary, depending on the context (see Temperature Reading for explanation and the default order, I’m going to do something different here).

1 New Information

We proudly presented QWAN = Quality Without A Name

We started handing out these rubber ducks at CITCON Amsterdam, for those cases when we are not around to pair (program, brainstorm, reflect, be innovative) with. Talking out loud helps, and ‘rubber ducking’ is a well known technique for this (e.g. Kathy Sierra writes that talking to pets works even better. We came across it the first time in the Pragmatic Programmer ). We chose QWAN as a name, because we are still inspired by Christopher Alexander’s early work on patterns (Timeless Way Of Building) most notably. QWAN is a label for stuff done by Rob Westgeest, Marc Evers and yours truly, often in co-operation with others.

QWAN co-created a bunch of new courses and workshops in 2008: eXperience Refactoring (also with Octos’ Emmanuel Gaillot), Unit Testing Masterclass, responsibility driven design with mock objects, dirty jobs (with Tjakko Kleinhuis), pimp my retrospective (with Topic’s Nicole Belilos), political games (with Emmanuel Gaillot), story testing with Rspec, and a revamped rightsizing your unit tests (and then some that I forgot. This collaboration seems productive, many more than last year it seems. We supported conferences in one form or another, e.g. by sponsoring, as co-organizers or ‘just’ running a session: CITCON Amsterdam, several Agile Opens, XP Days Benelux and London, ESSAP summerschool, Agile2009, AgileHolland.

2 Appreciations

We’d like to thank everyone who participated in our courses, conferences and workshops. Your enthusiasm and feedback helps us to improve and, not least, have fun in our jobs. Everybody who provided encouraging feedback when we published our brochure earlier this year. Especially Nynke Fokma, Becky Winant and other keys for giving detailed suggestions for improvement. We’ve had several great customers (you know who you are), who created amazing conditions for us to focus on our work. Thank you!

3 Complaints with recommendations

We’ve made some progress in supporting ourselves with a Customer Relationship Management system. There are still some improvements that would make our work easier (usability) and that of our customers (sign-up and notification of new courses). (Marc wishes for a more sustainable pace. I’m careful what I wish for – a more sustainable pace would be nice, but I’m also quite happy with our productivity, passion and income at the moment)

4 Puzzles

We made progress in selling open enrollment courses, and are still puzzling on better ways of selling those (as well as making it easier on our customers to plan and buy participation). The context for courses seems to be shifting at the moment – working more effectively has value, but many large corporations have the knee-jerk reaction of putting all training on hold when sales slow. At these corporations people have little time for training when things are good – too busy, and no budget for training when things are bad. Luckily we also have customers with a long term perspective, who invest in training, education and hiring continuously.

5 Hopes and wishes

We hope the ‘interesting’ economy will mark the breakthrough of lean and agile ways of working in more places. We hope to carry out more integrated on-site coaching … With integrated we mean doing whatever works best in a given context : a whole systems approach using combinations of lean, scrum, extreme programming with ’soft’ skills inspired by Satir and systems thinking.

We wish you a healthy, fun and prosperous 2009, and look forward to collaborating with many of you.

(meta-appreciation: thanks to Marc for coming up with the idea for a Temperature Reading, and giving feedback while listening to the items while writing them. Thanks to Marc & Maroesja’s kids Maris, Marden and Marijn for providing the necessary distractions )

What business can learn from open source and blogging by Paul Graham. I am resonating a lot on this one.

So these, I think, are the three big lessons open source and blogging have to teach business: (1) that people work harder on stuff they like, (2) that the standard office environment is very unproductive, and (3) that bottom-up often works better than top-down.

Ever since reading The Timeless Way of Building, I’ve been looking at many office environments with bewilderment. Usually, they’re not the right place to be creative. Even with all the values and practices of agile software development that can make it more predictable, It takes time to play and reflect to arrive at truly simple solutions. If I want to solve something, or ever write,

I’m usually better off going into the garden for a bit. How many offices do you know that have gardens?

At the end of the piece Paul Graham goes into startup culture (as most startups start out of home). When people ask me what it is like to run your own company, like I do, I usually say (with a smile) ‘don’t try this at home, kids’. But, as Paul Graham writes:

And as the example of open source and blogging suggests, you’ll enjoy it more, even if you fail. You’ll be working on your own thing, instead of going to some office and doing what you’re told. There may be more pain in your own company, but it won’t hurt as much.

I had some pain, it does hurt, but not as much. I ‘ve met people who paid far more ‘learning money’ than I did (so far). If something goes wrong, I’ve got only myself to blame, I can learn, and try again. Recently I find, that I am finding more and more the work I excel at and enjoy. As Lynne says: ‘live the life you imagine’.

I believe that the growing popularity of blogging, open source, wikipedia, Dilbert, agile (software development) and starting your own company is no coincidence. People are looking for better ways to live and work, and many are no longer waiting, like children, for their employer to make this happen.

Do I believe it is possible to achieve this inside companies as well? Yes, if you manage to change slowly, work with proven results, and keep playing the ‘professional’ games necessary to keep you in step with the rest of the company. Many agile teams enjoy more fun and productivity, and other ways of working and more respectful interactions are spreading. For most of us, it’s probably easier to try other ways on our own, or within the confines of a team (but watch out for being too succesful .

Some businesses can change from the inside, many business can change only if there is sufficient outside (e.g. market) pressure. Many more change into non-existance, because they are outcompeted. It’s no coincidence.