me.andering – Willem van den Ende

While procrastinating on the next post, Nynke jumped ahead with scenario planning and Marc continues with his routine on routines – we follow our routines (except when we panic) on what happens when a routine culture breaks down because of a foreign element. I could have anticipated that…

So this episode was supposed to be on how cultural patterns work on different levels, sort of like fractals, with stories. The first story already got quite more elaborate then I planned (and I wanted at least two in for the first story…), and I have no pictures for it! I’ll panic (following Marc’s lead ) and leave the stories for (maybe) tomorrow.

About my routine (when in panic, why not make a blog entry about blogging and me, which is what blogs are supposed to be about, no? )

My current process for posting a blog entry, is that I collect fieldstones, and when I feel one is strong enough, I go out and hunt for pictures. Because the feedback (steering…) on some posts suggested that posts with pictures and/or posts that are well prepared attract more readers as well as more comments (hint: I like comments)… So adding pictures became a routine… And in that routine, I have to follow the rules: post only with pictures…

To keep up with Marc and Nynke, I have broken that routine

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.

Rachel Davies is blogging about what for me was one of the highlights of XP Days Londen 4 – a presentation and workshop by Dave Snowden about Cynefin, a framework for Sensemaking. You can find more information about this in the paper Sense Making in a Complex and Complicated world by Cynthia Kurz and Dave Snowden (IBM Systems Journal, Vol 42, No3, 2003).

Luckily, I read the paper before going to the workshop – that left some room in my head to fill some of the gaps in my understanding the paper had left me with, rather than being overloaded (as most of the workshops’ participants seemed to be. It made quite an impression). By the way, the reason I read the paper was that I was wondering if paying to attend this workshop was worthwile. Since after reading I still had many puzzles, I thought it would be, and it was. I’m still ruminating over these ideas.

One of the ideas that resonated most with me was the Cynefin Domains model. It is sort of a two-dimensional matrix. The paper has a nice graphical depection that makes it clear that the boundaries between the domains are semi-permeable. One way I understand this model, that an organisation can move from one domain to another by making sene of where it is now – and seeing if the paradigm it currently applies for e.g. decision making is appropriate. I’ve transcribed the four domains into a table:

To give one illustration (more in the paper mentioned above) Systems Thinking and Scenario Planning fit into the Knowable domain. Someone at XP Days London asked me if I didn’t find it annoying that Dave Snowden sort of mowed the grass before my feet; Marc Evers and I were hosting a Systems Thinking workshop at XP Day London the next day.

I responded that I was very glad for the context setting Dave Snowden had done – we used the Cynefin Domains model in the introduction of our workshop, as we are constantly looking for a better way to briefly introduce Systems Thinking at the start of a workshop. I am not Systems Thinking it is one of the techniques I use to make sense of the world around me, if and when appropriate.

So how do I believe this model relates to appropriate forms of setting up an organisation? I immediately related this to Gerald Weinberg’s Cultural Patterns (aka Shooting and Aiming Stances) for organisations, so I came up with this mapping:

The Congruent cultural pattern would be equivalent to sensemaking: taking self, other and context into account, and choosing (and changing, if the domain shifts) a cultural pattern that is appropriate. When I was reading the wiki page on Cultural Patterns I realized I forgot Oblivious. Thinking about it now, I find it hard to place. Maybe the oblivious cultural pattern is not realizing where you are, and not making any choice for an organisational form.

The connection was somewhat natural, since with a group of systems thinkers we’ve been thinking about how to move from one cultural pattern to another. In the workshop and paper, Dave Snowden says they’ve identified a number (27 if I remember correctly) of specific choreographies to move from one domain to another.

For instance, working iteratively is a way of moving from Known to Knowable and back, and moving from Knowable to Complex can be done by Exploration (to move in the opposite direction, use Just-In-Time Transfer).

Dave Snowden talked about the relation with eXtreme Programming. At first sight, I would place XP at the Known/Knowable boundary, because of the Iterative aspect. He seemed to place it in the Complex domain which left me a bit puzzled.

The way I could place it there, is that XP also has an exploratory component (e.g. doing spikes), and the extremely short iterations make it possible to investigate multiple alternative solutions (relating to what Snowden calls probes, exploration and to Set Based Development). Another component to XP/Agile is delaying (design) decisions as long as possible, which relates to just-in-time transfer.

I just noticed I’m using a lot of emphasis in this post. It seems to have a high jargon density. I’m looking forward to the article collection promised at cynefin.net, so I could upgrade some of the emphasized words to hyperlinks. In the meantime, I recommend you read the paper if these ideas interest you. I’m also interested in any comments you may have on this blog entry, as I’m busy understanding the Cynefin paper.