Lyssa Adkins ran a very practical session at DeepAgile that shared several tools for team formation or for tuning up existing teams. She often uses these right at the project start since team members may know very little about one another – even if they have been working together for years. Here is a run-through of three of the exercises.

Constellation – Understanding each other through motion

I love this exercise. It provides the team members as well as the coach important information about everyone on the team. It is called constellation since everyone arranges themselves around an object on the floor (in our case a roll of tape) depending how they feel about a statement such as “I like getting results”.  People align their bodies with the statement: standing beside the object signifies strong agreement while standing far away to signifies strong disagreement. It is very powerful since people are engaging their whole bodies. To learn more, there is a full write-up on Lyssa’s blog.

Timeline – sharing our pasts

In timeline, each participant draws a timeline of their life with peaks, valleys and major life events. In turn, each person describes their timeline to the team. Team members listen and note skills or talents (on sticky notes) that stand out. These are then posted at the bottom of the timeline and reviewed as a team. This approach is about figuring out who the person is and what special perspectives they bring to move the project forward. When we did this, it helped the demo subject feel more positive about their talents. Nice.

Marketplace – sharing our talents

In marketplace we pretend we are a vendor in an open-air market place and decide what wares we have to sell. What are our special skills and talents that pertain to this project? We even get to create a banner to attract people. Under the table are things that are true for us, but may not directly relate to the project. The debrief is the same as timeline. Usually a coach will use one or the other (in the training session half of us did marketplace and half did timeline).

Below is my marketplace as an Agile coach.

(This is part of a series on DeepAgile 2010 Games Weekend).

At DeepAgile2010 this past weekend Mike McCollough led a session on Retrospective Games. We played a brand new game called Balloon Madness as an excuse to use several different retrospective formats. The game is in the conference booklet but is not yet posted on TastyCupcakes (check site for lot’s of fun Agile learning games).

What I learned about retrospectives

• Change the format on a regular basis. One attendee switches things up every retrospective.
• You can get great results by focussing on more of what works. This is inspired by appreciative inquiry. We are so used to looking at what the problem is, that looking at success can have a powerful shift.
• Another was to have each person write a personal commitment story card for something to do in the next iteration. They signed the card and someone else agreed to pair with them on it to provide support. The cards were posted beside the scrum board as a reminder. They were reviewed at the start of the following retrospective.
• Liked-Lacked-LongedFor was also suggested as a powerful way to connect with people’s deeper selves.

At DeepAgile in Boston, I played Yellow Brick Road: Fresh InsightsThrough Peer Coaching. The game was led by it’s inventor – Portia Tung who did a great job even with a very large group. If you haven’t played this, I suggest you make the time.

The game teaches people skills and resources to be effective coaches by practicing with peers. In the game, people take turns in one of 3 roles: Client (with a problem), Coach, and Observer.

Solve real problems

In the role of Client/Dorothy, you get to be yourself and bring up a problem that you want to work on. Over several iterations, new perspectives help you access the resources you already have. So a cool side-effect of this game is that you get fresh insights into whatever problem you want to work on.

Coach practices questions

The coach gets to practice listening and asking questions. We discovered that listening is something we need to practice since we are so used to jumping in with our expert opinion and solutions.

We also get practice with different types of questions (image by Portia Tung):

Observer provides depth

The observer roles gives you a chance to step back from the situation and really notice what is going on. Portia’s picture captures the simplicity of the task:

I was reminded that observation is a very helpful debugging technique. It is also less than easy – especially if you are like most of us and out of practice.

As the observer, I was able to get much deeper insights.

Go play this game

I am going to play this game again for myself and to help those I am coaching. The complete game instructions and presentation is available for download, so give it a go! I’m sure you will get value out of it. Even better, get Portia to come play with you so you can see some of the finer points.

(This is part of a series on DeepAgile 2010 Games Weekend).

Mary Poppendieck gave her usual well-researched and convincing tour-de-force presenation at LSSC10 on several approaches to organizational change with a talk titled “What’s wrong with targets?”

The purpose of the whole talk is to trash Management by Objectives. See my related blog noting the damaging effects: SMART goals may not be that smart. As an alternative, Mary shares 4 effective models for organizational change.

I have heard a lot recently about the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. It uses the metaphor of the Rider and the Elephant. I like it a lot since it lines up well with my NLP tools and understanding of the unconscious mind. Anyway the change model is very clear:

1. Direct the rider – provide clear direction and objectives.
2. Motivate the Elephant – appeal to emotions to provide energy for change.
3. Shape the path – create a supportive environment that will keep things on track.

Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results by Mike Rother is a second approach for driving change. Check out the above description in the mind map. It reminds me of the A3 technique that I have been using for the last year with great success. I’ll blog on my experiments later.

Strategy and Deming’s systems analysis + PDCA + People were the two final models to round out organizational change approaches that involve people rather than measure them. Caveat: SMART is OK for projects; not people.

Siraj Sirajuddin shared a deeply insightful reflection on the nature of Agile/Lean coaching. Lot’s of insights for me.

Below, I have a few notes that just scratch the surface.

A big take-away for me is that every day and every meeting I need to:

1. Learn
2. Make a difference
3. Have fun

Another concept is Clean State Fridays where everyone goes home without emotional baggage so they can start fresh on the following Monday.

He also reminded me that we play a dance with courage and grace to achieve great outcomes.

Strongly suggest you check out the full presentation or find a way to see him in person.

There was a really good session at the Scrum Gathering’s Open Space on some of the challenges around the CST application process.

What I want to share here is some general thoughts on what is required to be a Certified Scrum Trainer that I noted during the open space session. This is only an excerpt on how to succeed – the full session notes are here.

(Part 4 of 5 blogs on the Scrum Gathering in Orlando)

Caveat: There is a Scrum Alliance Improvement Committee working out the new process so this is an informal look at some considerations.

See mindmap below.

It is important to get connected so that people know who you are. If you are considering co-training, find people you like. (N.B. There was some discussion of dropping Co-training requirements so you’ll have to stay tuned on this.)

What you teach when you are CST is your business, however, the evaluation process is based on you wearing your scrum hat. Not your Agile hat. Not your XP hat. Not your PMI hat. Does this mean I need to show a flock of self-organizing geese? Is it OK to share the Agile manifesto? I still don’t know the answer to these questions.

As a CST you will need to develop a curriculum with learning objectives, exercises, etc. There is no official training material that you can use as a baseline – every CST is expected to author training material.

It is important that you contribute to the Scrum Community. This can take the form of organizing a local user group, a conference. Public speaking and publishing articles and blogs is relevant as well.

The big thing I got out of this session is that no one is going to hand you the CST designation because you know Scrum and have run training sessions. Becoming a CST requires excellence and hard work.

You may also want to check out Tobias’s blog posts: So you want to be a CST?, Becoming a CST and Scrum gathering day zero for an informal perspective.

See also my post on becoming a CSC.

Yesterday, Gerry Kirk and I kicked off a 4 day Agile Assessment with a presentation aimed at taking some of the uncertainty out of Agile and providing context for the transition/assessment.  See slides below.

The values and agile project life cycle slides were not show; instead, Gerry did a live diagram construction (see photo below). This approach worked well and we got lot’s of great questions.

One of the questions was about Agile contracting.  There is a good presentation I commented on in a recent post.

I was really excited to see the presentations from the Munich Scrum Gathering posted on the ScrumAlliance site since I was not able to attend due to a date conflict with Agile Tour Toronto. It took some time to go through all of them so I thought I would post some of the ones I found interesting here to encourage you to check them out and maybe some others. A big thank-you to the Scrum Alliance and authors for posting them.

Ideas from Other Fields

Making Change Happen – Peter Stevens

Peter Stevens has a visually pleasing presentation – Making Change Happen – that summarizes organizational adoption challenges and includes key ideas from one of my favourite books – Fearless Change. The diagram at the left illustrates that there are often factions in an organization pulling in different directions with different agendas – not just your favourite (Scrum or Agile). Check this out if you are involved in organizational change.

Social Objects in Software Development – Dave Harvey

Scrum talks about self-organizing teams. How do you get there? One idea is that we need to think about social networks. These form around social objects, so this is a good place to start. Social objects reinforce our identity and sustain our tribal identity. Consider the photo showing other dimensions of people’s lives. Not only can networks form around this, but it also primes our behaviour to think about others as … people. The presentation is done in zen style and I would totally love to hear Dave in person.

Self-Organizing & Subtle Control: Friends or Enemies? – Mike Cohn

Mike talked about self-organization not happening in a vacuum. It is management’s responsibility to guide the evolution of behaviours (rather than specify what how everyone needs work). He then went on to talk about Containers, Differences and Exchanges as a way of making indirect changes to a team. There is also a discussion of Philip Anderson’s 7 levers for influencing team evolution. Worth checking out if you are interested in coaching teams.

Stories from Scrum in Practice

Agile at Telefonica R&D Gemma_Hornos & Monica Izquierd

Although the presentation is about large scale enterprise adoption of Scrum, there are lots of interesting bits of information that apply in general. One example is image is about styles of growth of Scrum within an organization – I really like the viral/mosquito! Lot’s of other great visuals as well.

Practical Roadmap to Great Scrum – Jeff Sutherland

Jeff shares some of his key understandings of doing Scrum well. Want to double productivity? –> Focus on DONE. Want to double again? –> Focus on READY. Self-organization is identified as the 3rd way to double performance. The presentation also talks about large scale adoption and CMMI. Lot’s of good bits of info packed in here.

10 Contract Forms For Your Next Agile Project – Peter Stevens

Peter has a great analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of different types of contracts from both the vendor and the supplier perspectives. Phased development (see photo at left) is one that balances the interests of bother parties and encourages cooperative behaviours. If you need to set up a contract, check out this presentation.

Kicking Scrumbut – Rowan Bunning

Rowan takes a fun and informative look at some common failure modes that organization exhibit when adopting partial Scrum (AKA Scrumbut). Of course all the failure modes are matched with advice on what to do to resolve the problem. Even if you are an experienced coach or Scrum practitioner, you will be sure enjoy and learn from a different perspective.

Finally, the last in my series of visual notes from Agile 2009. Not my best, but I wanted to share my thoughts about the session.

Lyssa Adkins and Tobias Mayer gave a practical and experiential session at the end of Agile 2009. Lyssa has written more about this on her blog. The original name for the session was Human-Centred coaching.

One useful trick (unrelated to the topic) is to raise one’s hand and wait for everyone else to raise their hands as a soft and effective way to get people’s attention.

Powerful Questions

• Are open rather than closed
• Draw out hidden information
• Lead people to new perspectives
• Driven by curiousity
• Give people time to respond

To get good at them you can write some new ones on cards every week and use them where they make sense. The book Co-Active Coaching has a section that discusses powerful questions. It is partly related to the NLP practice of using the Meta-Model to ask questions to reveal hidden assumptions.

Powerful requests

Some tips are written in light blue above.  This is similar to the core protocol Ask for Help.

Joseph Pelrine gave a really interesting session on “Coaching Self-Organizing Teams” at Agile 2009.  (Mark Levison wrote about the pre-cursor to this session last year.)

There were a number demonstrations:

1. The first was of self-assembly (orange) and illustrated through people getting into an elevator.  They have no common goal and there is no change in behaviour.
2. Another was of people who were given the simple instructions (brown) of don’t bump, stay at the same speed and converge to the centre.  This demonstrated the idea of the team as a complex adaptive system where simple rules can lead to emergent behaviour.
3. Another was to ask people to clap there hands and then see how long it takes before everyone synchronizes.

He then went on to share some interesting ideas such as Core Group Theory – where the purpose of a company is to satisfy a core group of people.  To influence and organization, you need to know who they are.

Then things got really interesting.  Joseph likened self-organizing teams like making vegetable soup – the trick is to get the temperature right.

Checkout the heat gauge below.  As you can see there is a green zone where things are really cooking.  But beware the danger of too much heat (burning) and the cooling down phase where bad things can happen.  Gelled state is stable but there is not much innovation.  It is stable, but heat is needed to get cooking again.

What are the ways we can apply heat?

Stove #1 is about performance planning for individuals where challenge needs to be balanced against skill.  For a given skill level there is a range of challenge that can lead to a state of flow. With this model, there are two ways to climb in proficiency:

1. People can surf the top line and take on challenges beyond our capability.  Think of a snowboarder pushing boundaries of what they can do.
2. People can follow the bottom line and develop skills before taking on new challenges. This reminds me very much of Deliberate Practice – a key to Craftsmanship.

The next simulation was to have a group of people sit in a circle and pretend they are a development team.  The people on the outside interrupted them to ask questions.  Even when the team resisted, they felt pressured.

Stove #2 is to use the ABIDE model by David Snowden. (The pre-requisite is the have a context and a container.)  We need to think about how to stimulate the social network.  Here are some hooks:

• Attractor – Pride, money, quality, charisma
• Boundaries – Team boundaries e.g. traditional Dev/QA
• Identities – Role, responsibility
• Diversity – Gender, age, skills, personality
• Environment – Team room, desks, computers

We can make changes to any of these to get a shift in team dynamics.

Like this?  Joseph has some online talks on InfoQ:

• Coaching Self-Organizing Teams speaks to self-organization and the cooking metaphor.
• Dealing With the Organizational Challenges of Agile Adoption is about models for understanding conflict when adopting Agile.