A friend and fellow Agile coach – Jason Cheong-Kee-You – told me about this approach to get more out of books. It is one of those little nuggets that help make every day life go better. Thanks also to Allister McKinnell for starting the chain reaction.

The purpose of this post is to share my key learnings from the book: the goal of reading and how to skim. No effort to represent the whole book.

The Goal of Reading

Adler argues that the goal of reading is to learn and that there are 4 elements that need to be satisfied. Consider the diagram below.

In order to decide what parts of the book you believe, you need to understand what it is suggesting and how that information is supported. As I write, I think about confirmation bias and that we need to challenge ourselves to keep our minds open.

Perhaps the most intriguing part is to explicitly think about is: what impact does the book have one you? What are you going to do differently as a result of reading the book?

How to Scan a Book Quickly

It takes time and energy to read and learn from a book. Adler introduces an approach called inspectional reading (systematic skimming or pre-reading) to provide a mechanism to decide if the book is worth reading. The diagram below outlines which bits of a book to focus on.

In 20 or 30 minutes, you can get an idea of what the book is about and what its parts are. Even if you think you are going to read the whole book cover to cover, this is still very valuable in understand the book as a whole.

Happy reading!

Here is a very short (2 min)video where Selena Delesie and I reported back on a session at Agile Coach Camp Canada. This is what a group of 10+ of us came up with.

I’ll link to the writeup when it is posted.

Thanks to everyone who was there – it was a fun, intense and valuable session for me.

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).

At Scrum Gathering Orlando, I ran an experiential workshop titled Improve your communication through non-verbal rapport. The session turned out really well so thanks to everyone who participated. My only tools were a flip chart and some markers, so the purpose of this post is to provide details for attendees as well as provide visibility to anyone interested in better communication.

(Part 6 of 5 blogs on the Scrum Gathering in Orlando – ok, so not very good at counting

Mehrabian Study

Amazingly, only 7% of communication is based on words while 38% is based on tonality and 55% on physiology.

The Mehrabian Study produced these numbers to quantify the importance of non-verbal communication.

Rapport

Briefly, rapport is about making and feeling a connection with another person. We do this automatically with our friends: we match physiology and tonality. The key practice for connecting with others is to:

1. Face a similar direction
2. Be at the same or lower height
3. Match the angle of their spine and head tilt.

This goes a long way towards making a comfortable connection.  For more on rapport refer to NLP: The New Technology of Achievement by Steve Andreas, and Charles Faulkner.

Keys to great communication

There are some important approaches that complement non-verbal rapport skills.

I just posted on Crucial Conversations.

Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” has two models that relate to effective communication.

Win/Win is about seeking a good outcome for everyone involved – seeking a long-term, sustainable relationship.

“Seek first to understand, then be understood“ is about really listening to people around you. To really connect, you need to understand the person and where they are coming from.

Exercise to understand rapport

Caution: These exercises are here for those who attended the workshop and want to use them to help others. Please attend a workshop before trying these on your own.

This exercise is about getting an internal sense of how important rapport is in conversation.

Exercise to sense broken rapport

This exercise is about practicing rapport and getting a sense of what it is like for rapport to be broken.

Want to learn more?

These are some of the skill that I learned as an NLP (NeuroLinguisticProgramming) Practitioner. I have found Practitioner as well as Master Practioner skills to be an important part of my toolkit as an Agile Coach.

I strongly recommend Wauneen McMonagle Innergize Training if you are interested in building skills in this area.

One important book that has been in my communication toolkit for years is Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler. I am mentioning it now since I shared some of these elements in my Scrum Gathering workshop Improve your communication through non-verbal rapport. I’ll blog on this shortly; back to the book.

The book offers several valuable models for communicating effectively when the going gets tough.

The most important concept is that of safety: “when it’s safe you can say anything”. When we feel safe in our environment or with others, then open communication is possible and we collectively add to a shared pool of meaning. When we add to the pool we begin to understand one another and can produce shared insights. Mutual purpose – agreeing about the purpose of a conversation – is another requirement for effectively adding to the pool.

There are two common patterns people fall into that put safety at risk. With silence, people may be withdraw from conversation, avoid topics or respond in ways that obscure meaning. With violence, people may resort to verbal abuse, labeling, and manipulating the situation. Understanding these patterns has allowed me to diagnose situations and be more effective. Also, there is a test that lets you identify your preferred pattern when in conflict so you can debug your own behaviour.

Start with heart is about looking at the conversation with a wider lens – What’s important for you? What’s important for others? What kind of a relationship do you want? This is related to Stephen Covey’s habits of win/win and empathetic listening.

Finally, to be successful, we need to master out stories. One challenge with the way our brain’s work is that we feel emotions and then create stories to justify our emotions. There are many types of unproductive stories that we tell ourselves, the most common and crippling ones are:

• Victim – “How could this have happened to me? What have I done wrong?”
• Villain – “That other person is to blame.”
• Helpless – “I am powerless; there is nothing I can do”

See related topic – Cristopher Avery’s personal responsibility model.

Harrison Owen gave a very insightful keynote speech at Scrum Gathering on OpenSpace and how we often think about management the wrong way.

(Part 2 of 5 blogs on the Scrum Gathering in Orlando)

He started with an explanation of how he has come to think about systems of people over his 75 years on the planet. There are two rules or heresies:

1. All systems are Open
2. All systems are self-organizing (at some level)

Someone asked the question of how to manage a company? Harrison replied that it’s the same as Open Space:

1. Sit in a circle
2. Use a bulletin board for what to talk about
3. Market place for agreeing when and where to talk

What isn’t in the mindmap is how he invented this.  The story goes that he had a very successful conference with speakers and sessions, but he was told that the best part was the coffee breaks. So, when faced with the problem of organizing another conference with very little time, he decided to have one that was just filled with coffee breaks.  3 Martini’s later and open space was born.

How effective is Open Space? Harrison has the view that it can create astounding results by helping people reach agreement and resolve conflicts. He has seen this consistently time after time when running Open Space.

Mike Bria blogged about the Open Space the next day.

The workshop was nothing short of amazing. Lee Devin took a group of us through a 5 hour deep-dive into the key skills used by actors to create and collaborate. What Lee calls Artful Making (see book for more). This is 100% applicable for Agile teams and this has immediately become part of my toolkit for fostering creativity and much more.

(Part 1 of 5 blogs on the Scrum Gathering in Orlando.)

I have attempted to capture the key aspects of the workshop in the mindmap below.

I walked out of the session with:

• Better ability to LISTEN. This had been on my self-improvement list for years.
• A deep sense of playfulness, curiousity and creativity. Lee helped me reconnect with skills I had when I was much younger.
• A strong connection with other participants.
• Understand my EDGE in a number of different situations. I can now explore and expand this in a positive way.

The exercise where we were creating together through movement is a great way to illustrate the benefits that can be found through pairing. Together we were able to create and invent things that I could not even conceive of in advance. It was really awesome to experience such effective collaboration without words.

Not only was this fun, it also is immensely practical. One note of caution when you do take it: you will start off slowly and build the foundations; the really cool stuff comes together later on.

Kudo’s to the Scrum Gathering organizers and many thanks to Lee for sharing his craft.

Special mention to those that made it special for me. In photo: Mark Strange, Siraj Sirajuddin, Lee Devin, (me), Juan Banda.  Also, Mats Janemalm (not in photo).

One of my goals is to make a mindmap of every book that I read.  I figure if I can take the time to read it, I may as well take a little time to synthesize the content of the book into a mindmap so I can remember it later.  Seems like a good idea, and this is the first one in what I hope will be a long and informative series.

So, today’s review is on Why We Make Mistakes – a book that describes failure modes common to people. Many of my regular readers will be wondering what this has to do with Agile and Lean, but it turns out that there are several direct links to industry practices.

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.

Christopher Avery gave a very interesting talk at Agile 2009 called How to Develop Your Leadership Power Daily: An Agile Approach to Growth.  It was a very interesting talk about personal responsibility and how to grow – hence the title of this blog post.

Sidebar comment: This talk really has nothing to do with Agile so it appears that the conference program is branching out in new directions.  On the other hand, if you want to coach or build a high-performance team, then this is useful information.

The top left corner has the most important bit of information.  We are hard wired to not accept responsibility and would readily blame others.  As we are more self-aware we can progress from denial to blame to justification – all the way up to ladder to responsibility.   You can request a free poster here and there is a short description here.

The 3 keys are about how you can shift your own behaviour:

1. Intention – intend to change your behaviour so you can win!
2. Awareness – pay attention to your language and thinking.  Make a chart of how many times a day you can catch yourself not taking responsibility.  One way is to carry around change and give yourself a penny for noticing when you say something unresourceful and 10cents if you catch yourself before you say it.
3. Confront – you need be honest with yourself or you’re not going to get anywhere.

The daily practices are some additional tricks to help move towards personal responsibility.

The anxiety hierarchy is about how some words you use when talking to others can trigger defenses.  Approaching someone about a PROBLEM will result in getting their input on a consideration.

As an NLP Master Practitioner, there is a note in the corner to remind myself that it’s not that easy to shift behaviour.  We often have limiting beliefs and values conflicts that may need some shifting in order to make a persistent change.  Awareness is a good start, but in my experience often not enough.