On June 24-25, 2009 I had the pleasure of attending a 2 day workshop session delivered by Luke Hohmann. My workshop was on Innovation Games® and I was being trained to become a facilitator for the games. The training was by far some of the best I have received in years!!!

Previously, I had seen Luke deliver a couple of games and read his book. And I have tried, with good success, to apply many of his techniques. However, like all busy people one thing after another had crowded Innovation Games® out of my head and I was no longer using them as actively. The reason for this is simple: too many things to do, a busy schedule, time for mastery and lack of a deep appreciation for the techniques. So, my current thought is, Innovation Games are subtle, powerful and really require hard work to master and apply well. Innovation Games now has my full attention and I am actively applying them.

Luke is a Grand Master Facilitator. I have facilitated many meetings and discussion around product development and consider myself a good facilitator. After the 1^st morning of training on day one, my notebook was filled with quickly scribbled thoughts. Luke’s style, breadth and depth of applied experience as a facilitator were staggering. What could be learned by using the games became so much more apparent as the workshop progressed. When Innovation Games® are applied well many “hard to discover things” are teased to the surface through subtle artful facilitation and collaborative interaction. With trained observers these games can be used to capture powerful ideas for evolving products.

The workshop was a double success because many of my peers where there from the Scrum Alliance. We were all being trained to become Innovation Games certified facilitators. Our days were filled with Luke artfully facilitating numerous games. Most people would not notice the facilitator’s presence; however, because all of my classmates are professional trainers, coaches, facilitators we paid close attention. After each game we ran a retrospect and review of the numerous techniques being demonstrated. All of us were able to personally relate to numerous experiences we have had and could immediately see applications to improve our work.

Summary:

Master of the these games is aquired through application. I would encouarge anyone to try applying them and see what can be learned.

When the games are delivered by a skilled practioner they become a powerful set of techniques for figuring out product development needs. In Scrum the role of the Product Owner is well defined facing into the team. However, there is little to no help directly from Scrum for figuring out what to build. Generally, building the right thing is easy if we know what the right thing is. Innovation games are serious tools for determining what the right product should be.

It is not often that my head is left reeling from two days of intensive training. I am used to cramming information but, Luke’s training challenged my head in fundamental ways. These challenges caused me to reflect on how I was conceptualizing approaches to product development. My Big Thanks is too Luke and my classmates for making this possible. We make each other better through our collaborative interaction and Luke has raised the bar for me on what great facilitation can look like!

A BIG THANK YOU TO LUKE!

Recommended

If you are in the San Francisco Area then check out this conference. This conference is being organized by experts in the field of product development. They will be using the power of serious game play to identify what will make for a great product that people will love.  Those familar with complex product development already know that “building the right thing” is the greatest risk to development. This  conference offers unique skills to help you reduce that risk.

1 day – June 26th,  2009

Innovation, Design & Serious Games Exchange

Organized by Enthiosys and Other Great Companies

I will not be there because of prior commitments but, would highly recomed for ScrumMasters and Product Owners who face the tough challenge of building world class products that people love.

Register

Cost: $50-$90 (depending on options money well spent)

There are an increased number of posts about agile adoption not working out for some folks in larger companies. As the numbers of scrum / agile implementations sky rocket so too will the number of stories where agile is not succeeding.  The following story is not surprising and I expect to hear more of these types of responses as agile / scrum grows in applied practice. What interests me is not weather agile is good or bad (I’m sold on the concepts.) but, what we can learn through evaluation, in other words let’s be empirical and study the data we have.

A great recent blog post by Vikas Hazrati caught my eye.

The story starts like this …

You have been feeling great. Recently, you met a lot of people in \the software community who knew little about Agile and you felt good telling them on how you are practicing Agile on your new project. You tell them about the wonders it has done to the business value delivered to the client and how your work life balance has improved since you started following Agile methodologies religiously. How you have felt so committed to the project that you are working on a that you have a great team of professionals.

So far so good.

The climax in the story comes on that dreaded Friday evening when the less committed people of the organization, which includes all of your team, are give the pink slip, and of course you are one of them!

You wonder, Why us, Why me, How the hell am I not committed? I thought that after years of developing software the wrong way this is the first time that you have done the things right, then why? The reason is that somehow your organization believes that you are not committed. Neither to the organization nor your work.

This is not a surprising outcome and all to common. Agile has gone mainstream but it will be attacked from many angles.

My Observations

The current systems are thought models, essentially living thought models, changing them is slow and painful.  Like any living thing when it is attacked or challenged it will fight back and lash out in fear, anger, igonorance and for pure simple survival. The people defending the old tired models of thinking are simple acting reasonable from their frame of reference.

Additionally, for big companies to even recognize that they have an incredibly valuable asset in a well formed team is a huge step acknowledge that performing teams are capital assets. With a great team I can deploy it towards a challenging business problem and generate a myriad of ways to thrive. Knowledge is a commodity, it is the ability to do something useful with that knowledge that will distinguish these companies long term. Eliminating your good teams (capital assets) from the business is fiscally irresponsible and it will come back to haunt the organization.

Expect real change to take years. You can do things to dramatically accelerate this change but, you have to be very thoughtful about your approach. It will not rely solely on a rationalized conversation (i.e. 1+1 = 2) people just don’t care when it comes to habits and perceptions driven from an emotional bases. And like it or not we are most often dealing with emotional issues since our rationalizations are anchored by an emotional part of our brain. Intentionally changing behavior is a long haul propositioin and the scrum framework is an means to inspect and adapt a change state into existence.

- Doug
http://3back.com

I gave my first Livestream presentation today on Scrum. This will be talk that I run frequently over the next couple months. You can expect to see the slides posted soon and those will be available for use on general public license.

I hope you enjoy. Please leave a comment on your experience.

Look for more videos coming soon from a wide audience of practitioners, coaches and trainers.

New Scrum User Group

I will be helping the  Ottawa Scrum User Group kick off its first Scrum User Group  meeting. User groups are something that are intreguging to me because they bring up issues of sustainable community structures. I will be curious to see what kinds of internal structure unfold , how they are put in place and how those structure lead to sustainability. I have helped and seen many local interest groups come and go. I have learned to appreciate just enough structure for a Scrum User Group. I am being sent by both 3Back and the Scrum Alliance at the request of Ottawa Scrum User Group. I will be delivering a short Scrum In A Nutshell talk. 

Why help?

Several reasons:  help local communities that are interested in Scrum, support the Scrum and the mission of the Scrum Alliance, work withlocally talented people to build a collaborative community, help my company 3Back and finally it is fun and helps me professionally. I am actively involed with the Scrum Alliance and have seen that growing  local Scrum User Groups, helps us all. 

Read the Scrum Alliance “Scrum User Group Guidelines“, getting started is easy and I can help.

Two posts caught my eye today. In sumamry these posts were about scrum user groups and how / if they benefit from Scrum Alliance marks to help the build credibility. My response is YES and here is why.

1.) http://friendfeed.com/dailyscrum/a57c3474/scrum-users-group-controversy-agile

2.) http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/04/scrum-alliance-user-group

Context

“As discussed here previously, the Scrum Alliance plays an important role in helping to preserve the Scrum framework through its certification process. Because it has standardized the experience required for various “certified” positions in Scrum, the terminology used to describe Scrum, and, of course, the framework itself, the Alliance has armed thousands of software professionals with the practical knowledge they need to advance in a career in Scrum. I’ve always considered their work to be obviously valuable for individuals seeking training, but also an important reason why Scrum has flourished in recent years.”

Why

Scrum user groups, Agile user groups, XP users groups many of these I have seen come and go. I have tried and been unsuccessful at sustaining these groups and have seen similar patterns from others. However, I have followed others who were experienced and they have taught me.

It is my experience that these groups are driven by people who are not use to some necessary deliberate (self included) structure. Deliberate structure includes officers, organizing boards, keeping it interesting, volunteering, stimulating vibrancy and “marks (like SCRUMUSERGROUP)” from International organizations that help with credibility. These structures help groups sustain their existence. SPIN Groups have years of history, PMI groups have years of history, APLN has better success (different make up of people on average)Agile groups often seem to pop and die like grapes on the vine.

The Scrum Alliance is offering help by holding these marks and building brand value. Structure / value so that the group adopts some deliberate structure to stay organized enough to sustain it’s existence. We (agile community) need to learn from other groups that have a history and stop being so scared when something looks restrictive.

Doug Shimp
http://www.3back.com

So, I found a new tool to play with and it is pretty slick. The tool is free and allows you to make some interesting word art for little to no effort. Here is what you do.

1. Visit Wordle
2. Navigate to the create tab
3. Enter an Url ( For example, I used an atom feed from an upcoming Scrum Training Class)
   • http://milwaukee-scrum-agile.eventbrite.com/
4. Submit and then modify to taste.

Here is the sample I produced in about 5 minutes.

 You can adjust colors, fonts, remove words, increase words etc. The picture is a pleasing refresher when graphics are burning out your tastes. And it looks a lot better than classic tag clouds. 

Please drop me a comment if you use it,  like it and why.

Catch Me as a Certified On Demand Coach.  

Remote coaching or distributed coaching can be done through numerous mechanisms.  You can connect with me via phone, Various Online Meetings, Skype, ooVoo, or high definition video. You can connect with me directly on my Contact. Follow my micro blog on Daily Scrum on Twitter or ping me via Skype.

We are becoming increasingly adept at connecting our organizations together in ways that make them much smarter than they were 5, 10 or more years ago. The use technology  for social networking continues to transform the work world of today into a new place.  Connectivity tools, like IM, Blogs, eMail, Twitter, SMS Text Messaging, Cell Phones and the like are rapidly shrinking both distance and time. Connectivity tools allow us to stay connected and build complex thought far more rapidly than ever before. Although we are distributed through time, geography, culture, and language we are more connected now than ever. This new era of prolific connectivity is being commonly called social media and social networking. For the Internet geeks these tools have been around for over a decade. The difference now is that these tools are easy, cheap and readily available.

So, Are Organizations Really Benefiting Social Networking

 Often the answer is “NO“.

Web Of Technical and Social Patterns

Why?

We commonly find organizations adopting technologies and building processes with needless structures at a rate that is chewing away at the benefit social networking technology brings.  For example, we continue to see rampant signs of multitasking, despite a large amount of evidence that shows people do not multi task well, especially on demanding deep thought. Of course we can always walk and chew gum but, how many people can read a novel, play a game a of chess and carry a conversation all the same time? multitasking is an opiate of the lazy minded who want a quick fix for productivity.  Too often, we become forced into bad behaviors and frenetically driven pattens that force us to make the wrong decisions. These bad decisions chew away any gains we make.

We are dealing with the need to nurture and grow complex systems. This transcends traditional ways of thinking and requires a respectful shift and appreciation for how to work with complexity. Devloping a complex system requires a the development of an smart adaptive approach to planning and dealing with new information.

Smarter Social Organizations Are Possible Now

Enabling these smarter organizations is a matter of freeing up the intellectual capacity you already have. The tools and technology available now can bring about a vastly smarter organizations to emerge than we have previously seen. With a smarter organization, patterns of practices will emerge that defy one mind’s limited capacity to understand and digest.  However, a team who’s focus is to help the organization become better can see these things and tune the environment.  Collaboration tools and outcomes need to be applied and adapted by the people using them. A collaborative tools and outcomes enabler team needs to support and nurture a base level of knowledge for that to occur. 

Work From A Know Center

A team who’s job it is to nurture smarter social organizations needs to focus on a simple rules based applied practice. Simple rules are clearly being shown to be the key lever to emerging complex adaptive patterns of behavior. The team will need to continuously adjust and tune the organizations social structure and it’s interaction.

Transforming organization to work smarter needs to be adopted and done in an empirical way. A team that is dedicated to stimulating the environment so that adaptive patterns of practice emerge is necessary. The team that stimulates the environment should be comprised of people who have skin in the game and should be driven by an evidence based decision making process.  These experts should have a passion for becoming adept to leveraging social media as a source of vibrant rapid feedback. Expertise should be developed locally and nurtured through applied collaborative practice. 

Great leadership of tomorrow will  be recognized by it’s ability to bring people together through the use of technology and do not suppress their identity.

Great leaders must allow for individual recognition inside/outside the corporate walls and reward  success through collaborative effort. For individuals this means pursuing professional development through collaborative exchange. This is the promise of social media and the benefit it can bring to organizations both large and small. 

Well I started following the WhiteHouse on Twitter.

This is another step forward for the Obama Adminstration. I hope they can keep the posts real, timely  and authentic.  There is no doubt that this was a brillant move during his campaign.

Do you think this is a good idea? Will this change the way we run our country?