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Now to work on the second deck of cards for March (SDC2010) – I want to have two variants of the deck ready to go for all three conferences.

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http://technologyandfriends.com/archive/2010/02/01/tf0067.aspx

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http://www.scandevconf.se/

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http://fiesta.lostechies.com/

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http://www.altnetseattle.org/

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ThoughtWorks India is taking the lead in making the first ever RubyConf India happen on Mar 20th and 21st in Bangalore. RubyConf India is being organised by the Ruby community in India and actively supported by Ruby Central. It will feature keynote addresses and talks by Chad Fowler, Ola Bini and other key figures in the Ruby community like (*cough*) Roy Singham.

This is a big deal for the Ruby community in India, and for ThoughtWorks.

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You may be thinking “Doc must have attended some GREAT sessions!”

First of all, I was privileged to be a Stage Producer. This means that I got to go through 120 submissions to choose around 20 presenters/sessions. Along the way, I recruited some outstanding people to be on my committee, including Ola Ellnestam as my Assistant Stage Producer. Ola is a star in his own right.

During the conference, I tried to get to say hello to all of “my” presenters, and spend a minute or two in their sessions. I didn’t quite make it.

There were also over 20 ThoughtWorkers presenting, and I tried to spend a minute or two in each of their sessions.  This was particularly hard today, when there were as many as four of them presenting concurrently, along with one or two of “my” presenters.

Then there were the amazing people I got to hang out with, meet, and connect with, like Alistair Cockburn (poetry readings and shamanism this year), Jean Tabaka (I love Jean Tabaka!), my dear friends Julie Chickering and Christine Delprete, Chris Matts and Olav Maassen, Diana Larsen, Esther Derby, Johanna Rothman, Martin Fowler and all the other fabulous ThoughtWorkers, Twitter-friends whom I finally got to meet, Corey Haines, Phil Brock (without whom the Agile Alliance would fall apart), Jim Newkirk, and on and on. I spent a significant chunk of my time in the Open Jam area, which I have dubbed “The Shmooze Pool”, since that’s what I did there.

I also became a member of the APLN board, and spent more time with Julie Chickering in that endeavor, along with Pollyanna Pixton, Todd Little, Jim Highsmith, David Chilcott, Linda Cook, Rose Anton, Sanjiv Augustine, Robbie Mac Iver, Cesar Idrovo, and Susan Fojtasek. As a combined effort between the APLN and ThoughtWorks Studios, I am starting to plan a series of Agile Leadership Open Space events. We’ll probably initially focus on cities where there is both a ThoughtWorks office and an APLN chapter. And then? We’ll see.

I met so many interesting, smart, challenging, engaging people this week. Just amazing. If I didn’t name you above, I apologize – you helped to make this an exceptionally rich experience for me.

And then there was my session on Facilitation Patterns & Antipatterns.  The feedback was excellent, including some critical comments that will enable me to improve the offering and generate more value.

Expected more focus on how to be a facilitator and practicing facilitation.

Could benefit from connecting the patterns to when to use them, how some of them help.

Very well presented and very thoroughly prepared and thought out. Would love to hear more project/real life examples as anecdotes.

Loved the presentation and the interactive activities with the deck of cards. Learned lots of great stuff.

The cards were a big hit.  Someone at each table got to take the deck from their table home with them, and a bunch of folks asked me to send them one (I have to have more printed!).

Tomorrow we have the Agile2009 retrospective for the organizers, and stage producers, and so on.  It should be very valuable, and should start Jim Newkirk off on a great path toward Agile2010 in Nashville.

So while I really, REALLY wish I hadn’t gotten a cold, I’m still a happy boy!

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(While I’m thinking of it, take a look at the sessions being offered by my fellow ThoughtWorkers at Agile2009 – some very cool stuff there!)

I thought you might like to see a sample of the cards.  This is the back of the cards…

And here’s Superhero…

I hope I’ll see you at the workshop on Tuesday afternoon.  I’m planning on it being fun!

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• Convergence
• Co-Worker
• Dominator
• Zealot
• …and more

I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned that these characters will make their “live” debut when I present my session on Facilitation Patterns and Antipatterns at Agile2009. I’ve developed a workshop around these ideas, and I think it will be a lot of fun.

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I’m working with a couple of artists to help me develop some training materials for ThoughtWorks Studios. I’ve had one of them develop avatars for a number of the facilitation patterns and antipatterns that I’ve identified.

And for me.

The avatars will find their way into a workshop that I’m developing for delivery at the Agile2009 conference.

All of the artwork will find its way into the training materials, one way or another.

For the workshop, I’m develop playing cards.  My avatars and all of these characters were developed by Mike Ferrin. Here’s a sample:

Take a look at some of the facilitation patterns and antipatterns in this blog, and you’ll meet more of the characters:

• Repetitor
• Curious George
• Superhero
• Guide
• and more!

And here’s an example of one of the pieces that is part of one of our courses:

This piece was done by Brian Goff.

Note that all of this artwork is the property of my employer, ThoughtWorks, and all rights to use are reserved.

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It was a “typical” weekend event – we opened and created the agenda on Friday evening, sessions all day Saturday, and sessions and closing on Sunday.

The great majority of the 100 participants had never attended an Open Space before, mostly had no clue what it was about, and many came in skeptical. I love it when they start out skeptical.

I was a bit worried (as always) that there wouldn’t be enough topics. Was I ever wrong to worry! We had more overflow than any other event I’ve facilitated. The newbies got the idea quickly and the topics kept on flowing.

The energy was outstanding. Once things got rolling, the bumblebees were pollinating, the butterflies were flitting, and the conversations moved up and down the halls.

Topics spanned everything from how to expand the community to programming in F# to discussing BDD (and TDD and DDDD).

For me, the best part was, as usual, the closing circle.

The words I heard included “open” and “respect” and “sharing” and “wow”. The skeptical had become the converted.

On top of all of that, this group was one of the most eager and effective in not only getting proceedings up on their wiki, but also in sharing videos and far more information than just came out of the event. Plus the amount of tweeting that went on and the people who were connecting and watching streaming video and tweets around the world, was impressive.

It was a joy and a delight to be allowed to facilitate this event, and to share in the energy and excitement.

Suh-weet!

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http://houston.altnetconf.com

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The first thing that surprised me was the comments from folks that made it clear that they were not familiar with the book or the work. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Not everyone can have read everything that I find to be important.

Still, I’d suggest that anyone who has not read Crucial Conversations or Crucial Confrontations, and is working on/with/around any team, and particularly an agile team, should read one or the other (or both) immediately.

So there is my bias, right out there – these books are transformational and essential.

Second was the question “How does this apply to agile teams, specifically?”

That’s like saying “How does that computer keyboard apply to agile teams, specifically?”

Does a tool that works have to be specific to agile to be included in the conference? I’m a bit stumped by that. While I feel that these works do apply very specifically to agile teams, I’m still stumped. People will be talking about programming tools and process approaches and teaching games, any of which could be applied anywhere. So why is this different?

Interpersonal communication is one of the most critical skills someone on an Agile team can have. Knowing how to say “I felt upset” or “You made a commitment, but didn’t fulfill that commitment” is essential. And really, most people I know don’t know how to talk about this stuff. Without it, I believe that teams will fail. Without these skills, team members bottle up their upsets and frustrations – even happiness, sometimes – and they fester and then the team’s ability to work together breaks.

I’m hoping that this session gets accepted, because I really want to deliver it.  Really.

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ITARC Atlanta was another hybrid event – a day of workshops, a day and a half of presentations (including me ), and a half day of Open Space.

Presenting: Facilitation Patterns and Antipatterns

I presented my new-and-improved version of Facilitation Patterns and Antipatterns (PDF). I’d finished reading Presentation Zen (also see Garr Reynolds’s blog of the same name), completely revamped the visual aspect of the presentation, reordered it to make it flow better (thanks to valuable input from  Patrick Kua and Glenn Kapetansky of ThoughtWorks), and was all ready to wow ‘em. I started off, got through the first 4 – 5 slides, and one of the attendees raised  his hand to ask a question. And that’s the way it went – one or two or three slides, then another question. Somehow, I made it through all my slides (although very briefly, for some), as well as answering questions and carrying on some very interesting exchanges with the participants (who shifted from attendees to participants very rapidly ).  Needless to say, I came away with fodder for some new antipatterns and patterns.

Embedded Open Space

There is a pattern emerging in the technology and technology-related events I’ve been involved with. I’m referring to it as “embedded open space.” At these events, the organizers embrace the ideas both of Open Space Technology (OST) and eyes-front presentations.  The MDCs were an example of this, as was Microsoft PDC – at these events, they tried to do it in parallel (as my twitter friends (”tweeps”) say, FAIL). Folks in the OST community will assure you that parallel doesn’t work. There is no sense of community, no consistent body of people who share commitment, and competition between the two different parallel events.

At KaizenConf and ALT.NET Seattle, they were structured to have workshops first, followed by “pure” Open Space – sequential.

At the Microsoft Strategic Architect Forum (September 2008, San Francisco), it was structured as split days – mornings were presentations, afternoons were Open Space.

ITARC Atlanta was done as a sequential – first they did workshops, then they did presentations, and finally on the last afternoon we did an Open Space. There was good and bad about this. As always, a substantial number of the participants had never been to or heard of Open Space Technology. They had some loose preconceptions, but nothing that matched to reality.

The context was that this was Friday afternoon at the end of a very valuable conference, it was raining and chilly in Atlanta, and many people didn’t stay for the Open Space. I’m guessing, and would say that their thinking was something like “I don’t know what this is – I can stay for what might be a waste of time, or start my weekend early.” Out of around 160 people who attended the whole event, about 40 stayed for the Open Space.

As always, those who stayed were surprised (”Be prepared to be surprised!“) and got way more out of it than they expected.

The organizers were Joseph DeCarlo of Turner and Paul Preiss, founder and CEO of IASA. Joe and I have known each other for about a year, and Joe had been at the Microsoft Strategic Architect Forum, which was his first experience of Open Space. He became a convert, and was the driving force behind adding OST to the ITARC. Paul was a skeptic, and therefore wanted to limit what he saw as an experiment.  I’m happy to say that Paul is now a believer, too. .

Passing on ALT.NET Seattle

I got my start as an Open Space Facilitator at the first ALT.NET Open Space in Austin in 2007. It was a wonderful experience for me, and formed a bond between the ALT.NET community (and the individuals that comprise it) and me. I frequently think of them as “my family” or even “my chldren”. It’s a special relationship, both because of the community and because of the blend of technology and OST and agile that occurs there, all of which delight me.

I facilitated last year’s Seattle ALT.NET Open Space, and it was good.

We had talked about this year’s, but a date had not been set when I was invited to ITARC Atlanta.

When Glenn Block contacted me about this year’s event, I learned that it was to begin on Friday evening, February 27. That was when I would be finishing up ITARC Atlanta. Needless to say, there was no way to be in Seattle to open the conference. Glenn asked if it would work for them to open and create the agenda without me, and then have me arrive on Saturday morning.  Ignoring the logistics of taking a red-eye to get to Seattle, I still had to say no. The facilitator must be there for the opening – it’s part of the spirit of the event.

After considering his options, Glenn got Diana Larsen to come and facilitate. I was both delighted and dismayed. Delighted because Diana is a friend and a highly experienced and skilled Open Space Facilitator, so I knew she would take proper care of my family. Dismayed because I feared “what if they like her better?!?!?!?!” After all, I have facilitated most of the major ALT.NET events in North America, and most of them have never experienced anyone but me. What if…?

Having survived my attack of insecurity and anxiety, I’m delighted to say that Diana was as good as expected, and my family still loves me nonetheless.

One of my favorite comments was this: “I’d say that Diana embodies ceremony, while you embody essence.” I’m still not quite sure what it means, but I like it!

Next time, hopefully they’ll pick a date farther in advance so I can commit.

I’m planning on facilitating ALT.NET Houston in April, unless I go to China. Really.

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So what am I doing here? I was selected as one of less than a dozen external speakers, out of a total of something like 900 total presenters. The Architect track was pretty much the only one to include soft skills stuff, hence my presentations on Facilitation Patterns and Antipatterns.

On Monday, I moderated a panel discussion on networking within Microsoft.

On Monday evening, I delivered a custom workshop on networking (purely coincidence).

Tuesday I delivered the first ever presentation of my Facilitation Patterns & Antipatterns (good scores, I’m happy to say).

I did it again today, and am looking forward to seeing my scores.

Tonight and Friday, I have meetings with some folks at Microsoft to talk about how ThoughtWorks and Microsoft can continue to have a healthy and productive relationship.  And tomorrow night I’m having dinner with our CTO, Rebecca Parsons.

It’s a good week, and only half over.

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