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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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The Negator may seem to be contributory and helpful at times, as their suggestions come across as helping you to see risks and dangers*. However, this behavior pattern, when exercised to the exclusion of balance, can become seen as the person’s identity, rather than one pattern of behavior among many.

* See Edward De Bono’s “Six Thinking Hats”

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At 2pm Central time today, I’ll be doing the first full delivery of the Facilitation Patterns & Antipatterns workshop at the Agile2009 conference.

Yes, I’m excited.

I’ve gotten great response from the folks I’ve told about it.  Hopefully some of them will turn up.

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Helpless is only detrimental to a group in the sense that this individual doesn’t contribute fully nor live up to their potential.  Other than that, they may be very positively contributory in discussions and in helping the group move forward.

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Chicken Little is not a bad person, by any means. Chicken Little just sees everything as a portent of bad things to come.

Just in case you’re not familiar with the tale of Chicken Little, let me refresh your memory:

The basic premise is that a chicken eats lunch one day, and believes the sky is falling down because an acorn falls on her head. She decides to tell the King, and on her journey meets other animals who join her in the quest. In most retellings, the animals all have rhyming names such as Henny Penny, Cocky Lockey and Goosey Loosey. Finally, they come across Foxy Loxy, a fox who offers the chicken and her friends his help.

Depending on the version, the moral changes. In the “happy ending” version, the moral is not to be a “Chicken”, but to have courage. In other versions the moral is usually interpreted to mean “do not believe everything you are told”. In the latter case, it could well be a cautionary political tale: The Chicken jumps to a conclusion and whips the populace into mass hysteria, which the unscrupulous fox uses to manipulate them for his own benefit, sometimes as supper.

The challenge with Chicken Little is that he/she is believable, has great conviction, is convincing, and generally brings passion to their arguments. While you might not agree or believe at the start, through these attributes, Chicken Little will often persuade others to his/her point of view, thereby stalling or derailing the team.

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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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Motto

It’s about the subtleties. You know – it’s about the little things. It’s about the stuff that’s not so obvious – the subtleties… the things that others hear in what you say whether you were aware of it or not…

Repetitors are usually articulate. They are able to express themselves. In the positive way, without the unneeded repetitions, a Repetitor would be an Articulate. By repeating themselves, without checking to see whether the listener is understanding, the Repetitor turns a Pattern into an Antipattern.

Dealing with a Repetitor is as simple as a variant on the Facilitation Four-Step: Interrupt, Ask, Redirect, Commit.

Interrupt

“Excuse me, Frank.”

Ask

“Do you mind…”

Redirect

“…if I check in with the others for a moment?”

Commit

“We’ll get right back to what you were saying.”

Action (yes, a 5th step )

“Sue, just so we’re clear, can you tell us what Frank’s point was?”

In this way, I validate that others have heard Frank, check to make sure that they’ve understood Frank, and break the pattern of repetition.

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I was facilitating from my home in Austin. My colleague was in Chicago. The project manager/scrum master was at work, but off site. Several of the team were in the client’s offices, but not necessarily together. And several were in Bangalore, India.

From my perspective, this created a wonderful variety of challenges.

We used a sharing application that allowed participants to sign in as “guest #”, for those times when we wanted anonymity, and also used a WebEx. The PM shared the anonymous app via WebEx, so we could all see what was being entered.

We began with a Safety Exercise, which was supported by the sharing app which was revealed in the WebEx window. It worked quite well, and I was delighted to see all fives and one four (meaning that everyone felt quite safe).

We followed this with a Mad/Glad/Sad, still using the anonymous window. This was interesting, in that we were using virtual stickies, and had to do reading/clustering verbally. It’s clear that there’s an opportunity for a sharing app that actually presents something like stickies, and can be manipulated in real-time (something like cardmeeting.com, but more oriented toward this purpose).

I thought about using Mingle. Here’s how I think it might work (and I might try this next week):

• Create a card type of “sticky”
• Create a card attribute of “feeling” and give it a list of values: mad, glad, sad (or whatever is appropriate)
• Create a card type of “cluster”, with the intent of connecting Stickies to it in a tree or hierarchy, as with epics, features, stories, and tasks

I’m experimenting with this now, and will share results as I get them, and what I learn in the process. While nothing that’s done electronically will replace face-to-face retrospectives, I’m hopeful that this will reduce the pain.

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While the first two books deal with holding conversations and dealing with issues, this third book addresses the challenges that are near and dear to my heart: how you get people to change their behavior. Thanks to my colleague Jason Yip, I started on this book, and haven’t been able to put it down (well, I do stop for things like work ).

I wanted to share some of this with you, because it relates so nicely to what I’ve been thinking and writing about for a while now.

It turns out the all influence geniuses focus on behaviors. They’re inflexible on this point. They don’t develop an influence strategy until they’ve carefully identified the specific behaviors they want to change. They start by asking: In order to improve our existing situation, what must people actually do?

I love this. It’s not about how they feel or about their motivation. First and foremost, it’s about how they behave.

This is true whether I’m dealing with my family, my co-workers, or a client. Whether I want them to change their behavior, or I just want to understand the situation, I start with their behavior.

One of the vital behaviors consists of the use of praise versus the use of punishment. Top performers reward positive performance far more frequently than their counterparts. Bottom performers quickly become discouraged and mutter things such as, “Didn’t I just teach you that two minutes ago?” The best consistently reinforce even moderately good performance,…

This goes as far back, for me, as Ken Blanchard’s original One-Minute Manager series of books. It ties into how we relate to and teach our children. Every little accomplishment, every move in the right direction, and they get tremendous reinforcement. Then, as the authors say, we start to grow up and everyone gets stingy with their praise as if it’s only to be delivered when we do something exceptional.

If you know anything about training dogs (no, I’m not equating co-workers and family to dogs, just learning where I can), you know that you do the same thing – reward them if they make a move in the right direction, and keep encouraging them until they get it.

It’s so easy to say “well done” or “good job” or even just “thanks”. These things provide reward way out of proportion to their cost.

And it’s so easy to do these things as a facilitator, which many folks don’t get. It’s not about being insincere or ingenuous. It’s about rewarding and encouraging the behaviors we want to develop, and finding ways to reduce or eliminate the behaviors we don’t want.

Read this book. If you are a parent, manager, facilitator, professional, consultant, teacher,… okay, if you’re a human being, read this book.

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The Unconference: Where Geeks JIT Together

Steven M List

More collaboration and less imposed structure. That’s where technology is leading us. Whether it’s Wikipedia’s collaborative bottom-up organization or the Unconference’s on-the-fly topic and presentation planning, the trend is clearly about less prescription and more participation.

Just a few years ago, there were no Unconferences, Open Spaces, BarCamp, FOO Camp, or DemoCamp. So why does it seem like today there’s another Unconference or Open Space every other week? What’s so compelling about geeky, nerdy, tech folks getting together just to talk about whatever’s on their minds?

via The Unconference: Where Geeks JIT Together.

I just had to share – coming out in the May issue of MSDN magazine.

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