I get to facilitate an Open Space in my own home town! Woohoo!
Posts Tagged ‘Facilitation’
It was sad for me – I couldn’t do it last year because I was already booked for another Open Space. I’m delighted that they’ve invited me again this year, and that I’m available. This is my people!
Motto: That’s wrong.
Belief: It’s my responsibility to point out what’s wrong with other people’s ideas. I live in my black hat*.
Behavior: Points out the flaws and faults in everyone else’s approach. Does so without offering any balancing positives or alternatives.
Characteristics: Negative, sometimes superior, destructive, achieving satisfaction by negating others’ ideas.
The Negator sees their lot in life as poking holes in everyone else’s ideas and plans. While this is not, in and of itself, a bad thing, when exercised without the balance of alternatives or one’s own ideas it becomes a negative of its own.
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”
Yes, this is just a brag post. 
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.
Motto: I can’t do it.
Belief: I am not capable of making decisions or taking action on my own.
Behavior: Avoids making decisions or commitment. Frequently solicits others to work together and take on leadership/responsibility.
Characteristics: Fearful, lacking confidence, seeks approval.
Helpless can be very subtle, and sometimes very overt. Helpless frequently says things like “oh, I couldn’t do that” or “I’m not ready for that kind of responsibility”. Helpless tends to avoid making commitments and taking responsibility, and is therefore quite skilled at recruiting others to participate and take on leadership and responsibility.
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.
Motto: Duck! The sky is falling!
Belief: Everything is an indicator of trouble to come.
Behavior: Points out the negatives and the danger in most things. Frequently tries to prevent action out of fear.
Characteristics: Fearful, negative, reactive, active in pointing out the problems, believable, has conviction, convincing, passionate
You’re in the midst of a conversation in which you have high expectations of reaching a conclusion and moving on to action. Chicken Little says “but doesn’t that mean that someone will lose their job?” or “I’ve tried that before, and it always ends in problems.”
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.
Yes, I’ve added more new graphics, courtesy of Mike Ferrin.
- 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.
I’m delighted to share with you that I’ve added some very cool graphics to this blog.
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.
Motto: It’s worth repeating. It’s worth repeating. It’s worth repeating.Belief: You’ll only understand if I say it at least three times.
Behavior: Says the same thing repeatedly, frequently in somewhat different words, frequently two, three, or more times.
Characteristics: Articulate, filled with conviction, perhaps lacking confidence
In my last post, this would have sounded like this:
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.
Related Pattern: Articulate
A couple of days ago, I facilitated my first-ever distributed retrospective. I was pretty anxious about it, since much of the value I’ve experienced in retrospectives comes from the interactions between people. Here’s how it went:
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.
