Pierluigi  Pugliese and Yves Hanoulle gave a great session on Soft Skills Essentials for anyone working in a team (hint: everyone). The session covered three communication models: Status Games, Solution Focus and Transactional Analysis (see diagram below).

Status Games is a modeling technique that comes from Improv theatre. They are all about power and dominance. When we communicate we can raise or lower the status of others by implying something positive or negative.

Here is a quick example.

Statement: “I just finished my part.”

Status lowering response: “Well, I’m glad we are all finally done.” (Implication is that the person was last and they were holding things up)

Status raising response: ‘Great, we can only succeed as a team.” (Implication is that everyone is important).

I need to learn more about this. Here is one reference for more details.

Solution Focus

The principle of solution focus is that it is often more valuable to focus on the solution than on the problem. This principle is counter intuitive and is contradictory to other approaches such as root cause analysis and Diagram of effects. I think about the latter tools as useful for analysis, while solution focus is useful for generating solutions.

Solution focus is deceptively simple:

1. Image that you are in the future and have already solved your problem.
2. Think about how it was that you got there.

This perspective is useful in unlocking the series of steps that need to be accomplished to achieve the goal.

Solution Focus is very similar to the approach used in the InnovationGame® Remember the Future for defining what a product should do.

As I was reading more, I discovered that this comes from solution focussed brief therapy. Reminds me of my NLP tools and training. I am wondering how to share them.

Transactional Analysis

The work of Virginia Satir on family dynamics can be used to understand how we communicate with others. With this model we choose one of three roles when communicating: Parent, Adult, or Child. The example illustrated in pink is that if we communicate as parent to child then we will elicit a child to parent response.

The idea here is that by changing our response, we can change the dynamic of the conversation to get the result that we want. I think I need to learn more and play with this to get a better sense of this technique. Maybe I will just observe life and take notes from this perspective.

Please see WikiPedia for more on Transactional Analysis.

Slides and further reading

You can see slides and further reading/links on Pierluigi’s blog.

Gerry Weinberg’s Secrets of Consulting is a well-recognized classic for anyone helping organizations and people. It is a delightfully written treasure trove of tips, tricks, and hard-won wisdom. My goal is to draw a mind-map of each book that I read, however, this book is too filled with gems of knowledge to compress into a single page.

What I have in today’s post is a series of mind-maps that cherry-pick the best bits. I include a lot of quotations from the book together with page numbers, so these may be used as a reading guide. (I’ll let you in on a secret: it’s actually for me to be able to look up the good bits quickly).

Consider your attitude as a Coach or Consultant

Client Relationship is Built on Trust

Understand You Client

Change is Harder than you Think

Coach the System and Beware the Fate of Consultants

Reality Check to Avoid Problems

Give away your Best Ideas and How to Price your Services

Hidden Agenda Game

Ironically, the one item that didn’t fit with any of the others is the Hidden Agenda Game (p.116). It is a simulation that helps people start seeing other people’s behaviours and intentions.

For me, 2010 was a year for attending many conferences but I only did one planned training session – Innovation Games® Master Course with Luke Hohmann – and it was awesome.

I am writing this post to share with you a little of what happened. Below is a photographical tour of the 2 day workshop. You can click on the images to see a higher resolution image.

It all started with name cards

Who knew what a fun activity this could be? It’s not everyday that I get to use glitter glue …

Never enough wall space

With interaction knobs turned to “11″, the walls were covered with Big Visible Charts or Information Radiators. Note for Agile teams – you can never have enough wall space. A projector was only used for a little bit on the second day.

Grow the Product Tree

Grow the Product Tree is a variant of Prune the Product Tree where the participants create all the leaves. So no pruning, only growing. This is how to play the game if you want to generate lots of options.

Luke Explaining

Luke spent a lot of time telling war stories about using games. For me this was great. Lot’s of learning and gems. In the photo below we were discussing running parties and galas in online games.

Spider Web for Financial Services Product

Big paper = Big Ideas! Map out how your product interacts with related products.

When and where to Use Games

Here we see what games might be played to support a team at various points in the planning horizon. For example, at the strategy level, we might want to answer the question “What is our BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal)?” and we might use the game Product Box to help answer this.

Same but for Product Development Lifecyle. For example, after the release of a product, we might want to answer the question “What do customers like about the product?” and we might use the game Show and Tell to help answer this.

The above diagrams show that all you need is an image and you can create a brand new game.

Where to find out more?

You can find out about the different Innovation Games® here.

Here is the way one way to see Innovation Games® (Click for hi-res image).

The diagram came out out Luke Hohmann’s Innovation Games® Master class in September. In my search for order, I decided there were three main categories of innovation games:

1. Generative – for generating new product ideas
2. Prioritizing – understanding relative priorities of different features
3. Understanding Product Use – all about how customers use the product today

In the diagram I have bucketed each game in it’s primary category. The one that resists this classification is Prune the Product Tree which can be very unstructured and generative (participants write features) or highly structured and used for prioritization (features are pre-selected). It all depends on who writes the leaves.

There are also other perspectives for viewing the games. Check out the book for perspectives based on prep time, scalability, etc. Another good resources is this one page summary of all the games.

A big thanks to Luke Hohmann for sharing the images under creative commons license.

Martin Fowler is among other things the Chief Scientist for ThoughtWorks. He gave an interesting keynote that consisted of 3 mini-talks. I thought it was very effective since it was accessible to those new to Agile as well as interesting for folks like me.

Here are my notes containing the juicy bits:

One problem Agile suffers from is Semantic Diffusion where the meaning of Agile is getting diluted. As we grow, there is increased miscommunication and less understanding. I see this struggle on mailing lists where well-intentioned people sometimes mis-explain things.

Martin then made the case that Agile requires Evolutionary Design. It goes like this: requirements change, so you need adaptive planning and hence evolutionary design. Play the Marshmallow Challenge to experience how this can work.

The next topic (middle of diagram) was about people. He touched on Taylor’s anti-pattern of process-centric view where people are replaceable parts and contrasted this with the research of Alistair Cockburn who classified people as non-linear and variable. Martin suggests that each team must own it’s process and evolution. Not sure how he reconciles this with the enterprise view.

The final topic was on code branching strategies and how continuous integration is the best of all strategies. Heed his call or suffer the despair of code decay in your feature branches.

If you want to get a more in-depth report, check out John Tobin’s blog post or Piergiuliano Bossi’s very detailed post.

Slides? Not sure. If we do get them, the will be linked from the conference website.