Consider the following diagram:

Play for Work

The goal is here is to take difficult, boring, unproductive work  and create great results through play. In the diagram, I give a few examples of how to make work through play:

• Innovation Games® have a proven track record of using play to help companies understand their customers and build innovative products.
• Planning Poker is a well-established team based estimation technique that is now complemented by other estimation games.
• Lego® Strategic Play® is a hands-on activity for solving tough problems, team development and creating company strategy.
• The world of facilitation provides a host of engaging activities from team retrospectives to Open Space.

For more information, check out some ways I help clients with bring play to work.

Play for Learning

I have been very involved in games to assist people learning about Agile, Lean, etc. I made a helpful diagram that shows different types of games and what they can be used for. Probably the best place to go to find a game is TastyCupcakes.org – it’s a community-driven and has an ever-growing collection of games. I even volunteer my time to make it better for everyone – that’s how much I care and believe in play as a powerful dynamic.

Of course, play goes well beyond Agile through folks such as training master Thiagi and GameStorming. (Both are on my to-learn list)

Building Play Skills

What if you want to build the skills of your team or organization to harness play as part of daily work? To have play and creativity permeate everyone and everything? For this, your best bet comes from dramatic techniques such as ArtfulMaking and DramaTech. Also, strongly recommended are Improv skills. You may notice that these are not just about creativity, they are also about listening and collaboration as an added bonus.

For results, play on!

Related posts:

1. Stuart Brown Video on Why Play is Vital I recently realized that my use of Agile Games for...
2. Ways to Make Progress with Culture Gaps In an earlier post, I talked about how Agile Fits...
3. 5 Ways Scrum Creates Safety (vs. XP) Just had my first article posted to Scrum Alliance website....

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I’ll link to the writeup when it is posted.

Thanks to everyone who was there – it was a fun, intense and valuable session for me.

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Constellation – Understanding each other through motion

I love this exercise. It provides the team members as well as the coach important information about everyone on the team. It is called constellation since everyone arranges themselves around an object on the floor (in our case a roll of tape) depending how they feel about a statement such as “I like getting results”.  People align their bodies with the statement: standing beside the object signifies strong agreement while standing far away to signifies strong disagreement. It is very powerful since people are engaging their whole bodies. To learn more, there is a full write-up on Lyssa’s blog.

Timeline – sharing our pasts

In timeline, each participant draws a timeline of their life with peaks, valleys and major life events. In turn, each person describes their timeline to the team. Team members listen and note skills or talents (on sticky notes) that stand out. These are then posted at the bottom of the timeline and reviewed as a team. This approach is about figuring out who the person is and what special perspectives they bring to move the project forward. When we did this, it helped the demo subject feel more positive about their talents. Nice.

Marketplace – sharing our talents

In marketplace we pretend we are a vendor in an open-air market place and decide what wares we have to sell. What are our special skills and talents that pertain to this project? We even get to create a banner to attract people. Under the table are things that are true for us, but may not directly relate to the project. The debrief is the same as timeline. Usually a coach will use one or the other (in the training session half of us did marketplace and half did timeline).

Below is my marketplace as an Agile coach.

(This is part of a series on DeepAgile 2010 Games Weekend).

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Project Community Diagram

The Product Owner is not part of the team since their role is to ask for more to keep productive tension in the system. I like the way Ron Jeffries narrates about the Product Owner Role without ever using the term. This is a good story. So is the follow-up one.

I like the XP notion of the customer team to reflect the group representing the customers interests. (If anyone can suggest a good link/definition, I’ll add it.)

Why is the ScrumMaster outside? Their primary role is to act outside of the system to help it function and grow. Why is the ScrumMaster cheering on top? Ooops. That’s a bug. If I had time to re-draw, I’d put them underneath holding up the whole system as a servant leader.

So what do you do, if you don’t like the way I have parsed the world? Please help me understand your perspective – draw a picture to show me the world through your eyes.

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The importance of team agreements was recently reinforced in Jean Tabaka’s post on 78 Things I Have Learned in 6 Years of Agile Coaching (which is a great post).

(Part 3 of 5 blogs on the Scrum Gathering in Orlando)

Perhaps the most important point is that the working agreements need to come from the team and not managers or coaches. This can be tricky in the early stages of adoption where more leadership is needed.

Also of note is establishing team norms of how team members want to work and communicate together.

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(Part 2 of 5 blogs on the Scrum Gathering in Orlando)

He started with an explanation of how he has come to think about systems of people over his 75 years on the planet. There are two rules or heresies:

1. All systems are Open
2. All systems are self-organizing (at some level)

Someone asked the question of how to manage a company? Harrison replied that it’s the same as Open Space:

1. Sit in a circle
2. Use a bulletin board for what to talk about
3. Market place for agreeing when and where to talk

What isn’t in the mindmap is how he invented this.  The story goes that he had a very successful conference with speakers and sessions, but he was told that the best part was the coffee breaks. So, when faced with the problem of organizing another conference with very little time, he decided to have one that was just filled with coffee breaks.  3 Martini’s later and open space was born.

How effective is Open Space? Harrison has the view that it can create astounding results by helping people reach agreement and resolve conflicts. He has seen this consistently time after time when running Open Space.

Mike Bria blogged about the Open Space the next day.

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(Part 1 of 5 blogs on the Scrum Gathering in Orlando.)

I have attempted to capture the key aspects of the workshop in the mindmap below.

I walked out of the session with:

• Better ability to LISTEN. This had been on my self-improvement list for years.
• A deep sense of playfulness, curiousity and creativity. Lee helped me reconnect with skills I had when I was much younger.
• A strong connection with other participants.
• Understand my EDGE in a number of different situations. I can now explore and expand this in a positive way.

The exercise where we were creating together through movement is a great way to illustrate the benefits that can be found through pairing. Together we were able to create and invent things that I could not even conceive of in advance. It was really awesome to experience such effective collaboration without words.

Not only was this fun, it also is immensely practical. One note of caution when you do take it: you will start off slowly and build the foundations; the really cool stuff comes together later on.

Kudo’s to the Scrum Gathering organizers and many thanks to Lee for sharing his craft.

Special mention to those that made it special for me. In photo: Mark Strange, Siraj Sirajuddin, Lee Devin, (me), Juan Banda.  Also, Mats Janemalm (not in photo).

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Ideas from Other Fields

Making Change Happen – Peter Stevens

Peter Stevens has a visually pleasing presentation – Making Change Happen – that summarizes organizational adoption challenges and includes key ideas from one of my favourite books – Fearless Change. The diagram at the left illustrates that there are often factions in an organization pulling in different directions with different agendas – not just your favourite (Scrum or Agile). Check this out if you are involved in organizational change.

Social Objects in Software Development – Dave Harvey

Scrum talks about self-organizing teams. How do you get there? One idea is that we need to think about social networks. These form around social objects, so this is a good place to start. Social objects reinforce our identity and sustain our tribal identity. Consider the photo showing other dimensions of people’s lives. Not only can networks form around this, but it also primes our behaviour to think about others as … people. The presentation is done in zen style and I would totally love to hear Dave in person.

Self-Organizing & Subtle Control: Friends or Enemies? – Mike Cohn

Mike talked about self-organization not happening in a vacuum. It is management’s responsibility to guide the evolution of behaviours (rather than specify what how everyone needs work). He then went on to talk about Containers, Differences and Exchanges as a way of making indirect changes to a team. There is also a discussion of Philip Anderson’s 7 levers for influencing team evolution. Worth checking out if you are interested in coaching teams.

Stories from Scrum in Practice

Agile at Telefonica R&D Gemma_Hornos & Monica Izquierd

Although the presentation is about large scale enterprise adoption of Scrum, there are lots of interesting bits of information that apply in general. One example is image is about styles of growth of Scrum within an organization – I really like the viral/mosquito! Lot’s of other great visuals as well.

Practical Roadmap to Great Scrum – Jeff Sutherland

Jeff shares some of his key understandings of doing Scrum well. Want to double productivity? –> Focus on DONE. Want to double again? –> Focus on READY. Self-organization is identified as the 3rd way to double performance. The presentation also talks about large scale adoption and CMMI. Lot’s of good bits of info packed in here.

10 Contract Forms For Your Next Agile Project – Peter Stevens

Peter has a great analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of different types of contracts from both the vendor and the supplier perspectives. Phased development (see photo at left) is one that balances the interests of bother parties and encourages cooperative behaviours. If you need to set up a contract, check out this presentation.

Kicking Scrumbut – Rowan Bunning

Rowan takes a fun and informative look at some common failure modes that organization exhibit when adopting partial Scrum (AKA Scrumbut). Of course all the failure modes are matched with advice on what to do to resolve the problem. Even if you are an experienced coach or Scrum practitioner, you will be sure enjoy and learn from a different perspective.

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Lyssa Adkins and Tobias Mayer gave a practical and experiential session at the end of Agile 2009. Lyssa has written more about this on her blog. The original name for the session was Human-Centred coaching.

One useful trick (unrelated to the topic) is to raise one’s hand and wait for everyone else to raise their hands as a soft and effective way to get people’s attention.

Powerful Questions

• Are open rather than closed
• Draw out hidden information
• Lead people to new perspectives
• Driven by curiousity
• Give people time to respond

To get good at them you can write some new ones on cards every week and use them where they make sense. The book Co-Active Coaching has a section that discusses powerful questions. It is partly related to the NLP practice of using the Meta-Model to ask questions to reveal hidden assumptions.

Powerful requests

Some tips are written in light blue above.  This is similar to the core protocol Ask for Help.

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There were a number demonstrations:

1. The first was of self-assembly (orange) and illustrated through people getting into an elevator.  They have no common goal and there is no change in behaviour.
2. Another was of people who were given the simple instructions (brown) of don’t bump, stay at the same speed and converge to the centre.  This demonstrated the idea of the team as a complex adaptive system where simple rules can lead to emergent behaviour.
3. Another was to ask people to clap there hands and then see how long it takes before everyone synchronizes.

He then went on to share some interesting ideas such as Core Group Theory – where the purpose of a company is to satisfy a core group of people.  To influence and organization, you need to know who they are.

Then things got really interesting.  Joseph likened self-organizing teams like making vegetable soup – the trick is to get the temperature right.

Checkout the heat gauge below.  As you can see there is a green zone where things are really cooking.  But beware the danger of too much heat (burning) and the cooling down phase where bad things can happen.  Gelled state is stable but there is not much innovation.  It is stable, but heat is needed to get cooking again.

What are the ways we can apply heat?

Stove #1 is about performance planning for individuals where challenge needs to be balanced against skill.  For a given skill level there is a range of challenge that can lead to a state of flow. With this model, there are two ways to climb in proficiency:

1. People can surf the top line and take on challenges beyond our capability.  Think of a snowboarder pushing boundaries of what they can do.
2. People can follow the bottom line and develop skills before taking on new challenges. This reminds me very much of Deliberate Practice – a key to Craftsmanship.

The next simulation was to have a group of people sit in a circle and pretend they are a development team.  The people on the outside interrupted them to ask questions.  Even when the team resisted, they felt pressured.

Stove #2 is to use the ABIDE model by David Snowden. (The pre-requisite is the have a context and a container.)  We need to think about how to stimulate the social network.  Here are some hooks:

• Attractor – Pride, money, quality, charisma
• Boundaries – Team boundaries e.g. traditional Dev/QA
• Identities – Role, responsibility
• Diversity – Gender, age, skills, personality
• Environment – Team room, desks, computers

We can make changes to any of these to get a shift in team dynamics.

Like this?  Joseph has some online talks on InfoQ:

• Coaching Self-Organizing Teams speaks to self-organization and the cooking metaphor.
• Dealing With the Organizational Challenges of Agile Adoption is about models for understanding conflict when adopting Agile.

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