At Agile 2011, I was very fortunate to attend David Chilcott’s session on NonViolent Commuication (NVC) for Agile Coaches. NVC is a very powerful communication toolkit that has already helped me. I wonder how I ever managed without it.

At it’s very simplest form it is about explicitly considering your (and other’s) feelings and needs. The following diagram outlines the key elements of NVC for coaches.

Observing

Observing is an important skill for an Agile Coach. In NVC, the goal is to observe without evaluation, judgement or analysis. The idea here is that when we focus on observable data (I see, hear, etc.), we can operate and reason about what is actually happening rather than the filtered, distorted version that our brains typically serve up to us.  In the workshop we practiced distinguishing observations from evaluations and practiced removing the evaluation to focus on observable properties.

Of course, you can also practice observing with my fun Coaching Skills Dojo.

Feeling

People’s feelings shape the conversation. They can uplift and energize or take you down a rabbit-hole. Here is an inventory of feelings that you can use to understand what’s going on with people.

Needs

Needs are the place where feelings come from. Positive feelings come from needs that are met. Negative feelings come from unfulfilled needs. Here is an inventory of needs that can help you identify what’s going on.

Know thyself!
As a coach, it behooves us know where we are so we can help others.

First, get an understanding of your feelings and needs in a particular situation. This will allow you to more effectively communicate and manage your internal state.

Second, consider what you client is experiencing in terms of feelings and needs. If you pay attention to facial expressions, tonality and words, you will be in position to ask clarifying questions to understand what’s going on for them.

Exercise to find balance

The best part of the workshop for me was the following exercise:

1. Sit in a chair with your eyes closed and think of a situation.
2. What are your feelings in this situation?
3. What are your needs in this situation?
4. Stand up, open your eyes so that you leave the situation in the chair.
5. Look at the chair and imagine seeing yourself in that situation.
6. Now coach the person in the chair. Say an appreciation. What else will you say to them to help them?
7. Sit back down in the chair, close your eyes and integrate.

Barbara Fredrickson gave a great Keynote at Agile 2011 – Why care about positive emotions?

The essential message is that we can create positive environments and emotions to create an upward spiral of openness, resilience, and better performance.

This is in line with my use of Agile as a way to transform the world of work. And of getting innovation and results through play.

The flow of the diagram below is: Positive emotions –> Expand’s Awareness –> Other thinking –> Mind Meld

Dr. Fredrickson argues that Positivity is a lifestyle change that can result in a upward spiral of positivity with all the associated benefits. Masking the negative does not help, we actually need to focus on the positive – at least three positive events for every negative event.

I really appreciated Barabara’s message, however, the one part I will differ on is that in many environments we need to create trust and safety to reduce the background noise of negativity. This needs to happen in tandem with positivity.

You can learn more through Barabara’s website or book.

Update: Full Video is available on Agile Alliance Website.

Although Agile coaching requires many skills, we get back to basics by revisiting three fundamental coaching skills: observing, listening and questioning.

As you put these three key skills into practice, you will get feedback on your performance and have the opportunity to try out improvement ideas in a safe, open and friendly environment.

Learning Objectives

• Practice listening without judgment
• Gather information more effectively
• Ask different kinds of questions to understand the real problem
• Gain fresh insights into a problem you face at work

Recipe

• Number of participants: 6 to 20 (could go to 30 with a bit of deterioration)
• Team size: work in groups of 3.
• Duration: 90 minutes (can be made shorter or longer)
• Materials: Flip chart paper and marker for each group.
• Setup: Chairs for sitting, walls for flipchart paper.
• Credits: This game was created by Michael Sahota and Portia Tung. It can be considered a variant of The Yellow Brick Road – Agile Adoption Through Peer Coaching (see below).

Process/Mechanics

Below is the core part of the Dojo – practicing skills.

We will use flipcharts and posters to support a highly interactive workshop where most of the work will be done in small groups.

(2 min ) Introduction – session objectives, activities
(2 min) Three key coaching skills (http://www.agilitrix.com/2009/08/agile-coaching-roles-notes-from-agile-2…) – tell participants that we will only focus on these three.
(5 min) Human bubblesort: participants order themselves by listening, observing and questioning skills (low to high)
(1 min) Form Triads (groups of three) with neighbours

(9 min) Build Skills poster for listening, observing and questioning

• (5 min) Each triad creates a poster to define the three skills. (Need poster, markers)
• (4 min) Triads share posters with large group; only some groups will share, not all. We will ask if anyone has something important that was missed.

(6 min) Launch triad

• Re-iterate session goals: 1) Identify Action Points 2) Practice Skills
• Individuals brainstorm up to three problems and pick one
• Explain Roles: Client, Coach, Observer
• Explain timing and structure of the practice rounds

(27 min) First Round of Practice

• 5 mins x 3 mini rounds (everyone rotates through roles)
• 5 mins sharing within triad
• 7 mins sharing with group

(27 min) Second Round of Practice

(2 min) Wrap-up

• Action point takeaways – close eyes for one minute and think of how you will use these skills in the next week.

(6 min) Slack/Buffer – for possible late start or time overrun

Facilitator Tips

• Prepare in advance flipcharts with:
  • The 3 roles
  • Timing of each mini-round
• Bring a gong or bell to let people know when to change roles. Why? People get so far down the tunnel it is hard to get them to shift gears.
• (Optional) Prepare a handout with a summary of the three skills.
• (Optional) Prepare your own poster explaining the three skills.

Sources of Inspiration

Michael attended Rachel Davies Coaching Dojo at Agile 2010 and was curious about how to build upon its subject using aspects of the Yellow Brick Road game.

Coaching Skills Dojo can be considered a variant of The Yellow Brick Road – Agile Adoption Through Peer Coaching created by Portia Tung, Pascal Van Cauwenberghe and Duncan Pierce. The inspiration for this new game is to streamline it and create a more relaxed pace than the original Yellow Brick Road game. For example, the mini-rounds are extended by five minutes and there are only two mini-rounds rather than three in the original game. As well, we have introduced a learner-led mini-workshop at the start to remind and grow peoples understanding of the three skills.

This was submitted (but not accepted) to Agile 2011 as “Over the Rainbow: Coaching success through observing, listening and questioning” and has been subsequently renamed.

Feedback from First Run at Agile Games 2011

• “It was great to bring specific focus on the skills involved in coaching: observing, listening and questioning. It is too easy to take this for granted.” – M.C.
• “Made 2 really great contacts.” – L.L.
• Rated 9.2/10 for usefulness at work.
• As facilitator, it was very moving to see participants improve their skills in such a short time.

What is Agile Culture? In an earlier post, I talked about Schneider’s model for understanding culture – How to make your culture work. (Hint: this post will make more sense if you read the earlier post.)

What do we discover about Agile culture when we apply the Schneider model? How does this inform us about approaching Agile adoption or transformation?

Michael Spayd has done the community a great service by undertaking a culture survey of Agilistas. The results are very striking: it shows that the two dominant cultures are collaboration and cultivation, with competence a distant third and control barely even on the map. So one can say clearly, Agile is all about the people. Interestingly, the survey included Scrum, XP, as well as Lean-Kanban folks. So thanks, Michael!

What does the Agile Manifesto and Principles informs us about Cultural?

I took a look at all the values and principles and plotted the ones that show a cultural bias on the following chart:

The chart illustrates  the same finding as Michael Spayd’s survey – Agile is all about the people. It is aligned with a company cultures of collaboration or cultivation.

An Explanation Please!

Some of you may be curious as to how I arrived at my result.

For each value or principle, I analyzed how well it was aligned with each of the cultures. If there was a strong affinity, I associated it with that culture. For example, Customer Collaboration was very easy since it has the word collaboration in it and identifies success through people working together.

Some items seemed to be orthogonal to culture. For example, working software, didn’t really seem to suggest one culture over another. Well, it may weakly suggest competence culture, but only a bit.

Other items were a best guess based on my current understanding. It would be great to have a workshop to see if we can come up with an even better model.

I could go through each item and argue why I placed or chose to omit it. But that’s pretty boring and wouldn’t really change the result much.

So, there you have it: Agile is about people!

So what?

Consider for a moment what happens when foreign cultural elements are injected into an organization. Well, it’s like the human body: unless the body can be fooled into accepting the foreign tissue, it will be rejected.

More on what this means for Agile adoption and transformation in upcoming posts.

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.

After reading Roger Brown’s post – Adventures in Accelerated Learning – I decided I had better read Sharon Bowman’s Training From the Back of the Room. The book has really helped me improve my training style and I look forward to taking Sharon’s training to get an immersive experience. I am writing about this now since I had a chance to put it into practice on my Kanban 101 training. In this post, I want to share the key concepts from the book.

The visual note below is an example of an exercise I did when reading the book – “1 minute concept review”. It took me considerably longer than a minute, but now I have a clear picture of what the book is about. I knew some of this stuff when I was a teaching assistant in university where I was part of a program to help improve teaching skills. Sharon’s stuff is way more powerful.

The 4 C’s

1. Connections
2. Concepts
3. Concrete Practice
4. Conclusions

Sharon uses the 4 C’sas a way to think about training and to help learners engage with new information. The book contains links back to research on learning and neurology.

The reason I really like the book is that it is chock full of example exercises. These are easy to understand and apply. So it is theory + practice.

4MAT

The 4 C’s are a simplified model of the 4MAT system of learning that I learned a while back but found difficult to apply effectively. So if you are looking for a richer model consider this one.

What Sharon’s book brings to the table is a model that is easy to understand and apply. And great examples. So give it a read if you do any training.

A friend and fellow Agile coach – Jason Cheong-Kee-You – told me about this approach to get more out of books. It is one of those little nuggets that help make every day life go better. Thanks also to Allister McKinnell for starting the chain reaction.

The purpose of this post is to share my key learnings from the book: the goal of reading and how to skim. No effort to represent the whole book.

The Goal of Reading

Adler argues that the goal of reading is to learn and that there are 4 elements that need to be satisfied. Consider the diagram below.

In order to decide what parts of the book you believe, you need to understand what it is suggesting and how that information is supported. As I write, I think about confirmation bias and that we need to challenge ourselves to keep our minds open.

Perhaps the most intriguing part is to explicitly think about is: what impact does the book have one you? What are you going to do differently as a result of reading the book?

How to Scan a Book Quickly

It takes time and energy to read and learn from a book. Adler introduces an approach called inspectional reading (systematic skimming or pre-reading) to provide a mechanism to decide if the book is worth reading. The diagram below outlines which bits of a book to focus on.

In 20 or 30 minutes, you can get an idea of what the book is about and what its parts are. Even if you think you are going to read the whole book cover to cover, this is still very valuable in understand the book as a whole.

Happy reading!

Here is a very short (2 min)video where Selena Delesie and I reported back on a session at Agile Coach Camp Canada. This is what a group of 10+ of us came up with.

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.

At DeepAgile in Boston, I played Yellow Brick Road: Fresh InsightsThrough Peer Coaching. The game was led by it’s inventor – Portia Tung who did a great job even with a very large group. If you haven’t played this, I suggest you make the time.

The game teaches people skills and resources to be effective coaches by practicing with peers. In the game, people take turns in one of 3 roles: Client (with a problem), Coach, and Observer.

Solve real problems

In the role of Client/Dorothy, you get to be yourself and bring up a problem that you want to work on. Over several iterations, new perspectives help you access the resources you already have. So a cool side-effect of this game is that you get fresh insights into whatever problem you want to work on.

Coach practices questions

The coach gets to practice listening and asking questions. We discovered that listening is something we need to practice since we are so used to jumping in with our expert opinion and solutions.

We also get practice with different types of questions (image by Portia Tung):

Observer provides depth

The observer roles gives you a chance to step back from the situation and really notice what is going on. Portia’s picture captures the simplicity of the task:

I was reminded that observation is a very helpful debugging technique. It is also less than easy – especially if you are like most of us and out of practice.

As the observer, I was able to get much deeper insights.

Go play this game

I am going to play this game again for myself and to help those I am coaching. The complete game instructions and presentation is available for download, so give it a go! I’m sure you will get value out of it. Even better, get Portia to come play with you so you can see some of the finer points.

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

At Scrum Gathering Orlando, I ran an experiential workshop titled Improve your communication through non-verbal rapport. The session turned out really well so thanks to everyone who participated. My only tools were a flip chart and some markers, so the purpose of this post is to provide details for attendees as well as provide visibility to anyone interested in better communication.

(Part 6 of 5 blogs on the Scrum Gathering in Orlando – ok, so not very good at counting

Mehrabian Study

Amazingly, only 7% of communication is based on words while 38% is based on tonality and 55% on physiology.

The Mehrabian Study produced these numbers to quantify the importance of non-verbal communication.

Rapport

Briefly, rapport is about making and feeling a connection with another person. We do this automatically with our friends: we match physiology and tonality. The key practice for connecting with others is to:

1. Face a similar direction
2. Be at the same or lower height
3. Match the angle of their spine and head tilt.

This goes a long way towards making a comfortable connection.  For more on rapport refer to NLP: The New Technology of Achievement by Steve Andreas, and Charles Faulkner.

Keys to great communication

There are some important approaches that complement non-verbal rapport skills.

I just posted on Crucial Conversations.

Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” has two models that relate to effective communication.

Win/Win is about seeking a good outcome for everyone involved – seeking a long-term, sustainable relationship.

“Seek first to understand, then be understood“ is about really listening to people around you. To really connect, you need to understand the person and where they are coming from.

Exercise to understand rapport

Caution: These exercises are here for those who attended the workshop and want to use them to help others. Please attend a workshop before trying these on your own.

This exercise is about getting an internal sense of how important rapport is in conversation.

Exercise to sense broken rapport

This exercise is about practicing rapport and getting a sense of what it is like for rapport to be broken.

Want to learn more?

These are some of the skill that I learned as an NLP (NeuroLinguisticProgramming) Practitioner. I have found Practitioner as well as Master Practioner skills to be an important part of my toolkit as an Agile Coach.

I strongly recommend Wauneen McMonagle Innergize Training if you are interested in building skills in this area.