Wow – Innovation Games®

What if you could collaborate with a bunch of people to invent something new? Innovation Games are a great way to creative collaboratively! What if you could collaborate creatively and on a level playing field with people and not even be in the same room? That is the power of the new Innovation Games online platform.

I was honored last week to be a student in an Innovations Games Master class – taught by the inimitable Luke Hohmann. I am happy to be trained and ready to facilitate games now!!! And I’m looking forward to running games at both company and nonprofit events.

Check out the book by Luke Hohmann, then check out the site www.innovationgames.com … there is more here than meets the eye.  Also see Roger Brown’s thoughtful blog post on our class. Another detailed post from a previous attendee is here. I was very inspired by the class, the hands on learning, Luke’s mojo (talented speaker), and the amazing class participants – some well known in the Agile community…all bringing their enthusiasm and creativity. It was a wonderful treat for me to learn in this environment.

I remember reading about one of the early product box type exercises … sounded like fun – but also a bit hokey. Like something I almost could not imagine doing. But when we actually began to assemble these boxes in the class – I found that it was fun and was a very visual and creative way to bring out ideas…. So sometimes what looks silly turns out to be quite effective!

If you get a chance to participate in Innovation Games I definitely encourage you to give it a try. You may be surprised how many ideas, connections, and concerns you discover.

Resilience

Today was hard – I hit a pretty big bump in the road. The change road. Of course, even as I write this it seems that it is not such a big deal. But it was about an idea that I was trying to pitch. An idea that I thought had a lot of merit. Useful. Creative. But ultimately not approved.

Not really in a mood to read, I picked up a book called “Managing at the Speed of Change” by Daryl Conner…which talks about resilience. The ability to rebound quickly. To avoid becoming a victim.

“Resilient people face no less of a challenge than others when confronting a crisis, but they typically regain their equilibrium faster, maintain a higher level of quality and productivity in their work,…” etc

Sign me up for that!

Conner also uses a river metaphor. How navigating change relates to a river. The rapids can be tough to negotiate. There are patterns and contraints that need to be respected. Change is not a one-man-show.

Happy that tomorrow is a new day! Let’s see what happens next.

Drive – thoughts on Daniel Pink’s new book

While reading Daniel Pink’s new book Drive I realized that when I am motivated in a “Motivation 3.0” way then I am also playing to my strengths.

Pink explains that the evolving component is intrinsic motivation. For creative work, we are most highly motivated when we are driven from an internal desire to learn, create, or better the world.

Which reminds me a bit of the Marcus Buckingham strengths books…. Where we are most “strong” when we are doing something that makes us feel “strong”…it’s not about talent per say. I can be talented at something but find it boring or otherwise not engaging to do.

As managers, instead of just “hoping” that an employee or team member will be self motivated, we can help others discover what is intrinsically motivating to them. And we can reward creative work in a different way than we reward more predictable work.

The book “Drive” contains quite a few helpful exercises to help us discover our internal motivators. Some of them are described in this article How to Tap into What Really Motivates You.

Pink also explains that when an external motivator like a $ reward is dangled (think carrot) for creative work we actually produce less, and more slowly. The external pressure of an external reward or external deadline causes us to narrow our focus and try harder. Ironically, by narrowing our focus we are ignoring or filtering out the diversity of ideas that would lead us to a more optimized, more creative outcome.

In Tobias Mayer’s Welfare CSM class I learned the same principle firsthand. Tobias set up this ball game with tangerines…and after many iterations of improving he then started to add stress and pressure. And our ideas became frenzied and our teamwork fell apart. Then we started to check out. I know that in real life we do have deadlines, but it is helpful to know how much unreasonable pressure and  deadlines can stifle creativity and motivation.

Early in my career I was on a project to deliver a working system. It was a very big electronic system with over 100 engineers contributing. Management thought they would motivate us by promising a big bonus to us if we met a certain deadline. And we missed the deadline. It was devastating. Demotivating. One of the biggest system problems we solved much later, once the spotlight was off. I remember the fun and excitement of finding the problem and tracing the solution… teamwork was high because the pressure of the deadline was removed. And without teamwork we would not have been able to solve this very complex systems issue. An interaction of system bus timing, custom asics, and software. Even writing this I am intrigued, I want to go solve those kinds of problems, I want to work again with that team…

I also liked the part in the book “Drive” that talked about challenges. We need challenges that are “well matched to our abilities”… one of my son’s therapists taught me that we need to offer “just the right challenge” to our kids…. Too easy means no learning, too hard is demotivating. So, we need to find and set up “just the right challenge.” And so the same is true for teams and projects at work.

Which leads me to Agile and Scrum. With Scrum we set up self-organized teams and ask the teams to tell us what they will commit to complete within an iteration. The scrum team learns (over time) how much to commit to …how much is “just the right challenge”… lots of opportunities for Motivation 3.0

Anyway, Drive by Daniel Pink is a very fun read… recommended…

Learning through games

Last week I was a student in Tobias Mayer’s Welfare CSM course. What a great experience!  Almost all of the learning came via interactive games. I loved this, reminded me of Agile Open California in some ways – like no powerpoint, no sitting in rows of chairs facing the speaker… Even though Tobias clearly is a scrum expert, he set up the class so that much of our learning came from experiences like the spaghetti game, the three things game, an unpredictable variation of the ball game, a collaboration improv game, and more.

And we walked away with some new friends. Remembering everyone else’s name … valuing people over process a bit. Turns out that when we are being “me” centered, we just want to explain and tell.  Interestingly, Creativity happens when we are curious, when we are curious about others then we move into a mode of exploring with the other person. Exploration is central to creativity.

In another game we saw that failing fast led to many more ideas and success than too much talk and indecision. I don’t particularly like failing – so this was not a particularly attractive concept. On the other hand, I do have a huge bias for action, so then again this is looking like a winning strategy after all!

The biggest lesson was that scrum is an evolving framework…that as we practice we will iterate our own thinking about what works, and why. Scrum is not something we learn just once… It is a form of continuous improvement … we get to “done” on our sprint stories, but we are never “done” with our learning.

Lessons Learned from Agile Open California

For two wonderful days at Fort Mason in San Francisco I was amazed, educated, and entertained. I have been a student of Agile for several months, it all started when I read an article by Jesse Fewell inviting PMPs to come help build the new PMI Agile Community of Practice. Since that time, my company has started several Scrum Team pilots and I have attended several Agile/Scrum classes. But Open Space is a format that stands alone. And nothing quite compares to Agile Open California!

Learners make wonderful teachers

It’s easy to think that we need to sit at the feet of an expert to learn… but Agile Open California was full of ordinary people collaborating together and learning from one another. There were no official presenters and no room filled with chairs facing a stage. This conference was an Open Space – where facilitators welcomed us in a circle, reiterating our theme and the guideline for Open Space, beautifully led by Ainsley Nies:

• Whoever comes is the right person
• Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
• Whenever it starts is the right time
• Whenever it’s over, it’s over
• Be prepared to be surprised

There was a predefined structure of session times and spaces. And people came up to a microphone to announce topics that they would like to host a discussion about, topics like Agile with remote teams, and Agile chartering. The topics were written on sticky-notes attached to a wall next to session times and places. People expressed interest by adding their initials. Soon we had a conference agenda and everyone moved to the space where there was a discussion of interest to them. And we also moved between groups during sessions. It was very freeing to know that it was “OK” to leave a session where I was not giving or receiving value! 

One big “ah ha” for me was realizing that I could learn as much or more from another fellow student – another learner. We each have so much information about topics we are interested in…so when we discuss and pool the knowledge we can discover new ideas and solutions quickly.

Great teams create great value

Last week, at Agile Open California, my perspective on teams shifted center a bit. I started to see that teams are more important than I was willing to realize. People want to engage, to build teams that learn and build trust, teams that know and help one another.  Hmmm, so it doesn’t usually work out that well just to shuffle team members around.  And once a team has achieved success, now I am learning that  ideally I can ask – what else can this team create or solve next. 

Teams that are performing well achieve something called Group Coherence, which is defined by Joanna Zweig as “the shared energetic state reached by a group of people that allows them to perform one or more tasks in perfect rhythm and harmony with great energy to overcome obstacles.”

As PMP’s we can help teams by enabling some of the ingredients that nurture group coherence, as described in this article http://www.agilejournal.com/articles/17-articles/893-group-coherence-for-project-teams-a-search-for-hyper-productivity

A type of team we learn about in Agile settings is called a Scrum team. Several good resources to learn about Scrum are here http://agile-pm.pbworks.com/2-Practices-and-Methods .  At #AOCA we learned and practiced many games that demonstrated the value of both Scrum and Agile.

What’s next?

Agile is a framework, a set of 4 values and 12 principals described here http://agilemanifesto.org/ . In the PMI Agile Community of Practice http://agile.community.pmi.org  we are opening a dialog about how to map Agile to PMBOK and beyond. As Project and Program Managers we are called to take a leadership role in bringing Agile ideas into our companies because in order to get things done, on time, we know that change is needed. It’s time to embrace Agile creatively, to pilot new ways of working that will deliver more value sooner and with less effort.  Join us!

The different faces of risk

I enjoy talking with Esteri Hinman, a Program Manger with Intel who clear knows her stuff about risk management.  Last year, working with Strategic Planning folks, Esteri noticed that risk shows up differently depending on where you are in the Product Life Cycle. Business people want to talk about business value terms like NPV – Net Present Value. They want one number, a number based on a model that often focuses on sales and market projections. I can see Esteri’s point – what about technology risk, what about schedule risk, what about all those other risks that we track once the project is underway? These all need to become part of the business analysis, we need to be business people first and project managers second! Esteri has lots of great thinking to share on this topic – come see and ask questions at her “Risk on the Technology Treadmill“ presentation, Sept 24-25, 2009 in Santa Clara at the “Project Risk Management in an uncertain world” Symposium!

Speed limit for change

I am just learning the speed limit for change. It turns out that most people and organizations can reasonably be expected to absorb change at a certain rate. Wow – that seems so obvious…but up until a few days ago it was not top of mind for me at all. I figured, hey if this is good change let’s just make it all at once!

Who knew – I am a wanna-be speeder on the change highway.

Being curious – I found a few similar stories …
http://blogs.msdn.com/elee/archive/2009/01/30/do-not-exceed-the-maximum-safe-rate-of-change.aspx

I’m going to check out this book, Managing the Speed of Change, bummer that  Safari Online does not carry!

Meanwhile, I am listening and watching the already underway change…

Taking the emotion out of risk

Every week, our Program Managers review key risks with project teams and sponsors. It’s proactive, it’s valuable, and, it has required a culture shift to be successful.

Imagine, every week your PM is “telling” the execs about the project’s weakest or riskiest links. This has the potential to trigger teams to feel defensive, embarrassed, and stressed. These defensive routines can ultimately lead to disengaged team members and lower morale.

Interestingly, we know that addressing risk early and often is key to improved delivery, so how can we overcome the defensiveness and finger-pointing?

We have successfully employed the following “mitigations” built on ideas from Peter Senge and Systems Thinking…

1) Report observable data and behaviors, rather than gut feelings (http://tinyurl.com/observabledata  )
2) Keep the schedule real, if the team knows that the date is moving, change the date or move it to TBD
3) Be transparent, don’t “hold back” risks to give the team extra time to fix.
4) Avoid naming names in the risks, think instead of the bigger picture of the risk, can you decouple the risk from the personalities?

As PMs, whatever we can do to remove emotion from the risk register will set the stage for our teams and sponsors to discover and implement effective mitigations or acceptance, enabling us to deliver our projects with increased certainty and predictability.

To learn much more about risk management, join us at the PMISV and PMI RiskSIG 2009 Annual Symposium “Project Risk Management in an uncertain world” on Sept 24-25, 2009 in Santa Clara, CA. See http://www.pmisv.org  for further info and registration.

Agile Open California

I’m going to this…. I can’t swing a trip to Agile 2009, so this looks like the next best thing
“Agile Open California is a coalition of agile practitioners and advocates with an intention to provide an opportunity for learning, networking and growth to the Agile community in California and others who are interested.
Using the Open Space Technology framework, we hold Gatherings where sessions are self-organized around topics important to the participants. We invite you to take this opportunity to share your experiences, test new ideas and learn what other practitioners are thinking and doing! “

Come join!!!

PMI Agile Community

I am part of the new PMI Agile Community. And the subteam knowledgebase. As a PMP and a practicing program manager I have found the blending of ideas to be extremely valuable and am able to apply some of the new ideas on the job, for example using a backlog and user stories (well formed outcomes) in a task force setting.

This is all a learning process for me…learning about program management, learning about Agile, learning learning learning…

As I learn I find it helpful to catalog or map data. So I naturally gravitated towards helping with the Agile knowledgebase here http://agile-pm.pbworks.com … And now we have just launched the formal PMI Agile Community http://agile.community.pmi.org 

Come join the discussion!