How to get it done in organisations

I was attending a course during 2016. Attending were a whole bunch of people from many different walks of life, and many different organisation experiences and levels.

Out of the blue, one of my fellow trainees was explaining how they, in their role of working with many organisations on big business-to-business transactions, had discovered a very useful approach to getting things done in their own organisation, as well as client organisations.

"Want something done? Give it to a busy person"

This statement about "how to get it done" in large organisations drew quite a negative reaction from within me.

I realised the statement was right and wrong at the same time.

Busy people have figured out ways to give and to create more value to the organisation - by being of good service, they are asked to do more and more. They figure out ways to do more and more - usually alternative work practices that make them more streamlined / efficient. They become extremely knowledgeable across the whole organisation - knowing who's who, and who to go to directly and for what. Also importantly, they know which avenues to not even bother to try - saving everyone time and frustration.

So...the statement still makes me feel a bit ill, but I also recognise the truth in it. Many organisations I have worked within are literally functioning mostly as a result of these very busy network nodes.

For managers and leaders - look after your ever-busy people - they are busy keeping things moving in the right direction. You may not know what keeps them so busy - but perhaps that's where a little more curiosity and study will be quite revealing!

Agile In Four Or 4 words

I've been heavily reflecting on last week's post agile in 3 words and I'm not happy enough with it.

So this "Agile In 4 Words" is a response to that previous thought - to bring in a previous previous thought I captured in this older post Open question how.

I think the shortest summary to what is agile - other than "collaborative lightweight working practices" that means many different abstract things to many different people I've tried it on...and gotten nowhere with, is actually:

"How can I help?"

This one induces in the person asking out loud or silently to themselves the team working principles, the proaction, the learning, and more. That lovely "how?" question really opens things up more for everyone!

Especially in response to my earlier attempt "Can I help?" - a simple "No" would stop anyone in their tracks. And that "No" is to be expected when people are massively in a state of focus and don't want any interruptions.

The "simple" introduction of the "How" makes this an engaging question that any team member can get creative with by themselves and come up with more creative suggestions - even innovative practice improvements!

How do you think this is better or worse than the earlier version? Or...indeed..."How can you help?" :-)

Agile In 4 Words - How Can I Help?

Thankyou for supporting!

Agile In Three Or 3 Words

How many times have I heard the following from new clients and other coaches telling stories about their "difficult" clients? That's why I crafted this post!

Agile In 3 Words Is Easy

Actually explaining agile quickly, succinctly and simply for anyone, or any team or any organisation of any size is really easy, if you do the work (inspired by Byron Katie). It's simply you, and everyone in your organisation, and every supplier, client, consultant, advisor, regulator and customer around your organisation offering really often:

"Can I help?"

For agile in 3 words it is as simple as this! The implication is that everyone proacts to help each other all the time with everything from making tea to delivering the most complex system requiring 100's of people interlocking and aligning.

As an agile coach one of the things I look/listen out for when assessing the agile fluency of an organisation is how many times I hear the above line, and especially its followup which is highly noticeable in environments where there is a great deal of proaction - namely:

"Thank you!"

Now, go do the work! Thankyou for reading and supporting! :-)

My favourite coaching tools: Free online Kolb Learning Styles Assessment

Caveats:
As always when dealing with any kind of model that helps us communicate and understand the abstract world of our minds, our existence and relationships with each other, nicely summarised by George EP Box: "all models are wrong, some are useful".

This is a free assessment, and there are several others that you can freely download. I liked this one as it is a "1 stop shop" document that you print out, fill out, score quickly on the reporting sheet, and finally receive additional insights at the end. And anyone can complete this simply and quickly. 

Required:
Internet access
Printer and 8 pages
Quiet space
10-15 minutes

Step 1:
Give the link or 8 page print-out to the coachee: Kolb Questionnaire. Again I think the best time to do the assessment is in the morning, before work really starts.

Step 2:
When the assessment is complete, the coachee and you will have the coachee's 4 Kolb styles - Activist, Reflector, Theorist and Pragmatist allocated to very strong preference, strong preference, moderate preference, low preference or very low preference.

You now have material you can use to support the coaching goals and plans where learning is required. You also have the approach you need when explaining concepts to the coachee - a real time saver and much more enjoyable experience for you and the coachee as compared to approaching from the worst angle.

Personally, once I realised what my preferred/natural Kolb learning approach was, I realised how I could learn better and more quickly in the same amount of time.

The future no longer belongs to those who learn the fastest. The future now belongs to those who learn the right things the fastest. Kolb learning styles assessment is just another practical tool to help me and my coachees discover their best learning method, and give us some "Slack" to identify what are the right things. Really useful stuff!

My favourite coaching tools: Open Question How

I've been reflecting on a multitude of interactions over a number of years trying to improve my speech metaphors, better questions, less leading and less inference.

Along the way, learning about the simple Open Questions / Closed Questions model used a great deal by Business Analysts, as well as facilitators of new ideas and group consensus.

Open Questions are divergent - they cause the person asked to provide new insights from their own subjective experience or beliefs. Typically these are the Where, What, When, Who, How. And not the Why as it is too aggressive for the recipient.

Closed Questions are convergent - they cause the person asked to move forward with their ideas or their decisions. Typically these are the Yes or No, This or That.

Along the way I noticed is that most/all "Why?" questions can (and should) be reframed with the other Where, What, When, Who and How questions.

Further along the way I noticed that with a bit more effort most/all Where, What, When, and Who questions can be rephrased with How. And based on some stakeholders feedback, that's a very good idea as it seemed to unlock many more options and more possibilities in people's minds.

For Example:

• Why did you do that? Becomes
• What did you hope to achieve by doing that? Becomes
• How did you think it would turn out, and how did it turn out?

• Why do you think we should speak to xyz? Becomes
• What do you think we could learn from speaking to xyz? Becomes
• How does speaking to xyz help us?

There are 2 books which have been particularly useful to me, and I am sure there are multitudes others. "Metaphors We Live By" by George Lackoff and Mark Johnson, and "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" by Gregory Bateson - but more on these later! 

My latest saying - You Are The Subject Of Your Life Story

You are the subject of your life story.

It's been inspired by Roger Evans' recently published "5DL - Five Dimensions of Leadership", available from Creative Leadership Consultants.

The actual piece that Roger describes this one-liner in is on page 93 in the chapter "1DL: The Ability to Self-Reflect"

"So as we consciously stop and reflect so we begin to realise that we are actually the subject of our thoughts and feelings rather than being the victim or object of ‘what’s out there’. This is for many such a powerful insight!

Consequently, if we are the subject of these thoughts feelings/emotions and behaviours, then the possibility exists that we can consciously control and potentially change them if we choose to do so. It means that we can begin to control our thoughts feelings and behaviours.22" 

Every sentence, thought, image, piece of music, feeling, etc that occurs to you or appears to you in your mind's eye - it is all about you. Pay attention, grow your self-awareness, take control over your mindsets and from there control your life!

Book Crossing Is Cool

Towards the end of 2016 I was at a course and 1 of the attendees mentioned "Book Crossing" and explained it as leaving and retrieving books people have placed in all kinds of places.

Finally I got around to actually researching what I had heard around September 2017. Since then I have have placed 46 books out there and am hopeful that eventually people will begin to enter reviews, or at least little comments of some kind on my bookshelf (http://www.bookcrossing.com/mybookshelf/agilecoachrob).

http://www.bookcrossing.com/about does a pretty good job of explaining what this is all about really. I think one of the most fascinating things that will emerge from this social experiment running since 2001, is the way the membership (http://www.bookcrossing.com/findmembers) will change, and some kinds of insight that will emerge of where and when books are released, and then where, when and how will those books travel to their next release point. Maybe even luckier some kind of "pure" trend about which books are more popular really / unbiased by reviewers, publishers, book sellers, prizes or any other kind of "public persuasion".

Who knows - but I am still hoping that people will pickup one of those 46 and update the locations, leave their own reviews, etc and continue this fantastic social experiment! Thankyou for supporting!

Agile In A Nutshell Part 4

About 1 year has passed since I posted my first attempt (Agile In A Nutshell), and very quickly after that one, the second (Agile In A Nutshell 2) and third (Agile In A Nutshell 3)!

And, along the journey this past year, reading through some more random bits of Alistair Cockburn's blog and Martin Fowler's blog (which I always find nuggets in) it occurred to me that Alistair mentioned during his Heart of Agile advanced agile training course a few things.

To the best of my recollection Alistair told the story of how on day 1 of the 2001 first meeting of the 17 folks who wrote the Agile Manifesto, Alistair was facilitating the choice of the word to describe what they were trying to describe. 8 people diverged, and then converged onto "agile". 8 people diverged and converged onto "adaptive".

I wonder now, looking back, what would have happened to the software industry if "adaptive" instead had won the final coin toss / selection process. Of course adaptive is a harder "sell" as it seems so ordinary and so ... common sense.

And that's my point. Yes, "quick and nimble" is the right word to describe what is desirable from any (not just software delivery) process. That would be awesome if all processes we encountered in our moment to moment experience was quick and nimble.

And people would totally freak out with happiness if the process was also adaptive to the specific context it was applied in, correctly by the people applying it.

And that's what the promise of agile is, adapative-quick-nimble. Able to move in a direction at speed, and change direction (due to an unanticipated target movement) without loss of speed. And, achieving that as a organisation of people where information is real-time communicated and hence looking at the organisation as a social organism, it becomes much more responsive to its environment it operates or lives in. That's where the challenge and the benefits lie. The organisation/organism that adapts fastest and best to its changing environment lives to see another day, and if it gets so good at being responsive that it actually achieves an insight into the requirements of the future, and achieves that before any competitor, then its thrives to outlive them another day.

Because marketing is a zero-sum game. Those who learn the right thing the fastest, lead, and then win.

For more nuts, see What Is Agile For! Thankyou!

My favourite coaching tools: The Mindset Works Online Mindset Assessment

Caveats:

A reminder that all my favourite coaching tools - free, online, or other - need to be applied with the sensible cautionary advice from statistician George EP Box: "all models are wrong but some are useful". Remember also that this is about "the other" and the other's perception - not you and not your perceptions! 

Some time after I posted http://change-challenge.blogspot.com/2017/03/my-favourite-coaching-tools-mindset.html a friend of mine put me onto this fantastic Ted talk by Eduardo Briceno during 2017. Since then I have only looked forward!

I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone to watch - more than once! How To Get Better At The Things You Care About packs a number of important truths and is well researched. 

Upon researching Eduardo Briceno a little more over the months after first watching this talk, I discovered his company Mindset Works, and their online mindset assessment tool: What's My Mindset? (amongst other good things like the courses they give, and their blog site).

And it's as easy and simple as that for this one - 8 questions later there is an easy to understand assessment and some advice to follow!

But why bother? Well...those with open and growth mindsets appear to be living happier and more fulfilling lives, and accomplishing more at work. It seems that's quite important given the speed of the changes we're experiencing, as well as the quantity of changes. Both appear to still be rising exponentially.
For extra insights into how mindsets work, and how to work with them, of all the books I have read so far, this one has 2 excellent chapters on the subject, as well as several other excellent chapters!

The Creative Manager (we could all do with one, work with one, or be one!)