collaborative | vinylbaustein

dear CEO, tear down this wall!

1. February 2015

vinylbaustein Agile Mindset, Facilitation Agile, collaborative, experience, Facilitation, inspect & adapt, meeting, SeriousGames Leave a comment

On the 12.th of June 1987, the then US President Ronald Reagan held a speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin near the Berlin-wall. The wall separated to different kinds of ideology, the east and the west, state-directed economy and free market economy, the communism and the capitalism, state control and liberty.

The Berlin Wall, as part of the iron Curtain, was an impressive emblem of the cold war from 1945 to 1990. The Berlin Wall was an emblem, a landmark for separating, for ‘protection’ and for being intransparent.

Today, the Berlin Wall is part of the global history and notwithstanding we have to face the idea of the iron Curtain nearly every day. Almost without recognizing it.

We call it ‘the black Wall’

I’m talking about meetings, particularly business meetings. We all have to attend business meetings almost every day. The appearance of a modern bussiness meeting looks like this, a meeting room with one or more tables, chairs and lots of notebooks and mobiles.

the Black Wall

I experienced such kind of meetings for the half of my life. Being in a meeting and having the feeling that we are all hiding ourselves behind a little computer. Looking in a lot of eyes without being able to see a complete face, most people are busy with themselves, people are typing something in their notebook. Having a notebook or mobile in front of us is a kind of protection, helps us to do something different – if the current speaker is boring or I’m not interested in the topic etc. …

We protect ourselves from being in a real and deep contact and connection with all others. A basic requirement for fruitful conversations and dynamic dialogue.

You might want to say, ‘but I need my notebook – all information I need is available on it’. Ok, if this is the case why do you need a face to face meeting and what is the purpose of your meetings? Why do you attend? Is there a better way to achieve results?

What’s the purpose and what do you want to achieve?

Way too often we attend meetings without being aware of the real purpose of that meeting and if it is really needed. Could we have the same outcome with a different technique, maybe by sending an email, post infos on the intranet or having a Skype-call?

The purpose of a business meeting is about talking and exchanging ideas and opinions to come to a decision. The purpose could be also to strengthen the connection between the participants so that they can work as a team or to solve conflicts. There are thousands of serious purposes for having a meeting. So why do so many people complain about their company culture and how they handle meetings?

Way too often we have the feeling of wasting our time in a meeting. If you experience exactly that please allow me to ask you, who is responsible that the time in a meeting is used effective and efficient? The meeting organizer, your boss or even the whole company? I’m sorry, it is you and everybody else who is in the meeting!

If you are going to a business meeting and have the feeling it’s a waste of time, you need to talk to all others and to the meeting organizer how you can handle your meetings more effective and more efficient. Have you ever done that? If not, please start with it!

What can I do to improve my own meetings?

Tear down the wall first – get rid of notebooks and mobiles during a meeting – get rid of everything that can consume attention so tht people are fully present and can focus on what they want to achieve.
Agree on some meeting rules like everybody is responsible for the outcome of the meeting, listen carefully and talk with intention etc. (ask your attendees what they think is reasonable.)
Retrospect about your meetings. Reserve 10 minutes at the end of your next meeting and talk about how to improve it. Inspect and adapt.
Invite a Facilitator to create a setting for your meetings and to moderate it.
Try it ‘the Circle Way’ – have a circle of chairs – without tables
Get rid of presentations like PowerPoint-slides – visualize important information on a FlipChart or MetaWall.
Try serious games (yes, SERIOUS GAMES!) It can be so much fun to discuss or work on topics in a playful way

the Circle Way

I’d like to challenge you to tear down the wall, the black wall. It is the first step to transform the way you work with others. Tear down the wall and find a new way of dialogue. Tear down the wall and experience a new connection with your colleagues. Tear down the wall to find a deeper relationship with your peers. Tear down the wall as a first step for improving your meeting culture. Tear down the wall for success!

connection before content – get the fire startet first

13. June 2013

vinylbaustein Agile Mindset, Facilitation, StrategicPlay® Agile, Agile Mindset, Appreciative Inquiry, Coaching, collaborative, Empirical Experience, Facilitation, FUN, inspect & adapt, Lean, LEGO SeriousPlay, ProductOwner, StrategicPlay, Team, Team Building, Team Development 1 Comment

‘Good morning all you supernumeraries’ said one of the participants of a team development workshop to his colleagues when he entered the room.

colored pigs

Their boss already told me upfront that this workshop will be challenging and that there are some problems with the relationships between the participants. That is one of the reasons why their boss thought, ok, we need an external facilitator for a team-intervention as the relationships in the team are highly crusted over. Every piece of work feels like a little war fight and communication, better not to mention communication – people in the team prefer to write eMails to each other while sitting just on the other side of a desk or shoot each other if they are angry as they have soft-air-guns (!?!) in the office…

the Challenge

I knew, the very first challenge w’d be creating a safe space for all participants – without such safe space, where people feel comfortable to state the painful and to talk about the home truth, I could skip the day and w’d end up in what some poeple would call – ‘just another wasted day’. During the briefing for the workshop I was informed that this team already tried several things out and one of the biggest problems was, that past activities concentrated on visualizing the problems and dysfunction in the team with the outcome of some action items. At the end, any appearing motivational energy fizzled out after a few days back at work. Does this sound familiar?

sail boat

Ok, challenge accepted, I just have one sinlge day to transform a highly dysfunctional team into something new, where dialogue is possible and the motivation to change something on the current situation should last longer than a few days. I am aware that I can’t change the complete world of a team that has dysfunctional grown over the past years in one single day, even I’m not able to change their behaviors for one day, but maybe for the duration of the workshop. So the only chance I’ve had is to create an impact, a tiny little thing that could be the starting point for making a huge difference.

When I started to think about the design of the workshop, I asked myself 2 simple questions – which I always ask myself when creating a workshop, training or even just a meeting:

Connection: how to connect participants related to their status quo?
Content: when participants leave the workshop, what has changed, what is different for them than it was in the beginning?

Connection

Visiting…

…a foreign city and asking the way.
…a conference where I know absolutely nobody in person, all I know is the theme for the conference and that there’re a lot of experts in the room – so as I.
…a grandmother and all others of the family for a family afternoon.
…a best friend to talk about the girl you’ve just met.
…a colleague to discuss the upcoming project.

In all of these situations, there are different kind of cennections in place, a different kind of a relationship. If you imagine you meet all these people/situations listed above, try to imagine for every single situation:

what kind of relationship is there?
how does this relationship influences the way I talk with the other person about the subject?
how would the talk be different, if I simply replace the existing relationship with one of the others?

perspective

You don’t need to have an outstanding power of imagination to grasp the fact that different kind of connections will have different kind of impacts to your behavior, and even to the behavior of yours opposite. It doesn’t matter what kind of topic I talk about with somebody else, the first and biggest impact on our communication is our connection! A second important impact on our connection and communication is the environment, but the impact of the environment to our communication is a different topic – and a different post…

Content

Did you know, there is a purpose why people have meetings? Yes, it’s true! I know, for some people this sounds very surprising as they discovered meetings in the past as a complete waste of time… But there’re meetings that are different, they very often feel like little workshops and without any surprise, successful workshops, meetings and trainings have something in common, not just the environment nor the connection, no, somebody had deep and powerful thoughts about the content, about the message being transferred, the one and only piece of knowledge that makes it possible for me to see more or less of my entire world totally different than I did before.

key

Content, like connection, is key. So, one of my most important part of work when designing and creating a new workshop or training is, to answer the question -‘ at the end of the workshop, participants will…?’

What is very interesting, recently I’ve learned that exactly this sentence is also the most important question for any public speaker when creating a new speech… I just realize what public speeches, meetings, trainings and workshops have in common…

WorkshopDesign

After evaluating all information which were available, I ended up with a design using tools and methods from LEGO® SeriousPlay and parts of the discovery-phase of Appreciative Inquiry (AI). My Agenda was to create an environment where people can overcome old habits and feel safe to try new ways of collaboration so that participants are able to create solutions in a way they never did before – with a complete new perspective and connection with each individual and the entire team, that was my mandate.

For discovering individuals, the team, it’s purpose and to create a team identity we used StrategicPlay® based on the tools and methods of LEGO® SeriousPlay. So, for the purpose of building a new connection across the entire team I choosed to use a very playful and safe environment to break the crusted over connections so that new and fresh ones can occur.

For working on the content – topics were around how the team works and behave together – I choosed the discovery phase of Appreciative Inquiry (AI). One of the core principals around AI is to concentrate – and put focus on great experiences and what people want to have more of in their life instead of concentrating on all the problems which are present and how to tackle them. As working on the content was up to the participants, I decided to choose the AI framework to create an environment where participants feel safe to share their thoughts.

You might think, phew, this won’t solve the problems they have. Sounds like another waste of time… I need to disagree! On a short term current problems won’t be solved, yes. What is much more interesting than tackling current problems is how to behave and how to avoid situations that leads to these problems – as most challenges that we call ‘problems’ have patterns in common, we start to learn a new culture, a new way how to deal with situations which are challenging, a complete new behavior! While we create a new kind of culture, we also start to deal differently with the current challenges. This norm

As we just had less than half a day left to start the content phase, I didn’t explained the whole AI approach. For time savings I just explained the challenges for an appreciative interview, what is the first part of our AI-approach.
After the interviews were held, we gathered in groups and I gave a short introduction in the upcoming process as it was about to choose a top story the groups wanted to work on and then to discover the situation of the interview, find out success factors and possible action items to get more of that in the current team.

team rafting

That was more or less the whole day!

Debriefing

At the end of the workshop we gathered in a circle of chairs, by the way there were 13 ProductOwners of an international IT company.

After a harvesting of the AI-discovery phase I closed the workshop and invited the participants to give a last comment, feedback or anything they would like to say and how they would like to continue.

Most of participants liked the complete new approach they discovered over the day and they had the feeling that this was a milestone in their development phase. Some were sceptic as they discovered in the past that after such a great workshop the motivation which occured during the team intervention disappeared a few days later when people were back at their daily work. This fear clearly was present. One participant stated clearly that he has didn’t like the morning while ‘playing’ with LEGO and that for him this was a complete waste of time. But the afternoon has made it up.

It made me happy when all participants committed to continue the team development work upcoming monday – the next appointment was in place, good.

I totally respect if somebody does not like something about the framework I deliver, even if the dependencies between the exercises are not clear in detail for everybody. Important for me is that at the end, the framework made a difference, created new possibilities and opened the bridge to new perspectives and communication.

Connection first? why?

Remember the beginning of the post when I gave the examples of visiting a situation. Do you remember how your behavior changed when imagining the different situation in different relationships? Most people discover that as more powerful the connection is , as deeper and more fruitful a conversation can go. You can challenge the content, never challenge the connection!

That is why it make sense to build a connection first before I start to talk about crucial topics. That does not mean that I have to feel love or lots of sympathy for everybody! What is important is that I respect everybody in the team, I need to understand them, how they behave in different challenging situations and what kind of connection we have together so that I’m able to adapt my behavior if necessary. If such a connection exists in a team and teammembers are committed to the same targets and environment, communicate open-minded and have the courage to let the leopard change his spot, a team will learn how to fly!

very little aviation

Epilog

Last week I’ve received a mail from one of the participants of the workshop of this post – about 7 weeks after the event. The Team has still some problems but something crucially has changed, they work together differently than the years before. They are more respectful with each other and still work on the outcome of the workshop – towards of what they want to have more of. It seems that the fire is still burning and that people in this team have discovered that nobody is a supernumeraries, our team is star!

Open Space Technology – my experience

3. April 2011

vinylbaustein Open Space coffee break, collaborative, experience, FUN, meeting, Open Space, self organizing, Unconference Leave a comment

Introduction

In this article I want to introduce Open Space Technology. As it is the most efficient and effective kind of problem solving meeting I get to know so far I want to share my experience with you.

Open Space Technology is effective in situations where a diverse group of people need to deal with complex and potentially conflicting material in innovative and productive ways. It is particular powerful when nobody knows the answer and the ongoing participation of a number of people is required to deal with the question. In the Open Space environment people tend to be creative, synergistic and self motivated.

Open Space Technology was created by Harrison Owen in 1985 and combines a complex problem solving meeting with the spirit of a coffee break.

Discovering Open Space Technology

The first time I heard about Open Space was in late summer in 2009. I was participating the Scrum Gathering in Munich with some of my colleagues. It was an excellent conference with lots of interesting sessions, field reports and practical exercises. It was the first time that I attended such an agile conference at all and I was impressed by meeting so many like minded people. As I started learning Scrum mid of 2008 by private study and gained first experience by implementing Scrum in my R&D Team, I had not so much exchange of experience so far. Thus it was amazing for me to listen and talk with people who are doing Scrum on a longer term and practice the Framework Methodology.

Beside all the Sessions at the Scrum Gathering there was an Open Space organized in the lounge of the Hilton, where the conference took place.

To be honest, at that time I did not understand how OpenSpace really works and I missed the facilitated opening as it was a Guerilla Open Space. Thus for me it seemed that it was not facilitated. There were just some comments from the Organizers of the Conference that there is an OpenSpace for talks. To participate you just should place your topic at one of the corners for a special time and then wait who comes and also wants to talk with you about this topic. Ok, I understood what was explained but as this took place beside all the organized Sessions it seemd a little bit strange for me.

Seeing Open Space from the Inside

Half a year later Deborah Hartmann Preuss, an excellent agile Coach, organized an OpenSpace at my employer within an agile training. And that was the point when I started realizing what OpenSpace really is, how it works and how it needs to be organized and facilitated. For outsiders OpenSpace looks easy – when it is well prepared and well facilitated, and this is exactly the crucial skill you need to have to run an Open Space event – in my opinion

Here are the simple rules and principles for Open Space:

The Law of two feet:

If at any time you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing: use your two feet and go someplace else. You are encouraged to quietly withdraw and become either a Butterfly or a Bumblebee. A Bumblebee joins another group, perhaps fertilizing it while a Butterfly flies round or joins other Butterflies for informal discussion.

The four principles:

Whoever comes is the right people
Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
Whenever it starts is the right time
When it’s over, it’s over

drawing of a meeting You need to organize space for sessions. These spaces must be equipped with flip charts and whiteboards or panels. In addition you need different Markers, StickyNotes, IndexCards, ball pens and/or felt pens, chairs in a circle and perhaps tables. Depending on the overall topic you need eventually more stuff to organize.

Additionally you need enough print outs to document the participants, outcomes and follow-ups for every session…

In the space for the open planning there must be the marketplace organized with a large panel where you can visualize the session rooms and the initial time slots in a matrix. There must be space to hang up IndexCards.

Then you also need enough IndexCards and felt-pens. Off the mark you need to place posters with the rules and principles of OpenSpace. There are just a few rules but they are very important and existential to explain to have it work and make the unconference valuable.

How It Feels to Run an Open Space Event

Before the beginning of the OpenSpace event at my employer, which was organized by Deborah, I was a little bit afraid if it could work in our company, as I just had my experience from the Scrum Gathering in Munich which was rather disappointing for me.

Given that I was supporting Deborah by organizing the OpenSpace made me feel curious as it was something completely different to what I saw half a year ago in Munich. And when we started our unconference I was more and more surprised and encouraged that this Open Space had absolutely no chance to fail, everything made complete sense to me and as Deborah is such a phenomenal facilitator she started introducing Open Space to the participants which was totally energizing. And it worked. We had a great marketplace with lots of sessions and it took us about 20-30 minutes to fill the whole matrix of spaces and time-slots.

At the end of the day we had an amazing outcome. We posted all flipcharts and documentation of the sessions on the walls of our large conference. We had lots of follow-ups and action items planned. This was the beginning for a lot of creative collaboration and the starting point for much better communication between fellow workers. And I’m delighted to say that this event was a milestone for our company in our agile transition.

Applying Open Space to Technical Topics

Some month after this event we had an additional OpenSpace event in one of our R&D sites where the overall topic was a little bit more technical. You need something like a core relational theme that is still open but should put boundaries a little bit the topics so that people know why they are coming. For example, when you have an overall theme like cooking, you could have topics like, desserts, breakfast, dinner, ingridents, how to set up a kitchen etc.

The OpenSpace in our R&D Site was on the second day of a two day workshop, The first day was more strategic, about gaining insights for a technical framework. So the first day was a perfect preparation, so that participants came up with related topics and ideas so we could talk about how to address hurdles which were found in the strategic outcome one day before.

At the end of the day there were lots of valuable outcomes, follow-ups and action items, again. It developed understanding for complex topics, for example: insights about crossfunctional teams for technical problems and challenges which need to be addressed. Communication between teams increased. And once again this Open Space event was a milestone for our agile development in the company.

Trying it On My Own

In December 2010 we organized a two day agile workshop for ProductOwners. The second day was reserved for an OpenSpace. About two weeks before the workshop started, the main facilitator for theses two days got an urgent invitation from senor management with the result that he was not available for facilitating the Open Space event. I was helping to organize this event and I had already collected different experiences with OpenSpace, in addition I’m an experienced Facilitator, and so I started to think about if I could facilitate the Open Space by my self. It was not easy to decide, as Open Space needs a proper preparation and good facilitation to be successful.

After some mindmapping for myself I dared to prepare and at the end, to facilitate this OpenSpace event. I had some support from Deborah in preparing all the stuff and she helped me in mentally reviewing the upcoming Open Space. You’ll find some interesting links at the end of this article which helped me preparing.

the Market Place

As the event starts I was a little bit nervous. But after facilitating the first minutes and explaining the audience what Open Space is, I calmed down and just came into a good flow of facilitation.

The participants came up with a lot of great and expectant topics. Thus it was no surprise that the marketplace was filled up in just a short time.

And once again, Open Space worked. There was so much valuable outcome, community building and again follow-ups to concentrate on later. The only special thing this time – I facilitated it for myself, made a great experience and guided the people for whom Open Space was new through a great unconference.

My Conclusion about Open Space

Open Space events are powerful, efficient, effective and highly recommended kind of meetings, where all participants deal with complex and potentially conflicting topics in an innovative and productive way.

Further reading:

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