Monday, May 23, 2011

Scrum be damned...

Tobias Meyer's always interesting take on things Agile... Thinking people have moved beyond Scrum...

I reckon it was was my trip to LSSC11 in Long Beach, that caused this jolt in my thinking, this awakening. The experience acted as a catalyst, fusing my conflicting perspectives into a cohesive whole. To my delight I spent my two days of (let’s be honest) conference-freeloading engaged with inspired and inspiring groups of people, seeking new ways of thinking about the world, exploring, laughing, leaping paradigms and manifestos, and not wasting time talking about whether Kanban is better than Scrum, or visa-versa — in fact hardly talking about Scrum, or Kanban, or Lean at all… or even systems or software. The conversations were about people, and collaboration, and organizational structures, and complexity, and brain function, and starfish, and exploration, and improvement, and love, and kindness, and compassion… and even supplication.

Read more at agileanarchy.wordpress.com
 

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Good Attitude - getting the best from everyone

In a requirements workshop we are always faced with a variety of participants, some of them are motivated, interested, others may not care to be there, yet others tell you that nothing works and so on.

I was shown a simple useful model a few years ago that i often try to apply in these situations to steer the group towards - for want of a better term - Good Attitude.


There are 2 axes ...

x: apathetic (lazy, directionless) through to goal-oriented (motivated, productive)

y: empathetic (friendly, encouraging) through to hostile (sarcastic, arrogant, cold, cynical, pessimist)

... each representing a dimension of behaviour as a continuum.

We end up with 4 areas, quadrants ...
  • empathetic & goal-oriented
  • empathetic & apathetic
  • hostile & goal-oriented
  • hostile & apathetic
... and broadly speaking we can categorize people into one of them.
Some (extreme stereotype) examples:
  • Delivery driven but impatient - project managers sometimes (goal driven/hostile)
  • The cynic - What's the point? It won't work. (apathetic/hostile)
  • The friendly joker - everybody loves him (empathetic/doesn't deliver)
  • The positive, friendly, engaged solution seeker. (That's you, right?)

The goal is to foster and promote behaviour, to guide, encourage, gently coax people toward the upper right quadrant - empathetic/goal-oriented.

Easier said than done, i know.