I’m currently listening to Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull on Audible and absolutely loving it. I am almost finished, but couldn’t wait to do a little sketchnote.
There was a chapter around Failure which really resonated with me. Why are we so scared of failure? Where did this fear come from? How do we deal with this failure in a creative environment?
“Open Space (Technology) is a simple way to run productive meetings, for five to 2000+ people, and a powerful approach to leadership in any kind of organization, in everyday practice and turbulent change. ” – extract from OpenSpaceWorld.ORG
We have used Open Space Technology (OST) often within our organisation and for clients as a way of collaborating, solving problems and highlighting opportunities within companies.
Although it encourages self-organisation by allowing participants to facilitate their own discussions, there is a lot of preparation work and positioning of the Principles and concepts to ensure that the session is set up correctly and the participants understand the approach.
My colleague, Angie Doyle, who is a fantastic facilitator and has run many of these sessions, coached me through the first one that I ran. I jotted down some notes which I found extremely useful, and have now finally put them into a one-pager sketchnote.
OST begins without a pre-set agenda. It is advised to set a Theme so that it focuses the topics around a pressing issue. The philosophy behind OST is to encourage people to discuss what is important to them at the time and allow the conversations to unfold around topics that people are passionate about.
From a practical perspective, this means creating a visual, visible framework (“empty agenda”) in which people can propose topics to talk about. Depending on the number of attendees, which can range from a handful to thousands, you would work out the time allocations and number of stations where the conversations can happen.
I’ve sketched a rough example of a setup below. We have used tape on the walls in past sessions to create the framework. The time slots were large enough to fit an A4 page to encourage large, visible writing. We then worked out the timing for the sessions according to the duration that we had. Ideally, you would want 45 min – 1 hour per time slot.
Participants would then write down topics, and their name, and place it in one of the time slots.
There are tons of resources available online to read up on OST. The best way to learn about them and to see what works is to run one.
I’ve recently finished listening to The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management by Stephen Denning on Audible.
I found it extremely interesting and inspiring. It incorporated ideas from Agile, Scrum, New Product Development, Lean Manufacturing, to name a few and was synthesized into a compelling argument for a revolution in the way that we currently approach management.
I would really recommend this book. Here are my notes for the 7 key principles of Radical Management.
Here is the second installment in the poster series that I did a little while ago. These were themed around the Lean principles and process.
You can have a look at the Lean Coffee Poster here.
I really do think visually. Here’s proof. I had a retrospective with my team this week and this is how I planned it:
Before the session I just used this plan to sketch out the techniques on some flip chart paper or the whiteboard. I kept this open as a reference.
I used the 5 stage Retrospective format and referenced a couple of activities. For an overview of different techniques, you can have a look at: Retrospective Techniques for coaches, scrum masters and other facilitators. Another great reference is Retromat.
If you are interested, here is my Retro Agenda in a bit more detail:
I used Esther Derby and Diana Larsen’s Weather Report Technique. This is a great way to gauge how the team is feeling. You can find the full technique in their book Agile Retrospectives, alternatively there is also a reference on Retromat and Retrospective Techniques for coaches, scrum masters and other facilitators.
For the Gather Data technique, I used Mary Gorman & Ellen Gottesdiener’s 4L’s: Loved, Learned, Lacked, Longed For. You can find the full technique here.
This really worked well! It’s a great way to gather data, and adds a bit more information than the Stop, Start, Continue technique.
From the 4L’s, I went through all the responses with the team. I then grouped them into themes with the team. I then asked the team to dot vote on the “Lacked” and “Longed For” categories in order to do a deep dive on what was going on.
I used the 5 Why’s to delve into the details of the top 3 things that the team felt was missing or needed attention in the sprint. It’s a really interesting technique because you can go down into a culture-level and then need to decide (in the Decide what to do portion) where you can influence the most change and where to focus your energy as a team. The 5 Why’s is also in Esther Derby and Diana Larsen’s book Agile Retrospectives and there are some references online as well.
From the 5 Why’s, we brainstormed some action items as a team. We then chose 1 per category / issue that was raised. We use the good old raise your hands to vote technique, to show which action items the team wanted to focus on.
To close the retro, I just asked for a quick show of fingers using the Fist of Five technique to gauge how they were feeling to end off there. I also set up a scale (from happy to neutral to sad) and asked them to make a mark with their name as they walked out to see how they were feeling. This way I could go touch base individually afterwards.
That’s it!
I was asked to create some posters a few months ago for an awareness event at one of the large organisations in South Africa. One of these posters was to explain the Lean Coffee (or Agile Coffee) process.
It’s a really great way to run meetings and keep people involved. We now use this format quite often within our teams, and across our company, as a way of discussing topics and sharing information.
The details of how to run your own Lean Coffee and the purpose behind this meeting format can be found here.
No, this is not a tribute to The Big Bang Theory. In reality, it’s just me playing around with some visual elements – flags and frames.
I recently had the privilege of attending a workshop about DevOps, which was run by Jeff Hackert and Daniel Acton. During the workshop I took about 7 pages of sketchnotes, for my own reference, which were then circulated to my colleagues and I received quite a positive response.
This has inspired me to practice and pursue my sketchnoting interest, and hopefully by starting this blog I will be able to share my journey with you – and some interesting topics along the way.
Back to the topic at hand – DevOps. The workshop was intended to highlight the organisational culture and process aspects, after all this is where the learning should start, before implementing tools.
Change is hard. For more, check out Jeff Hackert’s article.
