The power of a pen and a notepad

During the last couple of weeks I have spent tuesday evenings drinkning coffee and discussing software development and change processes with a colleague. For our first meeting I brought a notepad and a pen for me to write down anything interesting that we would discuss. We sat down on opposite sides of the table and I subconsciously opened the notepad and placed it and the pen on the table between us. It didn't take long until my colleague started to draw images on the notepad explaining his thoughts and I did the same thing. Every week I bring my notepad and the same thing happens. Last week when we discussed learning we confirmed what we probably already knew, that we both have a strong visual learning preference.

My learning style

Continuing my trend on exploring NLP I came across learning styles and modalities. I decided to try an online questionnaire to determine my learning preference.

When filling out the VARK Questionnaire version 7.0 I was diagnosed with having a multimodal learning preference, my exact scores was:
Visual: 10
Aural: 5
Read/Write: 7
Kinesthetic: 13

The score is very interesting to me, my own opinion previous to taking the test was that I actually had a more dominant visual learning preference complemented with a Read/Write learning preference and that I would score lower on Aural and Kinesthetic learning preference.

This is something I will need to follow up on. By learning about the different learning preferences and what it means to be multimodal I can improve my learning process.

This I have to follow up!

(me to myself: - damn, my backlog is growing too large, time to focus and prioritize, I am all over the place right now!)

The Satir Change Model

A couple of weeks ago I participated in a workshop with Dan North where he talked about the Satir Change Model, created by Virginia M. Satir. Virgina has worked with family change process and from those experiences she developed the model. The model seems to be applicable in many different change processes and Dan North suggested that it could be used e.g. when introducing change in the software industry.

The Satir Change Model seems to addcress the behavior I have seen when introducing changes and also when undergoing changes myself.

After discovering this model I have talked intensely about it with my colleagues, who also works with introducing change in software development companies. From my limited knowledge of the model so far, it seems to offer the ubiquitous language that we have been lacking when talking about introducing change.

This model hs been added to my backlog of things I would like to be proficient in!

The magic of Daily Scrums

Teams who introduce Daily Scrum as a part of their Scrum implementation, have a gut feel, or evidence that suggest, that by introducing these kind of meetings we improve our efficiency. We feel this because traditional status meetings have e.g. a tendency to stretch in time and lack focus but Daily Scrums e.g. are kept short and concisely.

What is a Daily Scrum?

In a Daily Scrum, the team and potential observers gathers, and while standing up, each team member answers three questions:

• What did you do yesterday?


• What will you do today?


• What impediments are in your way?
  
  

During the Daily Scrum no observer are allowed to talk and the meeting should last a maximum of 15 minutes. The Daily Scrum is moderated by the Scrum master.

The magic of Daily Scrums

So by just standing-up we suddenly become more effcient! This must be magic!

The truth revealed

Some argue that the reason why Daily Scrums are more efficient is because people are forced to stand-up and want to get to the point and finish earlier. The routine of standing-up also reminds us about the timebox of the meeting.

In my last assignment as a Project Manager I replaced the daily standard status meeting, where all participants would sit down, chat, drink coffe etc. with a daily stand-up meeting. The stand-up meeting was almost like a Daily Scrum. I quickly got feedback that proved that we became more efficient in this way.

Some of the participants argued that my success with the daily stand-up meetings came from the fact that everybody was forced to stand up and this was more uncomfortable than sitting down and that's why we finished earlier.

Although, there might be some truth in that, the main reasons for the experienced improved result probably comes from other parameters that we got for free when we introduced the daily stand-up meetings. These parameters comes from what we associate with good meeting discipline, as put forward by Steven M Smith in is article Rethinking Stand-Up Meetings, Part 2, namely knowing the agenda, timeboxing the meeting, minimize number of participants. Steven M Smith also addresses other aspects and possible improvements of the stand-up meeting but I will not address these here and now.

In addition to the above discussed parameters the Daily Scum and my succesful implementation of the stand-up meeting also had a good moderator who always makes sure that the meeting sticks to the agenda and the rules. A good moderator is also a key to good meeting discipline.

So there is actually nothing magic about the Daily Scrum, only discipline, and discipline runs all through Scrum.

Meetings without agendas

Following my new found interest in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) I read an article on frames. In NLP frames is used to provide a context, focus or guidance for thoughts and actions. One type of frames is the outcome frame. An outcome frame provides focus on what you want to achieve, the achieved affects and the resources needed to achieve it. This line of thinking can be applied to the subject of meetings without agendas.

In some of the companies I have worked in or work with, people are meeting happy (compare with trigger happy). Not a day pass by without me being called into several meetings. People say we need to have a meeting about this or that. The meetings lacks an outcome and are rarely timeboxed and when the people exits the meetings, they are often confused as to what was decided and what is expected from them. I do find that people still often feel satisfied, while I always feel frustrated.

The reason for this, is that the outcome was to have a meeting, which was achieved. However, with a clear goal, a good agenda and a timebox you set the wanted outcome and this gives you a context for making decisions and assesing your behaviour.

So make it a rule for you to say no to meetings without a defined outcome. There is no rule without exceptions, but remember the downside of having meetings without a defined outcome.

Learn to learn before you teach

In Learn to forget I mentioned The Dreyfus Model of Skills Acquisition. In this blog-post I will elaborate on my thoughts on this model.

model

The Dreyfus Model of Skills Acquisition is divided into five skill levels:

• Novice - No previous experience


• Advanced Beginner - Step by step


• Competent - Goal oriented


• Proficient - Conceptual models / metaphors


• Expert - Work from intuition

The model dictates that at any given time with any given skill you are belonging to a certain skill level. Depending on what skill level you belong to your behavior will be different. It will be different in the way you act and also how you learn and progress.

As a novice piano player I will not be able to play a song that I hear on the radio by ear, instead I need to know how to play the scale first to understand what sound comes from pressing a key, as a advanced beginner I can play by numbers, when I am competent I can follow musical notes, when I am proficient I can play from a never before seen musical notes and when I am an expert I make my own arrangements to a known song by heart or play by ear etc.

learning

By understanding how learning works you can yourself become a better student and able to coach your teachers so that they can help you progress. On my current consultancy assignment I am in many aspects a novice, but by understanding how I learn, I can progress faster.

teaching

By understanding how learning works your teaching skills will dramatically improve. If you can identify what skill level a perticular student resides at you can adjust your teaching so that it fits. An advanced beginner system administrator may need a step by step guide on trouble shooting desribing how to start an application etc. while an expert system administrator may only need pointer to what area the problem could be in.

one size fits all

Often software documentation is written as "one size fits all" and this is most definitely not true. This results in that either it is too abstract or to detailed for a certain user. If you teach a small group you can adjust your learning to the particpating individuals, but what if you teach a big group?

An example of this can be seen in martial arts. Karate is often thought in a classic step-by-step manor, since you have large classes where it is impossible to adjust to fit all students, you try too find a medium level that everybody has to follow, this will often attract novice to competent students but will push-away proficient and expert students since they feel that they don't develop. In Filipino martial arts you have smaller classes where the teacher can coach/mentor individual students based on their present skill level, this will make it possible for everybody to develop faster and also retain the proficient students.

communication

I have found the model useful at several times when acting as a technical project manager and interacting with the product owners and business representatives. Instead of speaking in the language of a technical proficient person I speak in the language of a technical novice and a advanced beginner business person and guide my counterpart to speak in advanced beginner business language so that we will understand eachother. This one of the basic reasons to why business and technical representatives normally don't understand each other, they don't speak the same language. This is also one of the reasons why software development methodologies who focus on customer collaboration and delivering business values works so well , let business prioritize business values of features and let technical estimate and implement it and offer a common language for understanding eachother.

Progression

The way I was presented with the model at a seminar lately it was stated that the progression from novice to competent is rather linear and straight forward and that you can progress almost automatically but that the step to proficient and then to expert is non-linear and also requires a decsion and proactive behavior. You must decide for yourself that you want to progress. Maybe this can be connected to Rober Dilts Neuro-Logical Levels that I wrote about in Sustainable change. The higher your skill level are the more you must internalize it in your upper-levels, to become proficient or an expert you must make it a part of your values and beliefs or identity. A proficient person can explain and discuss his area of skills using metaphors and this requires a higher degree of internalization compared to behavior which is "just" something you do but cannot always explain.

I can really recommend you too explore The Dreyfus Model of Skills Acquisition, it has many answers to your everyday problems!

Sustainable change

Lately I have been thinking a lot about change management and how to achieve sustainable change. When change is introduced and headed by an external player and that player leaves the scene I have a feeling that many persons regress to the old behavior they had before the change was introduced. On my search for an answer I stumbled across Rober Dilts exploratory model of Neuro-Logical Levels. The model can be depicted as a pyramid, as a travel from a outer abstract level to a inner personal level.

A change at a lower level may, but not necessarily, affect an upper level. But, a change at an upper level will have impact on the levels below it. So for a change at the behavior level to be sustainable it has to be aligned with the upper levels or the change must take place on the upper level.

This suggest e.g. that, if it is not previously aligned with the upper levels, merely changing the physical location of people (environment) doesn't make people perform better (behavior). Telling people to negotiate better (behavior) won't have any affect unless you offer training on negotiation( capabilities). Teaching developers to do testing (capabilities) and demanding unit testing (behavior) won't be succesful when they actually think (values and beliefs) that a developer should develop and a tester should test.

Let's look at an example, management at FactoryY won't accept that the developers do pairprogramming since they argue that they only get half the bang for their bucks. They beileve that development is a mechanic task and that the value produced is restricted by how fast you can type on a keyboard and two developers sharing a keyboard can obviously type less than if each had their own keyboard. Here we must change on the level of values and beliefs and guide management to the understanding that develoment is a creative process not bound by how fast you can type on a keyboard.

And another example, at FactoryZ all the development is done component by component in different organizational units. When you get the assignment of leading a change initiative you quickly realize that the developers at the different units all believe and value cooperation and by grouping them togehter i.e. changing the environment, you can meet the goal of lower time to market by reducing the number of handoffs. The change in productivity will be sustainable since the change in enviroment is aligned with the upper level of values and beliefs. Note that the upper levels were already aligned but it was blocked by the lower level.

Robert Dilts exploratory model of Neuro-Logical Levels seems very powerful and is applicable in many areas e.g. self development, training, teaching, learning, leading change etc. I think I will study this closer.