{"id":2232,"date":"2016-09-15T15:59:13","date_gmt":"2016-09-15T20:59:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/?p=2232"},"modified":"2017-04-03T12:22:33","modified_gmt":"2017-04-03T17:22:33","slug":"more-modern-agile-connections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2016\/09\/15\/more-modern-agile-connections\/","title":{"rendered":"More Modern Agile Connections"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thanks to Deb Preuss and Steve Holyer to the first Agile Cocktails<\/a>\u00a0virtual (and international) lean coffee meetup\u00a0today, where a small group of us just had a great conversation with\u00a0Josh Kerievsky, CEO of Industrial Logic and one of the\u00a0leading voices in the Modern Agile<\/a> refactoring of the Agile Manifesto<\/a>. \u00a0I’ve already made a bunch of connections<\/a>\u00a0between Modern Agile and my own Inviting Organization<\/a> work. \u00a0Today’s conversation helped me make some more.<\/p>\n

The Modern Agile story starts with Safety, on all levels, from personal to technical. \u00a0Safety supports Making People Awesome or what I think of as\u00a0Making People Heroes (in Awesome Stories). \u00a0Awesome people are able to Learn Faster via Experimenting, which supports Delivering Value Continuously (or at least more and more often).<\/p>\n

The FIRST\u00a0challenge is moving the needle on each of these things, probably, in most cases, starting with Safety. \u00a0Josh shared Stop the Process cards, the knowledge worker equivalent of Toyota’s andon cord, that team members can use in any moment or meeting when they see\u00a0Safety slipping. \u00a0The purpose is the same as Toyota’s legendary tool: raise awareness and make changes while the problem is still new and small.<\/p>\n

Exploring other behaviors that reinforce Safety, we mentioned the need to keep returning to the assumption of positive intentions, that we need to find 4-5 more positives than negatives to maintain good relations, and that any targeting of \u00a0self-protective\u00a0withdrawal or responses will be counter-productive. \u00a0Invitation, on the other hand, what we called Challenge by Choice in my teambuilding days, seems some kind of bedrock.<\/p>\n

Now linking in some practices from pure\u00a0Dialogue<\/a>, developed years ago at MIT, here are some of the specific things we can invite:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Listen… to yourself, listen to the other, listen to the center (of the team\/group\/circle), and listen UP (or beyond or beneath, \u00a0for what might be emerging from above or below or otherwise outside of the group).<\/li>\n
  2. Suspend your assumptions, especially those negative assumptions that are the basis for mistrusting behaviors. \u00a0Let your assumptions be examined and questioned and adjusted separately from your Self.<\/li>\n
  3. Slow the inquiry,<\/li>\n
  4. Hold the Space for Difference and…<\/li>\n
  5. Speak from Awareness… round out the other Dialogue principles, but were mentioned only indirect or passing way.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    This\u00a0reminded me that the oft-cited Cynefin framework\u00a0can be wired in here, as well, on the way to articulating a\u00a0SECOND, higher-level, challenge of Modern Agile. \u00a0 Cynefin describes four decision-making contexts:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Simple, Obvious, Known<\/li>\n
    2. Complicated, but Knowable<\/li>\n
    3. Complex, Known Unknowables<\/li>\n
    4. Chaotic, Unknown Unknowables<\/li>\n
    5. (the cliff)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      These contexts map well to the “environments” described<\/a> by\u00a0Emery and Trist (1965)<\/a>, pioneers of self-managing teams (what Emery called “purposeful and ideal-seeking systems”) and organization transformation via participative (invited!) work redesign:<\/p>\n

        \n
      1. placid, random (where the goodies are just randomly available for picking)<\/li>\n
      2. placid, clustered (where patterns emerge and can be known, learned, used to find more goodies)<\/li>\n
      3. disturbed-reactive\u00a0(competitive, where others are chasing the same goodies, with complex effects)<\/li>\n
      4. turbulent (where surprises abound and success depends on adaptive learning)<\/li>\n
      5. vortical (an emergent, usually unsustainable situation, think peak experience or breakdown)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        The Cynefin view breaks down for me when it’s drawn as four quadrants with a kind of cliff at the far edge of chaos. \u00a0In direct experience, my knowns are always a subset of what is knowable, which is then bounded by those things I can see lie just beyond my capacity to know. \u00a0Which is to say they are nested wholes, like the levels in\u00a0Inviting Organization Emerges<\/a>. \u00a0This is important, because it allows for all the levels to be true simultaneously. I know some things and don’t know what I don’t know all at once.<\/p>\n

        As life and work unfolds in each moment, one of the levels is more important than the others, but they’re all still there. \u00a0AND… at each level, a different kind of Listening matters more than the others. \u00a0At the most basic, I need to pay attention to my own thinking, then to others, the collective patterns, the emergent, and finally to all of them at once, swirling in a vortical way.<\/p>\n

        In the same way, the SECOND challenge of Modern Agile is to turn\u00a0the four steps into a self-reinforcing virtuous practice loop is the second challenge. \u00a0That takes means finding ways that\u00a0continuous delivery reinforces safety and moving toward a vortical swirl that feels like doing all four at a high level and all at once. \u00a0That means Inviting customers, business leaders, dev and ops into a Safe, Awesome, Fast-Learning, Continuously Valuable Dialogue. \u00a0That means Inviting (vs.\u00a0driving\u00a0or grabbing for) more Peak Experiences and practicing the things that help us sustain\u00a0higher and higher plateaus between those Peaks.<\/p>\n

        We sticky-note our way through all the knowns and knowables, toward being more and more prepared for anything and everything else, always inviting attention to whatever level of listening, knowing, decision-making and learning that is most important, in that moment and the next and the next. \u00a0In this way, the being and doing of Safe, Awesome, Faster\u00a0and Valuable are continuously developed and refined, same as, inseparable from the actual software product.<\/p>\n

        At the close of our session\u00a0today, one of us suggested\u00a0that we can’t actually make people safe. \u00a0I think we can’t actually make people awesome or heroes. \u00a0Or make them learn for that matter. \u00a0Safe and awesome and learning are individual\u00a0choices. \u00a0Which is what I’ve said elsewhere about Engagement, too. \u00a0The best we can do \u2013 and all we really need to do \u2013 is continually\u00a0Invite them into these practices, to make it easier to choose these ways of working.<\/p>\n

         <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

        Thanks to Deb Preuss and Steve Holyer to the first Agile Cocktails\u00a0virtual (and international) lean coffee meetup\u00a0today, where a small group of us just had a great conversation with\u00a0Josh Kerievsky, CEO of Industrial Logic and one of the\u00a0leading voices in the Modern Agile refactoring of the Agile Manifesto. \u00a0I’ve already made a bunch of connections\u00a0between … <\/p>\n

        Continue reading “More Modern Agile Connections”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":88889,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51,28,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agile-development","category-inviting-leadership","category-practice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2232"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/88889"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2232"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2819,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2232\/revisions\/2819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}