Agile Complexification Inverter

An Exercise in Estimation:  How many times can you fold a piece of paper in half & half again... I do this exercise when beginning scrum teams start story estimation or task estimation.  While this exercise has a unique twist that is very different than task estimation or story estimation - very few people foresee this aspect of the exercise, so it adds to the ah-ha moment. Start by giving everyone a sheet of typical paper (8.5 x 11 in the USA - although the size just doesn't matter).  Then tell them the exercise but ask that no one do any thing yet.  First we will estimate.  The task is to estimate how many times you could fold the paper in half and then again in half and repeat... without doing it what's your estimate of the number of folds? Ask people to call out their estimate, write then on a board in no particular order or fashion. Typical groups come up with estimate in the range of 5 - 20 folds. If you want to do math... calcula...

Mayhem Just last month I receive a congratulatory letter from REI MasterCard - 10 years of a mutually beneficial business relationship ....  until .... chaos ensued (thank you Mr. Mayhem).  So I accepted the opportunity to communicate with my business lender on an incident that made me very dissatisfied with their policies. Subject: Re: Congratulations on your REI World MasterCard anniversary!  Thank you Robert,      Just to let you know - I’m sure this will interest you - I will shortly be canceling my 10 year relationship with REI MasterCard, because of the quality of service you have just required me to deal with. I’ve got a great payment history and have been using our card to pay bills on line and automagically for years. Recently through my oversight, I forgot to pay my bill on time. So in response to this great customer who always pays his bills and once in 10 years paid late, your organization saw fit to block all payments, causing fu...

I learned this technique from the facilitators of Language Hunting  and Where Are Your Keys , they term the technique How Fascinating   and practice it quite a few times each game. The purpose of the technique is to invert the physiology of failure into a learning moment to reflect upon what just went wrong and instead of cringing and curling up into a safe ball, we open up the body and the mind to learning and the experience of reflecting and allowing the universe to teach us something. Try it a few times... See Also: The Failure bow -DeepFUN by Matt Smith Go Ahead, Take a Failure Bow by  Beth Kanter  at HBR TED Talk:   The unexpected benefit of celebrating failure "Great dreams aren't just visions," says Astro Teller, "They're visions coupled to strategies for making them real." The head of X (formerly Google X), Teller takes us inside the "moonshot factory," as it's called, where his team seeks to solve the world...

What do you think & feel about personality and behavioral assessments?  Are they useful to you?  Can you share them with others to help improve your relationships?  Do you have the courage to put your personality on display for your collaborators to inspect? Well I thought I'd try to open the kimono to see if it helps me... I've studied Psychometric assessments and some I find useful, some I feel are just a step to the left from astrology charting.  Yet might not be harmful for self reflection.  I've also found that it takes an expert to explain the tools and reports such that a layperson can understand and make positive use of the assessment and it's report.  And while I've been "certified" is some of these tools/technique I do not practice them enough to be competent - and my pitch is akin to a snake-oil salesman. One issue with these assessments was made clear to me when I heard the Invisibilia NPR show on The Personality Myth.  "We lik...

David Koontz guiding a canoe I was at the Dallas Tech Fest last week (2017 actually) and was asked several times what an Agile Transition Guide was (it was a title on my name tag)... it's surprising to me how many people assume they know what an Agile Coach is, yet there is no good definition or professional organization (with a possible exception coming: Agile Coaching Institute ). So naturally, the conversation went something like this: Inquisitive person:   "Hi David, what's an Agile Transition Guide?  Is that like a coach?" David:  "Hi, glad you asked.  What does a coach do in your experience?" Inquisitive person: "They help people and teams improve their software practices." David:  "Yes, I do that also." Inquisitive person: "Oh, well then why don't you call yourself a coach?" David:  "Great question:  Let's see...  well one of the foundational principles of coaching ( ICF ) is that the coa...

A nice article on HBR - "Why Organizations Don't Learn" , by  Francesca Gino and   Bradley Staats ; take a look. They list these reasons: Fear of failure Fixed mindset Over reliance on past performance Attribution bias The authors then give some strategies for overcoming these reasons for the lack of learning.  Many of these will be familiar to the agile community. Who else has studied organization failure?  Well I've heard that many academics have studied the failure modes of organizations.  One was John Kotter's 8 Steps model  developed by studying the failure modes of organizations trying to institute large scale changes.  Other's have studied how successful large mergers have been after the fact (some would suggest it's on the order of 20% successful).  Some have studied how successful large software development project have been (Chaos Report - it is not a good report). So what does your leader do to encourage learning at the or...

Went to Agile Warrior Series   (Jan31, 2018) to visit with about 200+ Warriors in Dallas, TX.  And as the lunch time entertainment I brought some tangram puzzles and we practiced our collaboration skills while eating.  It was a great conference, with Uncle Bob Martin, Clean Coder Blog  delivering a wonderful morning address. And Luke Hohmann , of Conteneo , &  Innovation Games , describing his view of the future of the Agile movement into "frameworks" of collaboration. Also there I saw a MVP of the Scrum Game by Tim & Derek.  This is a great example of the creativity in the Agile community and the deep desire to share knowledge and experiences.    Presented at   AgileGames2016  conference in Boston, April 28, 29th. But  not   Agile2016  - so you can only see it in the  Microsoft NERD center MIT.         I presented this workshop at Agile Camp - Dallas , Oct ...

Retrospective at GameStop based upon Corinna Baldaug's Retromat. Retro process phases: Set the Stage, Gather Data, Generate Insight, Decide what to Do, Close the Retro REF: http://plans-for-retrospectives.com Set the Stage: give time to “arrive” and get into the right mood and focus upon the goal Gather Data: reflect upon what happened, create a shared pool of information Generate Insight: why did things happen this way? What patterns can we observe? Decide What to Do: Pick what to work on, plan concrete steps of action Close the Retro: reflect upon the retrospective, how could it improve? What shall we follow-up upon? Activities for this Retro: Quick Questions  In ONE word – what do you need from the retro? In ONE word – what is on your mind? In ONE word – what is you current mindset in regards to your project: are you a: Explorer – eager to dive in and research what worked Shopper – Positive, happy if 1 good thing come out Vacationer – Reluc...

A wish list of books I'd like to read... Large-Scale Scrum - more with LeSS  by Craig Larman & Bas Vodde It describes how we did scrum 10 years ago without the need to think about scaling on a VoIP project at SpeakEasy.  Four teams of around 40 developers (programmers, testers, UI, UX, BA, system engineers, etc.), one backlog, one awesome Product Owner (with a team of help), one deliver of working tested software, on time and on budget. My current goto resource for how to do Scrum at any scale. Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations by Rich Karlgaard , Michael S. Malone "Throughout, Rich Karlgaard and Michael S. Malone share insights and real-life examples gleaned from their careers as journalists, analysts, investors, and globetrotting entrepreneurs, meeting successful teams and team leaders to reveal some "new truths": The right team size is usually one fewer person than what managers think they need. The greatest que...

Do you believe that what you measure you will get?  If so you want to start to measure team happiness.  So what techniques do we have to measure something so ephemeral? This TED Talk by Dominic Price lays out a simple and insightful guide to assess your happiness. The health care industry has studied measuring pain and have very good data on their ability to measure and administer pain drugs upon a subjective self report.  Maybe we could do the same in knowledge worker teams and work groups. Team Happiness Net Promoter Score sheet Here's a riff upon the classic Net Promoter Score for measuring team happiness.   "How likely is it that you would recommend our team to a trusted friend that is looking for a job?" To calculate the NPS - the continuum is divided into 3 groups; the detractors (1 - 6), the passive (7 & 8), the promoters (9 & 10).  The passive are ignored - they do not promote your objective.  The NET promoter score is the pe...

What does the value of Transparency really mean? Nextgov: How do you define transparency? Fung: My definition is quite a bit different from the conventional wisdom about transparency. A transparency system is designed to allow people to improve the quality of decisions they make in some way, shape or form, and it enables them to improve their decisions to reduce the risks they face or to protect their interests. Some of those decisions are about political accountability but some are in private life, like what food to buy or what doctor to go to. --  Archon Fung , professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government who studies government transparency. Does your company practice fair pay?  Here's what one worker brought to Google and made a difference in transparency at the search giant. Tell Your Co-Workers How Much You Make!     There's no law against it and it increases the chances you'll be paid fairly. Does the Agile Manifesto im...