Category Archives: RealOptions

Thank You, 2011!

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2011 has been an awesome and truly transformative year for me, maybe the most important in my life so far. The primary reason was that a number of new real options emerged that gave me opportunities to create value for myself and others in ways that I wouldn’t have expected one year ago. I’m very happy with what I achieved this year, and it’s time for a few Thank Yous.

AgileInfluencers

Some of My Influencers of 2011

The biggest change in my life this year was that I joined agile42. This move created learnings, opportunities, connections and friendships that deserve their own post. Thank you, agile42!

I’ll go along the timeline of this year and reflect, that will lead to one possible, sensible order… which does not reflect importance. I can’t possibly cover all the people I’ve met, and I will intentionally omit some personal stuff. So if you are not mentioned in this post and feel you could be, it’s probably because your contribution to my life has been too profound or personal to share in public.

One person that earned her place outside, above and beyond my timeline of 2011 is my wife, Christiane. I couldn’t have done anything of what I did this year without your love and support! Thank you so much.

How My 2011 Started

I was exhausted after a very busy year, having made the hard decision to leave the company I’d worked with for more than eight years to join another one. That meant changing from the most senior and respected expert to the newbie, the beginner in a team of awesome agile coaches. I was excited, and a bit anxious.

Over the past one and a half year, starting with the ScrumGathering in Munich 2009, I had built a lot of strong connections in the agile community, and finally, at the age of 40, found my tribe. So, before I start with the timeline, a huge thank you to all the readers of this blog and all my followers on Twitter.

My Followers

Thank you all for following!

Timeline

In January, I visited Norway for the first Norwegian CoachCamp that I had organised with Sergey Dmitriev, Ivana Gancheva, Geir Amsjø and a few others, meeting my friends Ken Power, Rachel Davies, and one of my new colleagues, Ralf Kruse. I met influencial thinkers and practitioners like Niklas Bjørnerstedt, Jon Jagger and Johannes Brodwall. A recurring topic of my year, LeanProcrastination, got a major boost in an open space session and through feedback by the real options gurus Chris Matts and Olav Maassen.

In Febuary, our first Play4Agile unconference brought together playful minds from many countries. Ellen Grove and Michael Sahota came all the way from Canada, inspiring me greatly. I’m especially great they joined the StrategicPlay crowd, just as Juliane Conradt and Thorsten Kalnin… Thanks our amazing StrategicPlay mentor, Katrin Elster! Ken Power was there, and Ole Jepsen, who’s work I admire since then. And I met Jurgen Appelo, we started to develop a plan for the ALE network… And he gave me feedback in a signature which I’m still thankful for (see picture below).

On my way home from Play4Agile, I learned that the ultimate change agent had taken one of my best friends.

In March, I started working with agile42. Wow, so many new inspirations… That kept me intellectually busy in a way that before had only happened “after work”…

In April, Ralf and I started the Awesome Coach of the Week blog series. Although we did not post every week, it’s one of this year’s endeavours that I’m quite proud of.

In May, I attended the XP2011 conference in Madrid and we created the vision for the ALE network. We started organising an unconference in Berlin… I met Liz Keogh, who’s been a source of inspiration since she taught me to write Haiku in 2009… This time, we built a vision in Lego together and I learned her model of Feature Injection in her BDD Tutorial. It’s been altering my work…

ChrisMattsLego

Liz building Chris Matts building a Network

I finally met JBrains and Michael Feathers, paired with Matt Wynne to finally learn Ruby, got to know Brian Marick and Esther Derby… (Thank you, Brian, for the chance to tango with Esther!) And the change agent hit again: This time he chose a car crash to take the father of one of my closest friends. Only the good…

One awesome sidetrack that happened while I was in Madrid deserves its own paragraph: I was contacted on Twitter by Pascal Pink, whom I did not know at the time. He wanted to know if I intended to come to the American AgileCoachCamp in Columbus, Ohio, in September … I said it’d not be on my way, and he replied, that would be sad, as so many Americans wanted to meet me and it might be easier for me to come over than for all of them to come here… I was flattered but still said I didn’t plan to go. He asked what kept me, time or money? I said, a bit of both, as to come over for just on weekend would be a bad use of time, and I didn’t know how to pay the flight. He suggested I could come over to LA for a few days, give a talk at an LA meetup and visit one of his clients with him, so that I could learn how they worked in the US. Afterwards, he would go to the ACCUS with me and pay for all my expenses, as part of his sponsorship for the event… I couldn’t believe it at first but he was serious:-) So it happened that one of the three invitations to the US I got this year actually came true.

In June, the ALE2011 organisation started for real, I still haven’t completely conceptualised how we let such an awesome outcome happen by applying anarchy with a purpose… Also in June, I attended the German AgileCoachCamp which I had co-organised and which was sold out in 18 hours… Meeting many awesome friends and getting lots of energy and insights from the community, especially from awesome coaches as Jens Hoffmann, Pierluigi Pugliese, Marc Löffler and Andreas Leidig… And I met Gitte Klitgaard, who’s been joining Twitter in the meantime, leading to lots of awesome conversations with Katrin and my dear Lady of Astonishment. And she’s helped me focus on commitments for this blog…

In July, my wife and me flew to Brussels to attend the amazing wedding of a friend, one of two short holiday trips we had time for this year… Thanks for the invite!

In August, I did my first Kanban trainings with Franz Ivancsich which were well received and we will definitely do more of… ALE2011 organisation took more and more of my time, leading to me not attending Agile2011 although I was one of the few Europeans whose session got accepted. My fellow ProcrastinationCoach Marc Bless played the LeanProcrastination Last Responsible Moment Game with my colleague Dave Sharrock instead, I heard it was well received…

One huge and huggy Thank You needs to go to all my fellow ALE2011 organisers, Marcin, Franck, Oana, Marc, Ivana, Sven, Catia, Jule, Mike&Mike&Mike, Monica, Christiane, Eelco, Ken, Jurgen, Sergey, Yves… We’ve been through a lot. We achieved greatness. Some of us became close friends.

September was easily the busiest and most awesome month of my life. It started with the ALE2011 conference… I met Stephen Parry, who amazed me with insights, a level of thinking I seldom have seen in our community and quotes like “Agile and Lean done wrong only show our clients how to do the wrong things righter”… The most lasting gift he gave me was a signature in his book (next to the one by Jurgen I mentioned above):

FeedbackInBooks

Awesome Feedback in Books

The event was a blast. An amazing mixture of innovative talks, open space facilitated by my amazing friend Mike Sutton, and lots of hugs.

Later that month, I went to LA and Columbus, as described above. Gave my talk about LeanProcrastination and played the LRM game, told Pascal’s client about Feature Injection, played our brand-new agile42 Kanban Pizza Game and met inspiring people at the CoachCamp. Siraj Sirajuddin, Pascal Pink, Mike Hill (whom I’d met in Madrid), Paul Boos, Michael Sahota, Mike Cottmeyer, Sameer Bendre and his lovely wife Meghana, Derek W. Wade, George Dinwiddie… Three people I was especially fond of seeing: Angeline “AgileMeister” Tan—it was awesome to finally meet you in RL, Tobias Mayer, a constant source of inspiration, and Matt Barcomb—I seldom made a close friend so fast. Looking forward to the chance to work together next year!

One unexpected gift I got in Columbus was the outcome of a long chat I had with Pascal, where he told me a few things about US culture and how that influences agile coaching, and explained to me why he had invited me in the first place… A topic for another post.

October and November have been comparably quiet… December started with the XPDays Benelux where Nick Oostvogels and I hosted a Coaching Dojo session. I met Ole Jepsen again, who ran a great session on Human Nature and Agile, and Portia Tung, who inspired me greatly with her Tribal Leadership session…

The closing event of my professional year was the agile42 coach camp last week, which like the ALE2011 gathered some of the most important people in my life in one place of awesome collaboration, challenges and new horizons… Thank you Andrea, Marion, Mike, Ivana, Gaetano, Ralf, Franz, Nusco, TaZ, Hugo, Dave, Lasse, Sergey, Benjamin, Geir…

And, to end with where I started: Thank you, Christiane, my Love.

We’ll rock the world in 2012! I’ll do my best to astonish and surprise you. Merry Christmas and God bless …

Thoughts on Words: Project

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Thinking is shaped by the words we use. Management thinking is shaped by the words managers use and are used to. If we want people to change their mindset, we must stop to use words that carry a history of bad meaning with them. Let’s start to create a new language to talk about development that explicitly avoids mistakes made in the past.

Project

Project as a concept was devised in a time when management still thought they could execute an endeavor according to a detailed plan. This worked in the times of Henry Ford, when employees were glad to be paid, and customers accepted that their cars were black. Both is not true anymore. Employees seek mastery and purpose, and request autonomy instead of detailed plans. Customer value today is rather discovered than simply produced. Uncertainty is the only thing you can be certain of.

A project is a temporary organisation formed by people working on a sufficiently identified goal. As long as projects were few, changes infrequent, this paradigm had its use. Now, changes are the norm, and every enterprise runs multiple projects. These don’t function as temporary organisations anymore when each member is belonging to multiple organisations at once. I don’t see the concept adding any value anymore, yet it brings this whole history of misconceptions to the table… Continue reading →

Compassion—the Power of Vulnerability

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I’ve learned a lot about myself in the conversations at AgileCoachCamp US. I talked with Michael Sahota, Dave Sharrock, Siraj Sirajuddin, Pascal Pinck and others about various topics, a prominent being the influence maps that Siraj had multiple sessions on during the camp. Today, Gerry Kirk posted a TED talk by Brene Brown that gave me further insights into the source of my happiness:

Connection

Brene talks about the personal ability to feel connected. She identifies shame as the fear of disconnection, not being worthy of connection. In order for connection to really happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen. She found in her research there are two groups of people:

  • one with a sense of worthiness, feeling worthy of love and belonging, and
  • one struggling for love and belonging.

Courage

 What do these people who feel worthiness have in common? She found they’re whole-hearted, they have a sense of courage, the courage to be imperfect. They share the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others.

These people have connection because of authenticity, and they fully embrace vulnerability. They share a willingness to invest in a relationship without knowing if it will work out.

Vulnerability

To me, her talk boils down to: people who realise that vulnerability is important, who say, “I’m enough”, surrender and walk into it, will be happier. Because:

You can’t selectively numb emotions. If you numb your vulnerability, you numb joy, gratitude and happiness too.

Real Options

To me, this connects with Real Options. Allow uncertainty back into your life—accept you have real options, and that these have value. Stop being certain, start having open conversations. To do that, you need to be vulnerable.

Anarchy with a Purpose—a Model for Emergent Awesomeness

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ALE2011 Awesomeness—lovingly captured by Marcin Floryan

ALE2011 Awesomeness—lovingly captured by Marcin Floryan

An amazing crowd of volunteers organised the first gathering of the Agile Lean Europe network, ALE2011. It happened last week, and being part of the organisation team has not only been an honour and a pleasure, but also the most successful project I was ever involved with. Why? Because the organisation was emergent, the leadership and responsibility distributed, the team passionate and hard-working, and the outcome and created value outstanding, evaluated by the people who attended the unconference.

As I talked with various people before, at and after the event about our organisational model, my understanding of how and why it worked so well grew, so that now I can start summarising and explaining what we did. This will be a multi-post endeavour, which I hope to finish within a week, and I’ll do it in a way that you can give feedback and improve my thoughts along the way. The main step is done: Eelco Rustenburg already found a working title: Anarchy with a Purpose.

This first post will only give you the most important influences and a first insight into how we collaborated, decided, and measured progress. I’ll structure it in a way that each topic can (and will) be elaborated upon in a subsequent post.

The Purpose—Start With WHY

 The gathering had a simple and very compelling purpose: our joint vision to grow a network of sharing practitioners. People volunteered because of this purpose, speakers and participants came and paid and shared because of that purpose, and it was a clear goal to follow while we designed, planned and created the event. WHAT we did and HOW we did it was pulled from that purpose.

Although it was not apparent to me while we did it, I’d like to thank Simon Sinek for the guidance of his quote: “People don’t by WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.” Q.E.D.

Pull Value Using Feature Injection

Chris Matts and Liz Keogh developed a technique that I learned from Liz in a BDD tutorial (she’ll do another one soon near Berlin). It’s called Feature Injection and it’s a way to pull valuable capabilities and features from your vision and goal. Without realising it, we organised our sofas according to the intended capabilities of ALE2011:

  • ALE2011 should create learning and sharing experiences (program sofa)
  • ALE2011 should reach out to and integrate local communities (community sofa)
  • ALE2011 should encourage practitioners to come to Berlin and share experiences (participants sofa)
  • ALE2011 should invite participants to bring their families (spouse and kids sofa)

These sofas self-organised and pulled the features they needed from these basic capabilities, like (taking the program sofa as an example):

  • ALE2011 should have short invited talks by speakers from many countries
  • ALE2011 should have an Open Space on every day without anything planned in parallel
  • ALE2011 should have lightning talks with topics submitted by all participants so that everyone prepares something to share

Implementation of these features was highly incremental, similar to a software team pulling stories from these features into development.

Balance Commitments using Real Options

Olav & Chris—Real Option Masters (photo by Ivana Gancheva)

Olav & Chris—Real Option Masters (photo by Ivana Gancheva)

Together with Olav Maassen, Chris Matts applied Real Options to Agile. I had heard and talked about it for a while (especially during the development of the LeanProcrastination idea), but ALE2011 organisation let me truly experience it first hand. We had no other chance.

Because of the short timeframe of organisation (less than 4 months) we had to find a venue fast and commit to a contract early, binding us (thanks to agile42 for taking the legal responsibility for this) to pay 48k€ on August 8th. The hotel was agile enough to adapt these conditions to our options, as registrations and especially payments came in much later than expected. For nearly two months, until the end of August, we did not know if we would break even.

Because of this, we had to be careful not to commit to any other additional costs too early:

  • The hotel’s internet connection,
  • A dinner for all,
  • More rooms for Open Space
  • Technicians videoing all the talks in professional quality.

Yet, the fact that we were not able to commit to “standard features” lead to the emergent discovery of new options that wouldn’t have happened any other way:

  • The amazing guerilla internet connection,
  • The Dinner with a Stranger,
  • Open Space in two big rooms instead of many small ones,
  • A professional cinematographer who is now editing videos of the conference.

The surprising outcome is, apart from our great product, that we now actually have some money left over.

Distributed Cognition, Avoiding a Backlog

We did not keep a backlog. We used Mindmeister, Basecamp. Twitter, email and Skype to communicate, and Google Docs to gather knowledge. I’ve been getting more than 1000 mails a week during the last months, just to give you a feeling (that includes Twitter and Basecamp notifications). We wrote down what we discussed and only decided what to do in the last responsible moment.

That led to a few mistakes (we informed people who had submitted a talk that was not chosen for the program far too late, for instance—sorry!) but in the end I think the experience would have been much less interesting and new had we wrote down what we wanted to do far in advance. Committing to a backlog is a decision that’s not so easy to change, especially with 40 volunteers working from that list. Continually communicating ensured that were reminded of important features, decisions and tasks on time (in most cases) and with the best available information, leading to better informed decisions.

We paid with a few mistakes and increased need of communication, but we earned a more creative, unintended, emergent result which delighted our participants. I think it was worth it!

Real Options again:

  1. Options have value,
  2. Options expire,
  3. Never commit early unless you know why.