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Keith Ray: Thought Pioneer

The following is printed with permission from Keith Ray. It originally appeared here. The post is preserved here in unadulterated form. In this post he makes certain assertions that start to link Agile practices with the ability to manifest a Learning Organization. This is a great read.

 

 

Quotes:

Continuous Learning. I’ve always said that XP requires a Learning Organization, and this practice make it explicit.

and this one…

“….If everybody isn’t learning, then learning becomes a subversive activity.”

What is striking about this post is the obvious development of many of what are called Tribal Learning Patterns in the Culture Game book….blogpost follows…..

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2003.Apr.24 Thu

What is Industrial Extreme Programming?

At the BayXP meeting last night, Joshua Kerievsky, Russ Rufer, Somik Raha, and Tracy Bialik of Industrial Logic gave a presentation on their version of XP that they have developed over the last several years. They named it “Industrial Extreme Programming” (IXP). What follows here are taken from my notes. Any errors are my own.

IXP is what Industrial Logic has been doing the past few years as they work with their clients in training and coaching XP projects. Joshua said he was concerned with recent “blendings” of XP and other methods (DSDM, FDD, Scrum, Crystal) because some of those blendings were throwing away XP’s planning practices (one of the most valuable aspects of XP). Many of these blendings were for the most part untried and unproven, as well, though the unblended methods have records of success.

IXP doesn’t remove any of the core practices of XP (except Metaphor, and few teams have really felt like they successfully used XP’s Metaphor practice). IXP builds on XP, adapting it for survival in larger companies, highly political companies, and large teams.

Kent Beck defined four values of Extreme Programming, values he felt were essential… other values were good, but he wanted to emphasis four in particular. XP’s values are Communication, Courage, Feedback, and Simplicity. Agile Modeling adopted those four and added Humility.

Joshua and his team have chosen five values, which they not only want to emphasize, but insist that the absence of these values in the project or company will cause failure and unhappiness. The IXP values are: Communication, Simplicity, Learning, Quality, and Enjoyment.

The value of Enjoyment is sometimes deemed controversial. Joshua considered Fun, and probably felt Enjoyment sounded better. People who enjoy their work are more likely to want to learn I’ve always said that XP requires a Learning Organization). People who enjoy their work and enjoy working together are more likely to have the teamwork that XP requires.

Quality is “we know it when we see it.” Quality products, quality code, a quality process, quality people.

These are the original XP practices that IXP includes (more or less), sometimes with modified names and meanings: [names in brackets are the original XP names, or the names I prefer over Kent’s names.]

 

  • Sustainable Pace
  • Planning Game [Release Planning, Iteration Planning]
  • Frequent Releases [Small Releases]
  • Refactoring [Merciless Refactoring]
  • Story Test-Driven Development [Programmer Tests, Acceptance Tests, TDD]
  • Continuous Integration
  • Pairing [Pair Programming]
  • Collective [Code] Ownership
  • Coding Standard
  • Domain-Driven Design [replaces Metaphor]
  • Evolutionary Design [replaces Simple Design?]

The name changes are for clarity and to expand things beyond just coding — people can pair on other things besides code, collective ownership can extend beyond code.

The new practices are:

 

  • Readiness Assessment
  • Viability Assessment
  • Project Community
  • Project Chartering
  • Test-Driven Management
  • Storytelling
  • Storytesting
  • Small Teams
  • Sitting Together
  • Continuous Learning
  • Iterative Usability
  • Retrospectives

Readiness Assessment answers the question “Are they able to transition to IXP?” See http://www.industriallogic.com/xp/assessment.html.

Viability Assessment answers the question “Is the project idea viable? Profitable? Feasible? Does the project have the necessary resources?”

Project Community expands on Kent Beck’s “Whole Team” concept. “People who are affected by the project and who effect it.” (Hope I got that quote right.) This includes QA staff, middle and upper level managers, tech support staff, programmers, DBAs, customers, end-users, and probably marketing and sales. (Reference to David Schmaltz / True North Consulting’s Project Community Forum.)

Project Chartering provides the Vision and Mission, as well as the definition of who is in the Project Community. A light-weight exercise that seems to be necessary for clarifying the project’s goals.

Test-Driven Management requires objective measures be defined for the success of the project. External results like “support 100 users by December 2003.” The Whole Team cooperates to achieve this goal. Also defines return on investment.

Sustainable Pace. They considered renaming this to “Slack” (see the book by Tom DeMarco). An example of the value of slack is that it can provide the time for someone to write the tool needed to increase development speed — too much focus on getting stories implemented quickly can be sub-optimal.

Storytelling. I think Joshua separated this out from Planning Game in order to emphasize that story-telling is a natural way to get requirements (sometimes after a bit of coaxing). IXP stories are not necessarily “user-centered” stories, since they may address concerns of administrators, maintainers, etc. “A story is an excuse to have a conversation.” Conversation is required to understand some stories — a story that can’t be understood can’t be implemented. Five words for a story title was also mentioned.

Storytesting. One word, to parallel Storytelling. This is defining the acceptance tests, but not writing them. IXP coaches help their clients in both Storytelling and Storytesting. Ideally, you do want “executable documentation” and they talked up Fit by Ward Cunningham – a framework that allows anyone using any editor capable of creating HTML tables to be able to specify acceptance tests. (Programmer help is still required to plug an application into Fit’s acceptance test framework.)

Planning Game. Joshua says that it is very weird that some of the hybrid methods are throwing away the planning game. This practice is so useful that many of Industrial Logic’s clients, who did not adopt all of XP, did adopt the Planning Game. Still, the concept of “velocity” (work done per iteration) seems to elude some clients

Frequent Releases – frequent end-user releases — same as XP’s practice. Enables rapid return on investment. Releasing to end-users provides opportunity for feedback, to find issues in deployment, issues raised by real live users. “Without learning, feedback does no good”.

Small Teams — for large projects, set up networks of small teams, with their own code-bases and coding rooms. A 30-person project might consist of teams as large as ten people and as small as three. Sometimes there might be a testing team and/or refactoring team that join the each of other teams at various times and then move on. Industrial Logic practices Pair Coaching, which does not require that both coaches be together at all times. Pair Coaching does enable coaching larger projects than a single coach could cope with.

Sitting Together — Joshua says that the term “Open Workspace” turns some people off, but it is the same concept. He has seen a 40-person XP team in one very large room, but that’s unusual. He has also seen one or more people give up the office they worked hard to get, because pairing in the same room as other people let them focus better and learn more. Sitting together / pair-programming can be done via internet collaboration, so it isn’t limited to open workspaces. The gave an example of a team split in two time-zones, who decided to synchronize their hours to allow more “virtual pairing”.

Continuous Learning. I’ve always said that XP requires a Learning Organization, and this practice make it explicit. Examples… Study groups who are not just allowed, but encouraged to get together for three hours a week, during office hours, because they know this helps them advance in their careers. XP Coaches who assign practice drills to the programmers or QA testers. “Lunch Break” learning groups show that management doesn’t care enough about their employees learning. An XP coach in Italy spends an hour a day teaching his junior programmers — whose skills are rapidly advancing. I think an member of the audience said “If everybody isn’t learning, then learning becomes a subversive activity.” Joshua also said that “resume-driven-design” tends to happen because programmers are starving to learn, but not given opportunities to do so.

Iterative Usability. The UI must be usable and tested regularly. Management-Tests should be tied into Iterative Usability. Redesign the UI as soon as feedback shows its flaws. Paper-based GUI design was also mentioned.

Time was running out, so the remaining practices were discussed quickly…

Evolutionary Design. Drives all design. Their tutorial has ten practices for this. (http://www.sdmagazine.com/documents/s=7928/sdmsdw3d/sdmsdw3d.html.)

Coding Standard. Have one.

Pairing. As per XP, but not just programmers.

Collective Ownership. As per XP, supported by tests, pairing, etc.

Retrospectives are a critical practice. Some clients are reluctant to get 40 people together for 2 or 3 days for a full project retrospect, but they should do it for the unexpected learnings that come from it. Also do mini-retrospectives each iteration.

Refactoring. Early and often as per XP. Don’t let “refactoring debt” accumulate.

Domain Driven Design. Even though never officially a part of XP, it has been done by every good XP programmer that Joshua knows. The Model objects are kept separate from the rest of the code (GUI, etc.) The acceptance tests normally operate on the model objects, skipping the GUI. See the book on this subject at http://domainlanguage.com/. See also Erik Evan’s “Ubiquitous Language”.

Story-Test-Driven-Development. First write a failing acceptance tests. Then use the TDD cycle (failing programmer test, code to make programmer test pass, refactor) until the acceptance test passes. This is “top-down” TDD, and it best avoids writing unnecessary code.

Continuous Integration. As per XP.

See http://www.industrialxp.org/ for more information. Check out these papers, too: http://industriallogic.com/papers/index.html
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Pioneers in Thought Leadership

I am actively looking for people who have been linking Agile to the Learning Organization concept before 2012. Specifically, I am looking for folks who have written anything in books, papers and blog posts predating 2012, that explain how Agile practices are actually the A-B-C steps to building a small Learning Organization that we currently call a Team.

Here are some of the links I have received so far. These links show how pioneering thinkers have been VERY CLOSE to the idea that Agile practices actually are the A-B-Cs that get a group to start engaging in patterns of behavior (the Tribal Learning Patterns) that literally manifest the Learning Organization in small groups.

These are the pioneering thought leaders, the true trailblazers:

Chris Matts: 2003, web page:

http://abc.truemesh.com/archives/000107.html

“…Agile is Learning…All Agile principles and practices are based upon feedback and learning. ”

Chris Matts: InfoQ interview: 2010

http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/05/learning-machine

“…I want the the Agile community to know that the community is in fact a learning machine….. and it is broken. If something is not done to fix it, it will only last another couple of years before it fragments and something else will rise to replace it.” (NOTE: Please examine www.TheCultureGame.com and www.CultureConference.org)

“…I recently wrote a blog post where I state the Agile Manifesto is actually a call to arms to create a software learning community. This is not a recent view of Agile although it is a recent reflection on the manifesto.”

 

Keith Ray, circa 2003, via his blog:

http://homepage.mac.com/keithray/blog/2003/04/24/

“…Continuous Learning. I’ve always said that XP requires a Learning Organization, and this practice make it explicit.”

NOTE: If the above link is broken, USE THIS ONE: http://newtechusa.net/agile/keith-ray-thought-pioneer/

Keith Ray: A link from Keith Ray circa 2003…

….that covers QUITE A FEW of the Tribal Learning patterns that Agile practices encourage…..no direct mention linking Agile practices to the manifestation of the Learning Org…

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/extremeprogramming/message/82917

There’s a company that provides facilitators and arranges events for
other companies to help them think about their problems. They get a lot of people together in one room (they have places in various cities for
this purpose), and do various exercises not unlike some described in
Norm Kerth’s book on Retrospectives, and among other things do a log of
writing on sheets of paper on the walls.

 

 

 

 

 

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Four Years of Open Space

(NOTE: This is a guest post from my friend Jay Vogt, author of RECHARGE YOUR TEAM: The Grounded Visioning Approach.)

Rex and Bruce, two managing directors at Cyrus Innovation, had planned their big quarterly company meeting down to the last detail, but they still weren’t happy with it. They went back and forth, trying to find better ways to cater to employee needs, and really engage them. Finally they said, why don’t we just let them decide what they want to do? Let’s toss the whole agenda, and meet in Open Space.

Open Space is a self-organizing meeting method that allows participants – in this case the whole company – to meet without any preset agenda. Participants, guided by a few simple principles, create their own agenda, convene their own discussion groups, and produce their own proceedings. Participants use their time as they see fit.

Cyrus, with twenty employees, held its first company meeting using Open Space, and it went well; after that people asked for it. It became a company standard, and they’ve been doing it consistently, once a quarter, for the last four years. Today Cyrus has nearly fifty employees.

Cyrus maintains an open climate. Any topic in Open Space is fair game. “No one has ever put anything on the table that made me wince,” says Rex Madden, Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer. “It has run the gamut. From policy-type things – like the receipt and expense process is too hard – to how we can keep attracting top talent, to technology-specific things, to client-specific stuff, like how we can convince this client to do X. Even pay scales got raised, and after that, we opened them up. We have always believed in transparency. Open communication is one of our core values, and Open Space reinforces that.”

“How has it changed our culture? We tried to move toward getting teams to be more autonomous, giving people more responsibility to do things. Our attitude has been, ‘Go forth and do it, and let us know how it goes, and what you need.’ There is part of that embedded in Open Space. We are following the employees.”

“Doing Open Space gives us a sense of what people are interested in, what they want to do now, and how they want to approach something. You can learn a lot about people. When we see people are interested in something, we support it. One time, a guy went to a conference, and wrote up great notes. We said, ‘This is great, let’s share this with our clients.’ A gem of an idea grew into a marketing piece. This guy was really passionate about it. There is a lot of that. We have learned to recognize what people are interested in – where they excel – and we nourish it.”

“My advice to other companies? Read Harrison Owen’s book (Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide), get a facilitator, pay for some decent space so you can leave the office, and do it. Invest a full day, and be sure you follow up on action items. Retrospect it to improve it, and add value. On the first one, you will uncover a lot of stuff – better be listening for that. You will find out anyway, through other mechanisms, what the problems are, so you might as well get it straight, deal with it, and move on. Whatever it was we used to do, that came up as stuff at our first meeting, we don’t do anymore, because we fixed it.”

It takes some courage to throw your whole company into a day long meeting with no preset agenda, but Open Space, also known as Open Space Technology, rewards the brave. It challenges participants to connect with what they really care about, and are willing to make happen. It challenges managers to trust their people, and let them step up. The folks at Cyrus would say that a company that meets in Open Space over years enjoys a more open climate, with more autonomous teams and more passionate people.

Jay W Vogt is president of Peoplesworth, and author of Recharge Your Team: The Grounded Visioning Approach and Board Roles to Board Goals: Creating an Annual Board Workplan. Jay has facilitated hundreds of meetings with at least a hundred participants, and regularly facilitates meetings in Open Space. To see a four minute video of Open Space in action, visit: http://www.peoplesworth.com/2011/12/jay-facilitates-open-space/ 

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Winning the Productivity Game

Dave Logan is the author of TRIBAL LEADERSHIP. In this book Dave describes the triad, a structure that is essential for scaling Agile from teams to tribes.

In my book THE CULTURE GAME, I describe how to use triads to get viral spread of the sixteen team-learning practices described in that book.

Please join Dave Logan and myself (Dan Mezick) on the 1-hour FREE call entitled Winning The Productivity Game.

During this public learning event, you will learn:

  • How to raise your productivity at work, both individually… and in teams;
  • Why your meetings (and often work in general) can be soul-sucking death march from hell, and what to do about it;
  • What specific techniques you can use as a manager and/or someone who convenes meetings…to raise the level of engagement and productivity at work;
  • Where you can find specific resources and tools to help you install small changes (“culture hacks“) with big, positive effects for your teams and the wider organization.

Register now for this call to learn the specific steps you can take tomorrow to raise the level of productivity in your organization.

 

During this 1-hour call, you can help make work and meeting more engaging, productive and fun. I plan to disclose specific techniques to do this that are found in THE CULTURE GAME book.

You can click this link to learn more about the event, and sign up to be on the call! I hope to see you there ! Here is part of the description of the event found on the CultureSync registration page:

Play the game and love your work. Author and coach, Dan Mezick, will join Dave Logan for a rousing 60 minute romp through the games you can play every day to make work more productive, satisfying, and fun.

Dan says: 
Productivity at work is a game. If the core requirements for productivity at work are not present, you disengage and check out. If the core requirements are there, you automatically experience fun, satisfaction and potentially, a deeply engaged sense of well-being.

We’re sure he’ll share the 8 specific things he’s learned you must do if you are to win the game of engagement, happiness and productivity at work. You’ll walk away from the call with actionable techniques you can start using today to win the productivity game.

NOTE: This is a free online event from CultureSync, Dave Logan’s company providing education, tools and resources for leaders, managers and teams who are seeking an upgrade of their company culture.

REGISTER HERE:  Winning The Productivity Game

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Speaking in “We”, thinking in “Me”

Psst. Want to change the world?

If so, you’ll need the right kind of folks on the bus, the kind of people who “get it”.  You’ll need some leadership. Some TRIBAL leadership.

Me vs. We

My friend Dave Logan, author of TRIBAL LEADERSHIP, outlines 5 specific stages of culture. At each stage, the majority of the people in the culture are telling each other a standard story for that level. Stage 3 is “I’m great, (you’re not)” and Stage 4 is “We’re great (they’re not).” The difference is in where you get your identity from. At Stage 4, most (but not all) of the people get their identity from the group, rather than individual-ego….

The five stages of tribal culture, expressed as stories, from most basic to most advanced,  are as follows:

1. Life sucks!

2. MY life sucks!

3. I’m great! (You’re not.)

4. We’re great! (They’re not.)

5. Life is great!

There is a specific pattern of behavior that can rapidly create a dystopia in organizations and teams. It happens when people in a team or org “talk a good game” about Stage 4 and use “we” language, while behaving in Stage 3 “me” language.

I call it “speaking in “We” and thinking in “Me.”

“Thinking in We” is required if you are out to do something big that is literally impossible to do alone. It’s a Stage 4 way of being. At Stage 4, the language is about being the best tribe in a given domain or market. “We’re great” is the place where many successful companies START. Existing companies can do rework, to “refactor” or upgrade their culture by developing new “tribal” language. It’s all explained in Dave’s remarkable book.

If you cannot get big things done at Stage 4, “We’re great”, you have NO SHOT at Stage 5.

And what is Stage 5?

Stage 5 is the platform for manifesting world-building initiatives. Stage 5 the “Life is great” stage, where a focus on competitors literally disappears. The tribe has loads of alignment around a huge, world-changing  idea, and all of them together execute on making it happen. Stage 5 culture is rare.  When it occurs, the people in the culture are predominantly Stage 4 folks who know that game, and want to play a much BIGGER game.

(NOTE: These folks always seek each other out. And find each other. And help each other. It’s automatic behavior at Stage 4.)

Bottom line: We cannot do Stage 4 work unless we are at Stage 4 in our heads, in our mindset. This is why Stage 3 individuals have no shot at executing on big, huge, Stage FIVE work that requires a world-building mindset. That’s because, according to Dave Logan, you have to “own” each stage completely before you can move to the next. You cannot skip a grade. Stage 3 “I’m great” type people literally have no shot at Stage 5, because they are attempting to skip Stage 4 and do not have the essential “We” skills necessary to actually execute on genuine world-building.

Scrum and agile set up at least the potential for a Stage 4 culture, that  “We are great” mindset. We can argue that people that do not “get” agility are stuck at Stage 3, 2 or 1. You can learn all the stages of Tribal Leadership, in detail, by getting the book and reading it.

My book THE CULTURE GAME leverages the best ideas from Dave’s TRIBAL LEADERSHIP book. THE CULTURE GAME employs triads for socializing agile (group) learning up and out of IT, from teams to tribes. You can learn more here.

Dave Logan and I are developing products and services that combine the best of TRIBAL LEADERSHIP, agile, and what I call trans-agile or Tribal Learning patterns and practices as described in THE CULTURE GAME. There are 16 specific practices in the book, that any manager can put to work, today, to upgrade team culture.

If you want to sign up for interesting tutorial podcasts that Dave and I are doing around these ideas, click here to  sign up.

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What Kind of World Are You Building?

Jim and Michele McCarthy are the authors of SOFTWARE FOR YOUR HEAD, a book about structuring essential interactions inside great teams. There is one piece of this book, the chapter on the FarVision Protocol, which is very interesting.

 

It is as follows:

You work hard, burn out, and wonder why you bother.

You always play a role in creating the future, whether you choose to manage that role or not. Perhaps it is true of you that you can see no greater purpose to your work than supplying your own material needs and those of your company. Without purpose, you have a random effect on the future. That is, the world that results from your efforts is an accidental world.

Your team’s FarVision must answer this question:

What kind of world are you building?

The initial answers to this question are not always satisfying, because you don’t usually think of your daily activities as world building. When suddenly faced with such a question, you feel unprepared. You might avoid a direct answer. You might ask for clarification of the question. You might try to talk away the emptiness of your preliminary answer. Regardless of the response triggered by this query, there is real value in asking and answering the question, because it focuses the mind on the larger opportunities available.

If you are unable to directly and unself-consciously answer this question, you may want to examine why you don’t see the significance of your daily grind. Of course, the question of what kind of world you are building makes no sense at all unless you accept the implication that you are, in fact, building a world. Most of the time, of course, you may not consciously engage in the task of world building.

Nevertheless, your engagement in world building is a simple truth. You have beliefs. Every day you act on those beliefs. Your actions have external effects, and ultimately they cause your beliefs to materialize in the world. In essence, you change the world to look more like your beliefs. You build a world.

If you really are building a world, and if you are doing so unconsciously, you literally don’t know what you are doing. While you might not identify your purpose as the creation of a world, having a larger motivating purpose gives you a frame of reference for choosing alternatives. It is difficult to see how you can truly meet your daily challenges unless you bring a sense of purpose to each moment. Maintaining a broader purpose seems a necessary precondition of enjoying the highest levels of personal integrity.

To have integrity, your intention, your words, and your actions must be aligned. If you know what kind of world someone is building, and you are building the same kind of world, then you can work together on this goal, with much less noise and wasted effort cluttering the environment between you.

Like other team qualities, team integrity is the aggregate of the personal integrities of each team member, enhanced or diminished however much by the effects of the interpersonal synergy. The aggregate level of integrity has a positive correlation with desirable results.

Without a central purpose, an individual or team finds it impossible to make enlightened choices. Each day you make many choices. Before doing so, you check the alternatives against your larger purpose and envision how the alternatives might play out in the world you want to create. Wise choices, those that promote your world’s completion at reduced cost or in nearer time frames, are maximally useful to your purpose.

Even without the context of a larger purpose, you still must select from alternatives. Without an organizing purpose, however, your choices will be made according to whim and spontaneous, sometimes bizarre, and usually inconsistent motives. Inefficiency, apathy, premature cynicism, and failure result when individuals or teams make product design decisions in this way. The Core, on the other hand, provides you with a purpose template: to build a world.

Individuals, teams, and institutions have found that the most challenging, useful, and satisfying task is world building.

 

Many worlds and many kinds of worlds are possible.

 

CLOSING NOTE:

SOFTWARE FOR YOUR HEAD is a book. It’s available as a free PDF via the this link:  Free PDF Book. The aim of the book is to focus your attention on techniques for structuring great interactions…in pursuit of creating great teams.