Author: Alexis

I used, once again, listening exercises during the Devops Masterclass that I delivered with one of my colleagues in Ho-Chi-Minh-City for the APAC Red Hat Tech Exchange. I committed this time to publish a short description of those exercises.

I set the stage for the exercises with a short warm-up exercise 1-2-3-Go ! That helps to understand we are not probably using only our ears in the listening process 🙂

Then, I asked the group to form pairs.

First Rule

I explained to them that we will start with one listener and one talker and that we will have the opportunity to switch role later.
The talkers will have to speak for 60 seconds and deliver a story on any subject that is really important to them.
The listener will have to respect a first rule : Don’t talk.

I then facilitate a debriefing session, asking the listeners how they found the exercise, and then how the talkers felt about the listening of their counterpart. I insist on how they felt 60 seconds was, long or short ? I insist also that asking question may derail the talkers from their path, and that it may lead them on something that is important to you, but not them.

Second Rule

When the group is ready. I propose that we switch the role of listeners and talkers and that we introduce a second rule : Don’t even think about talking.
And we start again for 60 seconds on a story that really matters.

The second debriefing session is even more interesting about how difficult it is to not let the mind wander on something else. There’s obviously questions on the importance of questions that are here to clarify what the talkers are saying, or that demonstrate the interest of the listeners.Usually, I don’t need to answer those ones, a part of the audience gets it very fast and is able to answer that. What is the goal of your question if we are not listening to the answer but are working on preparing questions ? Our questions will probably be answered if we let the person continue their speech, or this question may have a small interest at the end.

Variants

There’s a lot of variants possible for this simple exercise:

• you can propose to the person to prepare their speech fixing the topic on introducing themselves. You will need to add more time for this (probably go for 90 to 120 seconds…)
• you can propose the persons to add a small bar on a paper each time they have a question during the first phase, and to tick this bar when the question is answered. And ask them to consider the bars that are still there at the end and to measure the importance of those questions.
• you can propose to the group to work in group of 3 people, with one observer each time

I first heard of this exercise from Paul Klipp in ALE2014. Another time, I attended a session with Olaf Lewitz and Michael Sahota during the Scrum Day in Paris in 2015. And one more time with a session delivered by Oana Juncu during Agile France 2015. Each time, there was variants, and each time it was really powerful. I had the opportunity to test it on different occasion, and it is a good eye opener to ease the following conversations.

When will you try it ?

Header photo Listen to ME! by Jonathan Powell under Creative Commons

Last week, I rehearsed a session around the evolution of organizations, methodologies and IT with some people of the Red Hat Montreal office. Thank you to them for their valuable feedback! Even if the title of the presentation was Devops and Bimodal IT, I presented some roots of the evolution of organizations and methodologies, and their short term and long term impacts on businesses.

I used a timeline and zome out to show previous moves, and “selected” important events, like Deming involved in the Japanese reconstruction, the new new product development game by Takeuchi and Nonaka, or The Machine That Changed the World : The Story of Lean Production by Womack and Jones.

At the end of the presentation, there was a discussion thread around clarity of vision and goals of enterprises. One question arose that foster an animated conversation : “What is the goal of agile enterprises?”.

This question led to a definitive answer from one attendees : “The goal of enterprises is to make money.”

And the discussion starts…

There was opinions like: “the others purpose are only things to hide the main goal of making money…” or “good intentions, but if we look at what enterprises are measuring, we know that money is the main driver”… and so on…

I tried to push my opinion that money was only a by-product of a higher purpose for enterprise that operate on a different model than “making money” ones. And that it worked for those companies… People seemed not really convinced… Still some work to do on this 😉

Featured image by Jericho [CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

The first time I explain that to enable collaboration, we need to create the conditions of this collaboration between people, people approved… But I feel like it’s not really understood.

The idea that a meeting needs to be facilitated to help participants to achieve their goals is seen as animation… Like if it was only entertainment…

I lived an interesting experience that can illustrate this idea of “creating the conditions”. We joined friends for a weekend in an holiday village. It was a real discovery as we didn’t know the kind of village and the place.

When we arrived by car on the car park, several employees was waiting for them with big smiles on their face. They took care to explain to the three of us that they will take care of the luggages, indicates us where to park, and how to find our room.

The simple fact that they were smiling, welcoming, benevolent enable in a snap a total deconnection from the week. I was on holiday! Nice weather and nice place probably count also… But I am sure that it was their behavior that makes a real difference.

The last sentence pronounced by one of them reveal their intention : “The dream begins now”.

And it works, I was instantly on holiday, and those one and half day spend there was really restful.

This can makes us think of the behavior we will adopt during our next appointment or meeting?

Two weeks ago, I facilitate a quarterly meeting of a distributed team. They met in person only once a quarter during this meeting.

I chose to start the meeting with an exercise to share their feeling about the last quarter. I asked:

Can you draw a line representing your happiness level during this period?

The levels are represented by weather symbols that make them more understandable for the people of this team who are coming from several countries in the world. They almost all chose to comment the drawing when they were drawing the line, and when they were not, I asked them to comment, and after that I thank each of them for sharing.

I was amazed by the amount of information shared during this simple exercise about their general feeling about their work, what make them tick from holidays to specific achievements, learnings, relation established with other people and so on…

I feel also that the state of mind of the whole group was best prepared to review the results achieved during the last quarter.

On the second day, in front of the drawing, I start by thanking them again to have shared their feelings about the last quarter and I asked them to use one or two post-it notes to answer this second question:

What are you proud of?

Once again, a good question to understand what’s important for the individuals in the team, and a good way to set the stage for the day.

If you try this, I would appreciate your feedbacks.

In 10 to 15 years, self-driving cars will be a reality in our world. It means that, people transportation and goods transportation will be done by those self-driving cars and trucks. The positive consequences are numerous and will be highlighted by manufacturers and service providers, like the possibility to order your vehicle from your phone and your computer. We will be able to remove traffic lights, and there will be no more (or less) traffic jam, less car accident…

We have seen with the emergence of Uber and other apps that can help you to order a car with chauffeur that the market was disrupt heavily. Imagine just one second that the car you will order with Uber will be self-driving ones in a few years from now.

In one article published on Medium, Tanay Jaipuria, questioned the decisions that will be made when it will come to the programmation on those robots. Isaac Asimov covered a lot of complex cases in his novels, now it’s reality…

One of the consequence of those self-driving cars will be unemployment of millions of people that are taxi or truck drivers. It’s not so easy to find the exact number of truck drivers in the world. More that 3.5 million in the US, so I suppose that there are more in Europe and Asia, as the number of truck registrations is 50% higher in those areas.

Millions of unemployed people that will not so easily find a new activity.

We can say (or think) that it’s not our fault or our responsibility. I believe that we should care about this problem and put in place an unconditional basic income for every people that will cover the basic needs, and give time to people to find an activity that can suit them.

A basic income is an income unconditionally granted to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement. More information can be found here.