Category: General

When I searched for “time management” on google this morning, there were 238,000,000 results. So, we could consider that it’s not necessarily useful to add one more.

A quick look at the first page of results, and we can already see divergent opinions. From the rigid daily structure to the statement that time management is ruining our life.

Let’s start with the most important first: why do we want to manage the time we have?

The common answer is: “To get things done”.

What are those “things” we want to be done? and why it’s important?

Because those things contribute to the accomplishment of a greater goal.

All that sounds really great! So, why do people are saying, from time to time, that they don’t have the time to do what they want?

As I fall myself into that kind of trap, I can try to list a few potential causes:

• Knowing what you want and why you want it: if you don’t, the lack of time could be just a nice excuse? Writing down your vision of where you will be in the next 5 to 10 years on the different aspect of your life could be a good exercise.
• Knowing what is the most important thing right now in order to make it happens: if you don’t, you want something, but you did not do your homework yet in order to make it happen, and so the question you need to answer is: What’s the ONE Thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?
• Driving yourself: Maybe your calendar or your inbox are driving what you are doing? If this is the case, you know what is the most important thing, but you are not doing it. One way to solve that could be to block some time, at the beginning of the day for the most important thing, and then only after that, choosing to invest time working on your inbox. Another important one is to empty your calendar, you will not be able to participate in everything and contribute to everything. Choose where your contribution is valuable.
• Interruptions: multitasking is a myth, and so you want to limit the interruption during the block of time you are working on the most important things. The number of decisions we are able to make in a day is limited, so you don’t want to make decisions at each new notifications, new mail, new message on social media…
• Care for yourself: you should have a block of time to care for your body, to exercise, to meditate…
• Invest in social interactions: you are not alone, and you need, as a human being, social interactions, so you probably want to invest in interactions that will have a positive effect on yourself, so you can have a positive effect on others.

I practiced the Pomodoro Technique in the past, and that definitely helped me to increase my focus on ONE thing at a time, and not to be fooled by my own estimates.

Maybe something to start with?

The header picture is from Ryan McGuire.

The term Town Hall Meeting is often used inside a company to characterize a meeting organized by a highly ranked executive and gathering a large part of the company employees, or even all of them.

Usually, the meeting is meant to give a short status on what the executives are working on for the future of the company and to answer some of the burning questions that have been heard in the hall way. Some of those questions have not been heard directly by the executives, but have been reported to them by some people. I have used two times the word “some” in the last sentence to give a sense of fuzziness, and uncertainty of what are the real concerns of people.

Let’s imagine that you are this executive, you have organized the meeting, you are ready for your speech, everybody is there. So now, you delivered your speech and you are ready for questions.

And, there’s no question.

Or, if there are questions, there are pushed by some manager, that want you to repeat what you already said, something that will reinforce their own beliefs, or positions.

In your speech, you have even gone further than what was planned to be said with your management team, and you have said that.

But still, there’s no question.

And, you know that there are unspoken questions. But the time is over, and there’s no way to know what are the real questions.

What is the problem?

Maybe the problem lies in the format itself. The Town Hall is not giving the sense to people that they can contribute to the thinking, that they can disagree. The Town Hall presents yourself in a position of power, with the authority to say yes or no.

Now, let’s say that you are a participant of the Town Hall Meeting.

At some point during the speech, you had one question. It was not really a question, in reality, it was more a slight disagreement. Maybe you wanted a clarification.

During the course of the speech, you have seen that effect reproduced 2 or 3 times. But that was not the time for questions.

And when the time for questions came, you cannot find a way to formulate all this in a meaningful way.

You even heard some of your coworkers said at the end of the meeting: “I bite my tongue because I really not agree with what Mr. Z said on this topic”.

Another option?

Maybe, If we want more interactions, if we want people to ask for clarifications when it’s time to do that, we need to use another format of meetings.

One of those formats could be a Fish Bowl.

In a fish bowl, the executive will not be alone in the center, so he can be joined in the fishbowl by some people in his or her management team. And it’s a moderated conversation, so topics can flow more freely from one or the other.

In addition, there’s an empty chair in the middle, and any person in the audience can sit on that chair to join the conversation at any time. When this occurs, an existing member of the fishbowl must leave the fishbowl and free a chair.

This way the clarifications questions and the slight disagreement could be covered at the moment they arise, and more questions and concerns can be covered.

Are you ready to try this?

The header picture is from Ryan McGuire.

Thanks to a push email from Harvard Business Review, and discussions around ongoing transformation efforts, I read again an old article from John Kotter: Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail.

The first lesson is that change is not an event, it’s a process. The second lesson is that change takes time, and not following the change process could create an illusion of speed, but will result in failure.

If we study successful or unsuccessful changes attempt using the 8 steps proposed by Kotter, we could learn a lot on what we could improve in the future.

One aspect that is not directly covered in the 8 steps is what is called “Your organization”.

I learned from successful (and unsuccessful) changes, that defining “The Organization” is crucial. It will define who is part of the core group, and more importantly, who is part of the core group from the start.

Let’s say that in your organization, you have several teams that need to work together to deliver a product or a service, and you observe that they are struggling to deliver, they could even engage in politics and blame game.

If you engage with team A and team B. That could be, for example, because they are at the beginning of the production process, or for other reason, as you will always find great justification for what you did and cannot undo. I am smiling there, at myself, please don’t be offended.

You could work with those teams on step 1, and establish a sense of urgency. You could work on step 2, and form a group that will lead the change.

Now that you learned more on the production process, you can clearly see that team C, plays a crucial role, and needs to be involved.

As you are yourself driven by the sense of urgency, you could decide to involve team C for step 3. You could rationalize this shortcut as much as you can, but it will cause you a lot of troubles.

The best option is to go back to step 1, and work with team A, B, and C on establishing a sense of urgency, and continue the process from there. Until that restart, Team C will not see the same crises or potential crises, they will not see the same causes, and they will not want their future to be dictated by other teams.

The header picture is from Ryan McGuire.

You probably remember the first 2 rules of Fight Club, right?

Let’s review the rules:

“Welcome to Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club! Third rule of Fight Club: if someone yells “stop!”, goes limp, or taps out, the fight is over. Fourth rule: only two guys to a fight. Fifth rule: one fight at a time, fellas. Sixth rule: the fights are bare knuckle. No shirt, no shoes, no weapons. Seventh rule: fights will go on as long as they have to. And the eighth and final rule: if this is your first time at Fight Club, you have to fight.”

― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Let’s now define what a retrospective is. A retrospective, is a specific session, in which a team reflects on what happened during the previous iteration. This reflection will lead the team to decisions, either to reinforce positive behaviors, or to invest time to improve what is preventing the members to achieve their goals.

There’s a lot of ways to facilitate retrospective, you could go here and there to find out more.

Isabel, my amazing wife, had the idea to create an “all-in-one” retrospective plan based on the Fight Club rules. You will learn more about this plan in her book to come.

In the meantime, I would like to present how I used the idea to foster productive conversations in a team that is scared of conflict. This is the second of the 5 dysfunctions of a team.

Maybe you think that using fight is too violent in the workplace. And at the same time, what happens in us, during a discussion could be felt as fight.

The meeting will start with the explanation of the goal, and how the Fight Club rules are transposed in our work environment.

The first 2 rules are useful, because, as stated by a manager in the team, the children don’t want to hear that “mum and dad are fighting”. I could argue that this statement in itself says a lot about the current state of trust in the organization, and that in an effective organization, the manager will probably not consider himself or herself as the parent of the team members. If we put that aside, the first 2 rules are useful to create a secured space in which conflicts are allowed, and nobody knows that we could have conflict in this team.

So we are saying there, that during this specific meeting, we will not seek artificial harmony, we will accept to start the conversation on topics that we are not in agreement (yet).

Third rule, we need to be able to stop the conversation. Fourth rule, only two people involved, everybody fighting at the same time against one is not a smart idea, right?

Fifth rule: one fight at a time. Let’s not mix all the topics in the conversation.

Sixth rule: no protection and no weapon. Is referring to your boss a weapon? Let’s discuss what it means for the team.

Seventh rule: … as long as they have too… We need the conversation to end with a decision.

Eighth rule: first timer have to speak up. In fact, every team member will have to bring a topic on the table.

What is missing there, is a way to bring topics that is non judgmental. So we could have a productive conversation. Isabel proposed to use Non Violent Communication, to encourage people to observe, express their feelings (and not their thoughts), to express their unsatisfied needs, and their requests.

This explanation of the 4 part of the NVC process could help 🙂

Tracking the mood of the team is something that agile practitioners are doing for quite a long time. For example, in 2006, Akinori Sakata, explained in this article the use of Niko-niko calendar.

The idea is to tighten the feedback loop, and to detect problems even before they become really conscious to an individual, or to the team.

By exploring how we feel at the end of the day, it helps us to take a step back, and sometime to express what is not going well from our point of view.

So, I used it for teams, co-localized or distributed, for quite some time. The tooling is really simple if you only want to deal with the mood of one team.

At some point, I wanted to expand this to track the mood of an entire company, so we could be able to get more feedback, and to adapt what we were doing.

I had a look at what was on the market, and at this time, hppy.com provided a tool to allow a quick feedback using a smiley ( 🙂 😐 🙁 ) and to leave a short text message associated to that.

There’s now a lot of tools on the market that are exploring employee engagement, like Niko-Niko or Happify.

Is it a tooling problem?

Obviously the quality of the tool you will use, will have an impact on your ability to run analysis, or to scale the mood measurement, but my take after several experiments is that it’s not a tooling problem.

It’s how you will take into account the feedback and act accordingly.

You could also be interested in this article Manage Your Emotional Culture published in the Harvard Business Review at the beginning of the year.

There’s sometimes conversations within teams about the responsibility of prioritization of backlog items.

The problems is the end result of this conversation. Whoever could have this responsibility, that could be the Product Owner or that could be an agreement within the team, the results will look like:

• 80% of the items in priority 1
• 15% in priority 2
• 5% in priority 3

That leads to end-less discussion to find what could be priority 1, 2 or 3, and that’s not really helping to decide by what we need to start the first iteration, and what could be the meaning of it, and what could be the meaning of the next marketing release.

Near the planned date of the marketing release, people starts to worry about the priority 1 items that could not be included in the release. Suddenly the meaning of priority 1 became “must land in the release”, and people are focused and what will not land, instead of what will land in the release.

That’s the reason why I am trying to avoid the “priority” word. Instead I am asking in which sequence the items should be delivered. I am interested in the sequence of the items that could be included in the next 2 iterations. What could be the meaning of the iterations, and what could be the meaning of the release for the product and its users. It’s not priority, it’s a sequence.

Another illustration of sequence versus priority is the way the airlines are boarding their plane. Some of the airline are boarding first the business class and give a “priority” access to frequent flyers. That’s not solving the problem of boarding a plane as fast as possible. During my last visit in Austin, I have seen that Southwest Airline, organize the boarding in sequence with indicators inside the boarding terminal. This is a better attempt to fix the system.

That means that we need a tool that is able to record that sequence. A wall with post-its can do that. Most of the task/project tracker are not able to do that.

Header picture from Ryan McGuire.