AYE 2008 Conference
Sunday, November 2 - Thursday November 6, 2008
More Conference Information
Sunday Session
AYE WARMUP TUTORIAL, all day with Don Gray and Steve Smith (SesEight00) (Optional, extra tuition)
Sunday Evening
WELCOMING BUFFET DINNER
Monday Morning Sessions
What is the Problem, Really? Creating Better Problem Definitions (SesEight01)
How do You Feel About Change? Experience the Satir Change Model (SesEight02)
First Steps for Organizational Change: Unearthing the Data you Need (SesEight03)
Monday Afternoon Sessions
New Ways of Seeing the Organization: Organizational Mapping (SesEight04)
Guiding Change with Retrospectives (SesEight05)
Making Something Happen: Diagrams that Show the Way Things Really Work (SesEight06)
Remembering Your Resources When Stressed: The Self Esteem Toolkit (SesEight07)
Tuesday Morning Sessions
Change that Really Works: Making the Team More Effective (SesEight08)
Change that Really Works: Making the Organization More Effective (SesEight09)
Choosing the Right Coaching Approach: Congruent Coaching (SesEight10)
How to Lead More Fruitful Discussions (SesEight11)
Tuesday Afternoon Sessions
Go for Quality, Go for Speed: Making Tradeoffs (SesEight12)
I Think We Could Work Better Together: A Framework for Giving and Receiving Feedback (SesEight13)
Bottom Up Change (SesEight14)
Moving Projects Forward: The Clinic Method (SesEight15)
Wednesday Morning Sessions
Selling Your Ideas to Management (SesEight16)
Building on Strengths: Making Better Use of Personality Resources (SesEight17)
First Things First: Managing The Project Portfolio (SesEight18)
Realizing the Promised Benefits of Agile Methods: Problems and Strategies (SesEight19)
Wednesday Afternoon Sessions
Magic Team Chemistry: Starting and Sustaining Teams (SesEight20)
Testing Lies (SesEight21)
Just Enough Leadership (SesEight22)
Now What? Bringing AYE Back to Work (SesEight23)
Wednesday Evening
AYE CLOSING DINNER
Thursday All-day Workshops
Designing Experiential meetings and conferences (SesEight24) (Optional, extra tuition)
Strategic Planning Without the BS (SesEight25) (Optional, extra tuition)
1-on-1 Consulting Opportunities with Don or Steve (SesEight26) (Extra benefit, free of charge)
SESSION DESCRIPTIONS
The AYE Warmup Tutorial
(Steve Smith and Don Gray
After the 2000 AYE conference, participants commented that a pre-conference tutorial would add value for new participants. They envisioned a full-day event that introduced participants to the vocabulary, such as “ENTJ” and “congruence”, shared by the people who would return to the conference. They suggested that a tutorial would not only provide value to those who had not encountered the vocabulary before, but also to those who had and wanted a review. Since then, we have offered the “Warm-Up Tutorial” to make it easier for everyone to participate from a shared understanding of the basics. It’s been a big hit.
The design of an AYE session is different than most conferences. The basic format of the typical conference session is one or two presenters talking from the front of the room to people seated in row after row of chairs. At AYE, session leaders use simulations to create shared experiences. People are often out of their chairs solving problems. When they are in chairs, they sit facing each other discussing their experiences and gaining insights from them. We believe that this approach enhances learning, and we’ll use it in this tutorial too. That means that you’ll have an opportunity to participate, determine what happens to a great extent, and have fun doing it.
We’ll introduce you to the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and several of the tools, techniques and concepts of Virginia Satir, such as: triads, safety, feedback, congruence, making contact, the communication stances, and the interaction model.
Join Don and Steve to warm-up before the conference starts by experiencing the shared vocabulary, models, and freedoms of the AYE Conference.
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What is the Problem, Really? Creating Better Problem Definitions
(Don Gray)
Have you completed a task, proudly showed your work, and discovered you didn’t solve the real problem? Or have you been on the other side where someone didn’t understand the problem you wanted solved? Have you tried to create a test and found the design document confusing beyond belief?
Better problem definition could prevent these occurrences. What constitutes a good problem definition? What rules can we use to develop and test our problem definitions?
Bring a problem with you and we’ll work in groups to create better problem definitions.
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How do You Feel About Change? Experience the Satir Change Model
(Steve Smith)
Improvement is always possible, but change is difficult. A gift from pioneering family therapist Virginia Satir is her model for how change takes place.
The Satir Change Model describes the: major stages of a change; transition between stages; effects each stage has on feelings, thinking, performance, and physiology; interventions that are helpful during each stage; and interventions that are harmful during each stage
We will go beyond an intellectual understanding of Satir’s model. You will climb inside the model and experience how you feel, think, and perform during each of the stages. You will hear how others experience the stages. You will explore with others constructive interventions that nurture change.
Our goal is to help you take the next step to effectively applying the Satir Change Model for transforming the way change takes place for you, your team, and your organization.
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First Steps for Organizational Change: Unearthing the Data you Need
(Johanna Rothman)
If you’re planning a trip, you have to know where you’re going-but even more importantly, you have to know where you’re starting. It’s the same idea when you’re trying to fix the problems you have in your organization. You can’t work faster, cheaper, or better, unless you know how fast, how cheap, or how good you are now. You can’t work more collaboratively unless you know how collaborative you are now.
You can learn where you’re starting with no more than three simple questions. The questions that work for me are: “How do you know what to do?”, “How do you know when you’re done?”, and “What would make your job easier to do?”
In this session, you’ll learn how to design three questions that work for you to start an assessing conversation. We’ll explore which questions work, which questions are traps, and how to stay out of trouble with questions. You’ll learn to use questions as the first step to uncovering the data you need to lead your organization to success.
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New Ways of Seeing the Organization: Organizational Mapping
(Steve Smith)
Organizational mapping is an adaptation of Virginia Satir’s approach to family system sculpting. It’s a powerful technique that can be used in several situations:
to help an organization understand and diagnose its own interpersonal or intergroup dynamics
to help a group from similar organizations understand typical dynamics
to help a group understand the dynamics of its relationship to outside groups
to provide consultation in a training context to a consultant engaged in a change effort with a client system.
We’ll learn the technique by giving each person a chance to map an organization of interest, with consulting from other participants.
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Guiding Change with Retrospectives
(Esther Derby)
Many changes start with a plan. And many plans collapse when they encounter something unexpected. And when you change an organization, it is inevitable that youíll encounter something unanticipated.
Once you have a change plan how do you keep it out of the dust bin? How do you turn unanticipated lemons in to lemonade? How do you distinguish rough diamonds scattered in your path?
Most of us think about doing retrospectives after projects to launch process improvements. But retrospectives during a change effort can help teams and organizations in many ways. They help the team understand where they are. They help the team analyze obstacles and visualize paths forward.
In this session, weíll experience a retrospective and explore how to incorporate retrospectives in any change process as part of the plan-do-check-act cycle.
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Making Something Happen: Diagrams that Show the Way Things Really Work
(Don Gray)
Why do my actions create the opposite results from what I really want? What slows down or derails change efforts? The Diagram of Effects provides a way to examine how people, events and actions interact and influence each other.
We’ll use the Diagram of Effects to generate insights into what’s happening in a system and locate intervention points to steer by. We’ll practice using the notation, then work on your problems. You’ll leave with a new way to show why things happen and how to intervene to generate better results.
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Remembering Your Resources When Stressed: The Self Esteem Toolkit
(Jerry Weinberg)
Remember how the Wizard of Oz gave the Scarecrow a brain, the Tin Man a heart, the Cowardly Lion a badge of courage, and Dorothy the power to go home? According to Virginia Satir, the Wizard’s great secret was that each of his supplicants already possessed the tools they thought they lacked. The Wizard’s job was merely to remind them.
From this idea, Virginia developed her idea of the “self-esteem tool kit”—a set of resources that each of us owns but often forgets to use when we’re feeling powerless. Virginia’s original kit consisted of the following:
The Wisdom Box—the ability to know what’s right and what’s not right for me.
The Golden Key—the ability to open up new areas for learning and practicing, and to close them if they don’t fit for me at a particular this time.
The Courage Stick—the courage to try new things and to risk failure.
The Wishing Wand—the ability to ask for what I want and to live with not getting it.
The Detective Hat, sometimes teamed with The Magnifying Glass—the ability to examine data and to reason about those data.
The Yes/No Medallion—the ability to say yes, the ability to say no (thank you), and the ability to mean what I say.
This session will provide user-training for these six tools, plus a handful of other tools we have added over the years: The Heart, the Mirror, the Telescope, the Fish-Eye Lens, the Gyroscope, the Egg, The Carabiner, the Feather, the Hourglass, and the Oxygen Mask
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Change that Really Works: Making the Team More Effective
(Don Gray)
Not all changes make teams more effective. Poorly timed, misdirected and overly complex changes slow or confound improvement efforts.
In this session you’ll experience different forms of attempted change and decide which work and which don’t and when. From there we’ll create rules of thumb for successful changes helping your team be more effective at avoiding disasters and creating success.
Many change tactics work well on the team level, but may need to be adjusted on the organizational level. If you are more interested in working at the organizational level, consider attending Esther Derby’s session, Change that Really Works: Making the Organization More Effective.
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Change that Really Works: Making the Organization More Effective
(Esther Derby)
Managers have good reasons to ask the people in their organizations to change: a competitor launches a new product, material prices rise, a new technology changes the way you do business. Maybe youíve tried to implement such a change only to find that people hang onto their old ways. And maybe youíve asked yourself, ëWhy is it that people resist my well-thought out and reasonable requests to change?
If you want to be more effective accomplishing your organizational change goals, come to this session. We’ll experience a change to see what works and what doesnít. Weíll discover when to manage closely, and when to allow the change to evolve organically. We’ll look at how to obtain feedback to adjust the change to obstacles and opportunities.
Many change tactics work well on the organizational level, but may need to be adjusted on the team level. If you are more interested in working at the team level, consider attending Don Grayís session, Change that Really Works: Making the Team More Effective.
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Choosing the Right Coaching Approach: Congruent Coaching
(Johanna Rothman)
Many of us have experienced sports coaches, where they helped us stretch for the crawl, turn in dance, or catch a ball. But sports coaching tends to be just one kind of coaching-and not necessarily the kinds of coaching you need to provide or hear at work.
Coaching is one of the most important-and most difficult-responsibilities of leaders. Too often, people struggle and fail when it comes to coaching others. Coaches may try to impose their style on someone else for whom it doesn’t fit. Some coaches try to transfer “best practices” regardless of how well they fit the organization. Other coaches talk too much.
Congruence, the balancing of self/other/context, helps both the coachee and the coach. We will explore how to recognize when you are the right coach-and when you’re not. We will explore multiple coaching techniques so you can select the ones that most fit you, the other person, and the context. We will practice coaching in several ways and see which ones you prefer, and which ones you might need to practice more.
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How to Lead More Fruitful Discussions
(Steve Smith)
Is your time frequently wasted in fruitless group discussions?
For example, you join a problem solving meeting attended by the right six people. But the discussion wonders aimlessly and contributes little to the solution. You feel your time was squandered and wish you would have invested your time doing something that would have made a difference.
Discussions tend to stray. Without shepherding they will diverge rather than converge. Groups that have consistently effective discussions have a common characteristic—members step up when needed to help lead the discussion. It’s not a single participant, such as the facilitator, who is the “leader” but rather many leaders who participate in shepherding the discussion to success.
Here is another example of a fruitless discussion. I attended a conference that had a structure that I hadn’t experienced before. I could choose among a number of parallel meetings. I chose a meeting filled with dozens of experts and dozens of bright people. I was thrilled with my opportunity to learn. But two attendees engaged in a continuous argument about minutia. Their argument dominated the meeting. I learned more about the topic talking to someone after the meeting than during the meeting. I wasted my time. I wished for the opportunity to go back in time and choose a different meeting..
Arguments aren’t necessarily bad. They often bring important information to a discussion. But when arguments stop adding information, a meeting leader needs to step up and shepherd the discussion toward new information.
These are just examples. The same kind of things happen in meetings both small and large. I’ve seen discussions go awry on trivial issues, such as what picture will hang in the lunch room and who will receive the largest amount of a trivial bonus pool. Without meeting leadership, fruitless discussion abound.
Join this session, to learn about solution to these examples and more. Learn how to lead meetings from the front and the back of the room.
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Go for Quality, Go for Speed: Making Tradeoffs
(Steve Smith)
YOU (TO MANAGER):”What is more important quality or speed?”
MANAGER: “Both”
Is this a familiar script?
Deciding whether to tradeoff quality for speed or vice versa is a fundamental decision for a product development team. Its members, not just its managers, often don’t appreciate the difficulty and necessity of making this decision.
Making sound tradeoffs involves dealing with the interplay of logic and emotion in the decision process You will have an opportunity to experience this interplay and the value of making a conscious decision.
You will be a member of a team competing against other teams to deliver a product to market. Parts of your product work as designed: Other parts are defective. Your product is more valuable if it has less defects. But reducing defects takes time and resources, which increases your product’s time to market thus potentially decreasing its value. Your team must grapple with this predicament and decide on a tradeoff between quality and speed in the face of competition.
We will examine how your team stacked up versus its competition. We will explore how the teams dealt with the predicament. We will reveal the patterns in how emotion affects the logic of tradeoff decisions, especially under competitive pressure. Step back and learn how to make more conscious, effective tradeoffs that lead to the outcomes your organization desires.
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I Think We Could Work Better Together: A Framework for Giving and Receiving Feedback
(Esther Derby)
I recently spoke with a colleague who was distressed that her office mate picked his nose throughout the day. “Have you told him his habit distresses you?” I asked. “No, I didn’t want to hurt his feelings,” she said. “I just avoid him as much as I can.”
Even if you’ve never been in this exact situation, chances are you’ve been in a similar oneóa situation where you were unable to tell a co-worker was doing something that made it hard for you to work with him or her. Or maybe you told co-worker, but you were uncomfortable or it didnít work out well.
Maybe youíve been on the other side of this situationósomeone offered you feedback in a way that was cryptic or hurtful. Or someone didnít tell you something because they were afraid of hurting your feelings even though the information would have helped you.
Come to this session to increase your comfort and ability to offer and receive feedback in work situations. We’ll learn a helpful framework and practice offering and receiving feedback.
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Bottom Up Change
(Johanna Rothman)
Maybe you’ve realized that schedule games such as Schedule Chicken aren’t helping your project. Maybe you can see times when implementing by feature makes more sense than implementing across the architecture. Maybe you have a great idea for reviewing work products. But you’re not the Top Dog in your organization. Is there any way you can start some change in the organization?
Yes, you can. Bottom-up change might be more limited than change that starts at the top, but everyone in the organization has the potential to make some improvements. In fact, change that starts inside a project or with a small team has tremendous potential to make the change stick in the organization. In this session, we’ll examine the kinds of events that could lead to bottom-up improvements, ways that you can start with bottom-up change, and how to nurture the improvements as you proceed.
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Moving Projects Forward: The Clinic Method
(Jerry Weinberg)
Many projects die unfulfilled, but why?
Every project, no matter how well planned, no matter what it’s methods, no matter how motivated to perform, encounters and endless series of small disturbances: a developer with resistant flu; a misunderstood interface; a new requirement; a lost password; plus a million other other small things that become big things if they’re not dealt with and disposed of. A project that cannot surmount these “minor” obstacles swiftly and efficiently will be late, over budget, and not pleasing to its users and customers.
The Problem Solving Clinic is a project tool for dispatching small problems before the escalate into major issues. In this session, we’ll learn how to build the clinic method into a project’s culture. We’ll conduct sample clinics dealing with participants’ problems from all phases of a project and well as in management, leadership, and coaching.
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Selling Your Ideas to Management
(Steve Smith)
Do you wish you could break through and communicate your ideas more effectively with management?
Employees do their best to sell their ideas to busy managers. But a typical outcome of the conversation is “No.” or “Let me think about it.” Employees seldom ask and management seldom offers feedback about elements of the proposal that worked and those that didn’t.
If you could hear managers talking with each other, you would hear them complain about employees who whine; who don’t define the problem; who don’t state the impact of the problem in business terms; who don’t provide an action plan; and who don’t explain why fixing this problem is more important than fixing other problems. Help your management see you differently, as someone who connects their ideas with how they benefit the business.
Managers are busy. You may only have only one shot at selling your idea. Make it your best proposal.
Join this session to learn about three top characteristics of proposals that sell; apply these characteristics to an idea of yours; simulate a conversation with management where you propose your idea; and simulate the same conversation after hearing feedback and receiving coaching.
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Building on Strengths: Making Better Use of Personality Resources
(Don Gray)
Have you ever sat in a meeting wishing the blowhard would shut up? What did you think when the twit asked for data supporting the database upgrade you just proposed? Why does Steve keep worrying about how Joe feels? Aren’t we here to get a job done? How about the time no one else on the team could come to the obvious decision?
If you’ve had these or similar experiences, you’ve been exposed to different personality types. With improperly handled differences, the team slowly grinds to a halt just prior to imploding. Handled constructively, these differences create the bed rock for an effective team.
We’ll explore personality types Extravert/Introvert, Sensing/iNtuitive, Thinking/Feeling, Judging/Perceiving. We’ll experience their strengths and weaknesses. We’ll examine how to use them for better team performance. Perhaps we’ll find there isn’t anything wrong with the other person.
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First Things First: Managing The Project Portfolio
(Johanna Rothman)
Have you ever been told to multitask-working on so many projects simultaneously you don’t know where to start or what to do next? On the other hand, have you ever felt so pressured by your organization that you asked your staff to multitask?
Multitasking happens when leaders don’t set direction for themselves and other people. The most important decisions leaders make are about who should work on which projects when-the project portfolio. These decisions determine your results-how effective and productive you and your group are. In this session, we will discuss what a portfolio is, what it looks like, what it doesn’t look like, and we’ll explore how to make decisions about it, qualitatively and quantitatively.
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Realizing the Promised Benefits of Agile Methods: Problems and Strategies
(Esther Derby)
Is your organization hoping to realize the promised benefits of Agile methodsófaster time to market, better quality, and higher productivity? On the surface, adopting agile methods may seem simpleóand it often goes well with the first few teams. But when agile expands beyond a few teams, the change can be difficult, time-consuming and costly. In the end, if the transition isnít done well, your organization will pay the price and may throw out the whole thing.
What are the common pitfalls of transitioning to agile, and how can you avoid them? In this session, weíll confront the specific issues related to adopting agile methods, for eample, working iteratively, role revision, culture shock, existing organizational structures and procedures.
Drawing on my knowledge of Agile adoption and participants questions and experiences, weíll develop a sense of how to navigate an agile adoption.
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Magic Team Chemistry: Starting and Sustaining Teams
(Esther Derby)
Some teams start wellóthey seem to have that mysterious chemistry from the beginning. Other teams wallow, stumble, bicker, and slog their way to uncertain results.
Weíll explore the essential ingredients of that magic team chemistry. For example, weíll examine such tactics as building team cohesion, clarifying goals, and determining if the work really requires a team.
Weíll learn how to look for clues that tell us what a team needs to get out of the muddy wallow. Weíll experience actions that we can take both as leaders and team members to help the team soar.
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Testing Lies
(Jerry Weinberg)
How many myths and fallacies can you find in these commonly heard statements:
- “The product was on schedule until the testers got hold of it.”
- “The product didn’t sell because the testers didn’t fix all the bugs.”
- “I know we’re almost finished testing because we’ve found so many bugs already.”
Do you wish you could help your managers and co-workers see these myths and fallacies, too?
Are you a tester or test lead who is …
- feeling misunderstood or under-appreciated?
- tired of taking the blame?
Or are you a project manager who would like to …
- be better able to predict test schedules?
- have more productive relationships and less bickering between developers and testers?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may benefit greatly from participating in this session.
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Just Enough Leadership
(Johanna Rothman)
If you’re like most technical leaders, you came to leadership through the technical ranks. Many of your leadership role models showed you what not to do. But just avoiding those mistakes isn’t enough to make you a great leader.
A great leader creates an environment for success. For that, you don’t need micromanagement-in fact that’s exactly the wrong thing to do. But you can’t use hands-off leadership-that’s not enough direction or guidance.
You don’t have to be like Goldilocks before you arrive at just enough leadership. In this session, you’ll have a chance to experience just enough leadership. We’ll explore the boundaries of a leader’s job, and diagnose some of the issues holding you back from being an exceptional leader.
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Now What? Bringing AYE Back to Work
(Don Gray)
By the end of the AYE Conference, you will be bursting with new ideas and insights. What will you do with these ideas and insights? How will you incorporate them into your work life and home life?
We’ll do guided introspection - a personal retrospective on your experiences at the AYE Conference. You’ll capture your ideas and insights and build a high level action plan. From that plan, you’ll pick one or two items and consider the following:
- How you will know you’ve accomplished the goal.
- What you’ll see, hear, and feel when you achieve the goal.
- Is the change congruent with your overall values?
- What resources you have that will help you?
- What resources will you need, and how will you get them?
- What and whose support will you have?
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Designing Experiential Meetings and Conferences
(Esther Derby and Jerry Weinberg)
Would you like your own classes, conferences, and meetings to be more like the AYE Conference? Would you like to assure that your students really learn? Start on your path with this tutorial.
Participants will have the opportunity to present one of their own exercises, have it critiqued, possibly improve it, and do it again. Through these experiences we’ll study learning theories and models, different formats for experiential learning, the larger context in which learning takes place.
We’ll focus on design: where to start: learning objectives vs. metaphor idea; where to find design ideas; how to make an exercise idea relevant to a particular learning objective, and vice versa; mechanics and logistics of design; technique and style; testing a design.
Then we’ll learn about running the exercise and debriefing. When we’re finished, you’ll be well started on your own as an experiential trainer.
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Strategic Planning Without the BS
(Johanna Rothman)
If you’ve ever been in a strategic planning session, you might be tempted to hold your nose and swear off them forever. They tend to take a long time, supply vague output, and result in motherhood and apple pie statements. BS strategic planning wastes time and doesn’t answer the questions of what do we do, who do we do it for, and how will we execute.
But great strategic planning allows each person to deliver his or her value to the organization. Strategic planning helps people decide which work to do first-or even if that work is necessary at all. Strategic planning helps you know which projects to do when, and when to hire which kinds of people. Strategic planning helps everyone know what to do and what not to do.
Because real strategic planning has to start with a real mission, bring a draft mission. We’ll check that the mission is clear and make sense. We’ll also check that your personal mission is clear and congruent with the organization’s mission.
We’ll proceed through a series of steps to define objectives, strategies, and goals. We’ll work through each step, removing the BS, ending up with steps you can do and know when the steps are done. You’ll leave with your mission, vision, and values, and some ideas for how to continue the strategic planning back at work.
One-on-One Consulting Opportunities
(with Don Gray or Steve Smith)
Master consultants Don Gray and Steve Smith will be available all day for one-on-one or group-on-one consulting to AYE registrants. Choose your topic. Choose your consultant. Schedule in advance. This consulting is an extra no-charge benefit for AYE registrants only.
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