You’ve spent the last few day at AYE learning how to recognize and solve problems. But, as you may have experienced, not all your problems can be solved, especially if they are part of a larger system.

Suppose, as a leader of a weekly meeting, you notice that people arrive 10 minutes late because their prior meeting ends on the hour and your meeting starts on the hour. You can manage the problem by starting your meeting at 10 minute past the hour. You haven’t solved the big meeting problem–which may be ineffective meetings, self-inflicted coordination overhead, or poor formal communication channels–but you have managed the problem with in your purview.

Other problems do not have a solution. You must find a way to cope with them (or not). For example, if you have an abusive boss, you may be able to recognize that his anger comes from his own vulnerability and let it roll off your back. But for some people in the same situation, that coping may not work. When the personal price for coping is too high, it’s time to exit.

In this workshop, Esther, Don, Johanna, and Steve will guide you through examining problems through simulations and group discussion. You will learn which approach–solving, managing, coping or exiting–may provide better results to your organization and, most importantly, to yourself.

Please join us for a full-day of exploring problems, fun and learning.

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For years, managers have been taught that their job is to delegate and direct, mandate and monitor. And, one might argue, they?ve been quite successful.

But new research shows that traditional management and directing people what to do isn’t always the most effective way to get things done. This is especially true with the younger generations entering the workforce, and in organizations who have decided to harness the creativity of self-organizing teams.

If you’re a manager who wants to re-think management and renegotiate your relationship with the teams you support, this workshop will provide you will tools to navigate that change.

We’ll learn tools that will help you determine which decisions the team owns, which they participate in, and which ones are the sole prevue of management. We’ll look at how to establish the boundary within which the team has free-reign. And we’ll examine the too-typical oscillating pattern of too much/too little management control.

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We’ve reserved the Fresh Catch for sessions that reflect our newest thinking.

Watch this space!

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Have you had the experience of watching smart people argue endlessly over which technology to use? Have you walked out of a meeting believing the group had agreed, only to find out that five different people thought they?d agreed to five different things?

People in our industry pride themselves on their brain power and ability to make good decisions. And most of us are good at thinking, learning, and deciding?on our own. When we work collaboratively on interdependent work, though, we need to think and decide as a group if we want to realize the benefits of the team effect.

In this session, we’ll experience a group decision. Then, we’ll look at the pieces and parts of the process to see what we can learn about how groups think and decide togther. We’ll tease out the techniques that will help you help groups take advantage of all their expertise, see other points of view, and arrive at high-quality decisions.

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It’s not easy to build the right product. People sometimes don?t know exactly what they need, want things that won?t help, and don?t imagine what’s possible.

Agile project capture requirements on cards that contain a statement of want and benefit and notes on how to confirm the need is met. The intention isn’t to fully document the requirement on the card, but to make a note and create a reminder for a conversation with the customer.

Whether you are using agile methods or traditional requirements, valuable products start with understanding the customers context, their problems, what they want, and how they use a product.

However, most people aren’t born with the ability to speak naturally in user stories or fully formed requirements statements. So we must learn how to ask the right questions, draw out pertinent information and understand the customer?s world in those conversations.

In this session, you’ll learn about different types of questions, and when to use them to learn about how the customer currently uses a product, the problems they experience with the product, and problems that new features in the product might solve. Then, we’ll put that to work in practice interviews.

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Learning new skills and development processes requires time and effort. In the end, we hope for improved productivity. Having someone with experience in the new area coach the team can reduce the time and effort needed to get this improvement.

Coaching has many facets. One part involves facilitation – helping make the change process easier. Another part has coaches giving advice to the team around options the team might consider, but leaves the decision to the team.Occasionally the options advice becomes more guiding suggeting” What would happen if you tried this?” Another part of coaching could be pairing with a team member demonstrating and practicing techniques.

In this session we’ll do exercises exploring the coaching facets and how they affect performance. Participants will learn strategies and actions to add to their coaching toolbox.

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Efficiency means doing things right. Effectiveness involves doing the right things. Becoming more productive requires being both effecient and effective. But how do we do that? Employing the Agile Principle of “the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly” the team can do both. In short, the team conducts a retrospective.

Retrospectives form the basis for continuous improvement. The continuous cycle of inspect and adapt allows the team to experiment with changes. Some changes may focus on efficieny while other changes look to effectiveness. The iterative, incremental changes allow the team to check the results and decide if they want integrate the change into their process or try something else.

In this session we’ll do a project, and participants will experience a process for creating:
- a common understanding built on each member’s experience
- shared insights gleaned from the common understanding
- an agreement on what to do next

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This session is a coaching practicum, with participants coaching one another as coaches. These coaching scenarios will be the basis for illustrating deep principles of good coaching, such as:

• Making contact
• Creating and adapting a contract
• Coaching vs. consulting
• Coaching vs. managing
• Following the Rule of Three
• Perceiving the Big Picture
• Using meta-questions
• Handling “resistance”

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Managers want to improve results in their organizations, and use the tools available to them. One of the common most common tools is re-organization. Managers seek the optimum arrangement of people, processes, and work to achieve goals–creating new teams, here, new reporting relationships there, and a ramped up process or two. These changes can have a dramatic effect, though often the one desired.

It’s easy to say that the change was ill-conceived, ill-designed, poorly implemented, or scuttled by resisters. While that is sometimes true, even a sound design will fail when it doesn’t take into account the informal and invisible structures that pervade organizational life. Seeing the hidden structures opens possibilities for action and avoids pitfalls.

In this session, we’ll do a simple simulation and they analyze patterns of behavior based on the visible and invisible structures at play. We?ll also peek behind the veil of your organization as we work in small groups to analyze the interaction of structure and behavior where you work. When the invisible becomes visible, you will see more options for action.

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Sitting around the table with the ScrumMaster and his team, I quickly noticed Jack was the team’s big dog. Once he weighed in on the user story, discussion ceased, the team agreed with him, and the discussion moved on. When I re-connected with the client two years later, I learned that Jack had been transferred and the team’s velocity almost doubled.

Welcome to the “Uneven Participation” team trap. When a team experiences uneven participation one person or small group dominates the team’s interactions. Quiet team members fall by the way side. The team loses valuable input and dialogue. Frustration sets in and lack of buy-in creates false consensus, yet another team trap. Team traps occur when team interactions reduce the team’s ability to deliver value to the organization.

Using a series of projects, we’ll explore team traps and develop strategies for dealing with them.

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