Podcast appearances and mentions of daniel mezick

Jim talks with Daniel Mezick on the theme of games and their relationship to governance. They discuss Jane McGonigal's four properties of games, the nature of authority, position-based vs role-based authority, formal vs. informal authority structures, finite & infinite games, mutable games, the paradox of self-amendment, the U.S. Constitution as a game, progress tracking in governance systems, roles, artifacts, rules, events, Constitutional reforms, problems with a two-party system, unintended consequences in rule design, game theory & system design, gaming virtue, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP151: Daniel Mezick on Ritual and Hierarchy JRS EP219: Katherine Gehl on Breaking Partisan Gridlock Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, by Jane McGonigal Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, by Christopher Boehm Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization, by Dave Logan "The Tyranny of Structurelessness," by Jo Freeman Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, by James Carse "The Paradox of Self-Amendment," by Peter Suber "Designing the Future," by Jay Forrester Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, by Johan Huizinga Coaching executives and teams in Agile since 2006, Daniel Mezick leads Improving Agility. Daniel has guided dozens of organizations in the art and science of Agile improvement. An author and co-author of three books on organization change, Daniel is a frequent keynote speaker at industry conferences and events. He is the originator of OpenSpace Agility, an engagement model for enabling authentic and lasting organizational improvement. He is also an Advisory Board member and co-Founder of The Open Leadership Network, a certification body and community of practice dedicated to implementing Open patterns and practices inside business enterprises worldwide.

Scrum is as agile as the moto mindfuck of Orwell's Novel 1984! This is the Dare Real Agile Episode 60 From the 2021 Friday Livestream vault.  A forgotten interview with Daniel Mezick! So much actuality nowadays of the rising authoritarianism, at this beginning of 2024, as we call for Renaissance of our way,  by stopping […] The post War is peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, Scrum is Agile. appeared first on Agile Lounge.

Coach AF goes into is takeaways from the Agile Boston Conference – 15th Annual Give Thanks For Scrum with Daniel Mezick, Dr. Jeff Sutherland, Dan Lefebvre, Dave West and many more. This year GTFS Theme: Empiricism in the Modern World The Agile Boston Conference Reviewed : https://www.agileboston.org/gtfs/2023event Let's Talk about agile survey Buy my Guests […] The post Give Thanks For Scrum Takeaways appeared first on Agile Lounge.

This Month's Episode: Coach AF left the Business Agility Institute because of unshared values, and announce his summer chill break and a tech diet. Alexandre Frédéric Joly goes on to showcase 3 initiatives of next-level decentralization ongoing. Finally, Alexandre Frédéric Joly welcomes Daniel Mezick to discuss Decentralize Now proposition of actions with Open Patterns at […] The post Decentralize Now! appeared first on Agile Lounge.

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Agile The Age of Imposition Recorded  LIVE at Scrum Beer #16 on March 24, 2022 at the Deville Dinerbar in Montreal!   Coach AF welcome 4 guest to engage an authentic and unscripted conversation in the state of agile consultancy and more.   Are we in an Age Of Imposition? Why Tyranny of Framework process forced into teams and organizations ? More on that with: Sue Ryu

Agile The Age of Imposition Recorded  LIVE at Scrum Beer #16 on March 24, 2022 at the Deville Dinerbar in Montreal!   Coach AF welcome 4 guest to engage an authentic and unscripted conversation in the state of agile consultancy and more.   Are we in an Age Of Imposition? Why Tyranny of Framework process forced into teams and organizations ? More on that with: Sue Ryu

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Daniel Mezick about open leadership. What motivates people and how to get great results in a group. Organizations are social games with goals, rules and players with different resources and decision rights. Most organizations are totalitarian dictatorships with a heavy management tax. Open organizations are much more effective at harnessing the talents of their people and resources. Harness peoples talents by giving them an attractive goal, clear boundaries, leadership support and the right to make decisions about their own work. Be generous, calm and support your people.   Listen to the podcast on your favourite podcast app: | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | iHeart Radio | PlayerFM | Amazon Music | Listen Notes | TuneIn | Audible |    Connect with Daniel via Linkedin , Murray via email or Shane in the Twitter-sphere  @shagility.   The No Nonsense agile podcast is sponsored by: Simply Magical Data

Jim talks with Daniel Mezick about two books on leadership & social coherence, Michael Suk-Young Chwe's Rational Ritual & Christopher Boehm's Hierarchy in the Forest. They discuss ritual as a mechanism for large-scale coordination, mimicry in beer choice and Super Bowl ads, fragmentation of audiences through microtargeting, the relationship between common knowledge & ritual, China's … Continue reading EP 151 Daniel Mezick on Ritual and Hierarchy → The post EP 151 Daniel Mezick on Ritual and Hierarchy appeared first on The Jim Rutt Show.

In this Episode, Coach AF have a honest, open and authentic conversation once again with the great Daniel Mezick where they explore more in dept the decision right in Scrum. On keeping Scrum going well: “… a coach, called the ScrumMaster, helps…” Mike Beedle About Scrum being Agile and the ScrumMaster not having access to everyone In the organization. That's irritating for a scrum lean purist like me. Let's talk about it and the decision rights in Scrum Team with Daniel Mezick. 

In this Episode, Coach AF have a honest, open and authentic conversation once again with the great Daniel Mezick where they explore more in dept the decision right in Scrum. On keeping Scrum going well: “… a coach, called the ScrumMaster, helps…” Mike Beedle About Scrum being Agile and the ScrumMaster not having access to everyone In the organization. That's irritating for a scrum lean purist like me. Let's talk about it and the decision rights in Scrum Team with Daniel Mezick. 

I am so grateful to have this Excellent and dynamic conversation with Daniel Mezick with whom we explore open space agility and inviting leadership. The importance for us coaches to have access to the executive to really bring the change within by enabling conscious leadership. We also discuss how to get teams and stakeholders engaged through invitation based change and group decision right. How to reach Daniel: https://danielmezick.com The Agile Industrial Complex: the 2016 Essay http://newtechusa.net/aic/

I am so grateful to have this Excellent and dynamic conversation with Daniel Mezick with whom we explore open space agility and inviting leadership. The importance for us coaches to have access to the executive to really bring the change within by enabling conscious leadership. We also discuss how to get teams and stakeholders engaged through invitation based change and group decision right. How to reach Daniel: https://danielmezick.com The Agile Industrial Complex: the 2016 Essay http://newtechusa.net/aic/

Hi everyone and welcome to another episode on the Agile Atelier podcast. Today, I have the pleasure of chatting with Daniel Mezick about Open Space Agility. Daniel has coached executives and teams since 2006. He is also a ScrumAtScale Trainer, and an author and co-author of three books on organizational change: The Culture Game, The…… Continue reading Episode 35: Open Space Agility with Daniel Mezick

This episode of Joekub welcomes Daniel Mezick; charismatic author, entrepreneur, and founding member of the Open Leadership Network.  This might be the best monkey episode yet.  Here are the topics we cover:  • Daniel's newly minted cult called TIAC (This Is A Cult) • Tips for being an amazing communicator online • Don't worry about how it works, just care that it works • Learn acting techniques to be a better communicator • How to change a culture in 3 days by changing how decisions are made  Daniel is also giving a gift to the Joekub community.  To get a 10% discount to attend the virtual 12th annual GIVE THANKS TO SCRUM event go to: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-12th-annual-give-thanks-for-scrum-conference-event-tickets-122813040109 and enter in the code: joekub  You can reach Daniel through any of the following channels: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielmezick/ https://newtechusa.net/about/

In this episode Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, first spoke to Daniel Mezick & Mark Sheffield about using Zoom for Open Space events. They have release a set of guidelines and a checklist for online Open Space events under a Creative Commons license. Listen to the podcast for more. Curated transcript and more information on the podcast: https://bit.ly/3mcdIza Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube: @InfoQ Follow us on Instagram: @infoqdotcom Stay informed on emerging trends, peer-validated early adoption of technologies, and architectural best practices. Subscribe to The Software Architects’ Newsletter: www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter/

Im ersten Halbjahr 2020 war ich Teil des Orga-Teams für das DATEV DigiCamp (#DATEVlernt). Die vierteljährliche Veranstaltung ist Teil des Transformationsprozesses der DATEV. Im letzten Jahr fand das DigiCamp als Präsenzveranstaltung im Fürther Fußballstadion statt. Aufgrund der Corona-Pandemie wurde das DigiCamp im März 2020 abgesagt, das Camp im Juli fand vom 15.-17.07.2020 virtuell statt. Mit Christian Kaiser spreche ich in dieser Episode über die Vorgeschichte und die Erfahrungen der Veranstaltung. Shownotes: Christian's Stationen in der DATEV Christian im Intrinsify Podcast Viel reden hilft viel und im HR Klartext Podcast Studium Pädagogik (Andragogik), Praktikum bei der Datev Diplomarbeit Teleteaching (Videokonferenztechnologie in der betrieblichen Weiterbildung) Stationen im Bildungsbereich der DATEV Welche Transformation ist gemeint? Lernende Organisation, Agile Transformation und Digitale Transformation New Ways of Working: Agiles Manifest, Kanban Boards, Scrum Digitales Ökosystem der DATEV Hierarchie als “trainierter Muskel”, Netzwerk als zu trainierender Muskel Session-Dokumentation Change and Transition – Dialogräume als Teil unserer unternehmensweiten Transformation DigiCamp Vorgeschichte Zwei Ursprünge: Experiment Cross Solution Center und Community of Practice Change & Transition (CoPCAT) Einfluss der Systemtheorie durch Ausbildung bei Marc Poppenborg und Lars Vollmer (Intrinsify, Pathfinder Festival, Anm.: heute work-X Festival) Twitter als Kommunikations- und Lernwerkzeug DATEV DigiCamp Format Kuratiertes, vierteljährliches Format (Video), nicht Barcamp oder OpenSpace (mit Beteiligung von Externen) Format: Kleingruppen zum Start, Impulsvorträge, parallele Sessions (vorab ausgewählt) Wöchentliche Online-After-Hour als Möglichkeit, mit digitalen Kommunikationsräumen zu experimentieren Toolset DigiCamp: BlueJeans (Events und Meeting), Event App (Lineupr), DATEV Community (Vorstellungsrunde, FAQ, Session-Dokumentation) Besonderheit: drei 1-tägige Camps in Folge, Rahmenprogramm und einige Session wiederholen sich (ursprünglich wegen räumlicher Begrenzung, später wegen technischer Begrenzung) Besonderheit: Technik-Check vorab, für Teilnehmer*innen, aber auch für das neue DATEV Online-Studio Infraräume eines Barcamps Was ist das Ergebnis des DigiCamps? Menschen treffen reflektiertere Entscheidungen, deswegen: das DigiCamp als “Plattform des organisationalen Lernens” Open Space Agility von Daniel Mezick mit Quartalstakt, Sponsor und Proceedings Twitter Archiv zum DigiCamp (Hashtag: #DATEVlernt), Twitterwall war mit walls.io realisiert, Selfies auf Twitter als Abschluss Ausblick Nächstes DigiCamp im Oktober 2020 (wieder online) Oktober 2020 DATEV Co-Creation Camp

Heute interviewt Daniel die wunderbare Miriam Sasse zum Thema Inviting Leadership. Miriam erklärt was es damit auf sich hat und woher die Idee des Inviting Leaderships kommt. Wir tauchen dabei tiefer in das Thema ein, wie man gute Einladungen im Business (aber auch im privaten) ausspricht und welche Elemente eine erfolgreiche Führung ausmacht. Wir schauen auch gemeinsam nach vorn ein die Zukunft, welche Formen von Unternehmen werden sich durchsetzen und welche Rolle nimmt dabei das Thema Inviting Leadership ein. Viel Spaß beim hören...

Daniel Mezick talks with Jim about agile process & organizations, how agile scrums work, openspace tech, change management, leadership, authority, complex systems, and much more… Daniel Mezick talks with Jim about how he got into business consulting & agile processes, what an openspace organization is & how it scales with business size/type, Jim’s experience with … Continue reading EP41 Daniel Mezick on the Agile Organization → The post EP41 Daniel Mezick on the Agile Organization appeared first on The Jim Rutt Show.

Martin Thompson on Arrested DevOps, Dr. Carola Lilienthal on Legacy Code Rocks, Jeff Gothelf on Agile Atelier, Safi Bahcall on Coaching For Leaders, and Mike Burrows on A Geek Leader.  I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting August 19, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. MARTIN THOMPSON ON ARRESTED DEVOPS The Arrested DevOps podcast featured Martin Thompson with host Jessica Kerr. Martin and Jessica talked about the parallels between optimizing the performance of software systems and doing the same for human systems. Using ideas from queuing theory, they discussed the notion of adding small amounts of slack to a system to make it drastically more responsive. Martin connected Amdahl’s Law to the more general Universal Scalability Law, which is more comprehensive because it takes into account coherence cost, which is the time needed to reach agreement between parties working together. He added that Brook’s Law from The Mythical Man Month is the Universal Scalability Law by a different name. They talked about the difference between parallelism and concurrency. Parallelism, Martin says, is doing multiple things at the same time. Concurrency means dealing with multiple things at the same time, a definition Martin says he stole from Rob Pike. He further decomposed the universal scalability law into its parameters. One parameter represents whether you can subdivide the work (the contention penalty) and the other represents the time to reach agreement (the coherence penalty). If your team can reach agreement faster, they can get better throughput because they can have more parallelism with less concurrency. They got into a discussion of the importance of feedback in information theory. Sending information and not confirming reception is a naïve approach and this has been understood for a long time and yet software is still built that ignores this. Two phase commit is an example. If you study the two phase commit protocol in any detail, Martin says, you realize it is fundamentally broken, yet corporations don’t want to say that. They talked about how to design distributed applications in the presence of partial failures. Martin says to make your communications idempotent, give each message a sequence number, and use this sequence number to identify and ignore replayed messages. According to Martin, designing your systems this way is just good hygiene and professionalism. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/protocols-and-sympathy-with-martin-thompson/id773888088?i=1000444947737 Website link: https://www.arresteddevops.com/protocols/ DR. CAROLA LILIENTHAL ON LEGACY CODE ROCKS The Legacy Code Rocks podcast featuring Dr. Carola Lilienthal with hosts Andrea Goulet and Scott Ford. They talked about Domain-Driven Design. Carola said her company read Eric Evans’ book and immediately took to it. Talking to users, writing software in the user's domain, and using a common vocabulary fit with what they were already doing so they adopted it easily. They talked about Carola’s modularity maturity index. It consists of three areas of sustainability: 1) modularity, 2) hierarchy, and 3) pattern consistency.  Andrea brought up the fact that larger codebases aren’t necessarily more difficult to change as Carola found in her research. Carola says that, based on the three hundred systems she’s studied, systems under a million lines of code are often in a worse state than larger systems. Around a million lines of code, she says, something happens: either people start structuring the system and putting in guard rails that keep the product maintainable or the system doesn’t grow any more. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/sustainable-software-architecture-dr-carola-lilienthal/id1146634772?i=1000443349633 Website link: http://legacycoderocks.libsyn.com/sustainable-software-architecture-with-dr-carola-lilienthal JEFF GOTHELF ON AGILE ATELIER The Agile Atelier podcast featured Jeff Gothelf with host Rahul Bhattacharya. Rahul and Jeff talked about the intersection of Agile, Lean, and Design Thinking to find commonalities. They examined customer-centricity, measuring success, continuous testing, and the importance of having a hypothesis. Jeff had been working as a designer on waterfall projects for the first decade of his career and, on a good day, only saw 50% of his work get implemented. Ten years into his career, Jeff got exposed to Agile software development and it forced him to revisit his design process and his process for doing product development as a whole. Because Jeff was in a leadership position and had a boss that understood the new methodology, Jeff got the chance to run process experiments to learn what the best collaboration model was for him and his team. This became the basis of his book, Lean UX. Rahul asked Jeff how he would define Design Thinking. Jeff described Design Thinking as applying the designer’s toolkit to solve business problems. This includes empathizing with customers, brainstorming ideas, prototyping, testing ideas with customers, and iterating.  Rahul asked if there is a specific situation in which to apply Design Thinking. Jeff says that he has yet to find a client or an industry where customer-centricity, continuous learning, risk mitigation, experimentation, and iteration don’t make sense. Even when working with people at GE who make locomotives and working with organizations that make room-sized air conditioning units that sit on top of skyscrapers, Jeff was able to successfully introduce them to ideas like talking to customers, identifying risks, and continuously improving their product. Rahul asked how the principles of Design Thinking fit with the Agile principles. Jeff says that everybody thinks that Agile is its own thing, Design Thinking is its own thing, Lean Manufacturing and Lean Startup are their own thing. The tactical execution of those methodologies might be different, but at their core, Jeff says these methods all share the same principles.  They are all customer-centric. They all measure success as an outcome, as a change in customer behavior. They all focus on testing your ideas quickly and moving off of bad ideas quickly. And they all focus on continuously improving and iterating the thing you are making as you continue to invest in it. They then got into a discussion about the importance of measuring the impact on the user of the product you are building. Jeff says that, unfortunately, shipping the thing is still one of the major definitions of success for most organizations. But in a world of continuous software when you can push a software update five times a minute like Amazon does, delivering the thing is a non-event and it should be a non-event. We shouldn’t celebrate it. What we should celebrate is the change in customer behavior that tells us that we’ve delivered value. These are things like showing up at the website, engaging with the app, buying the product, telling your friends, whatever it is we care about for our product. This line of thought led to the quote above. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-11-intersection-agile-lean-design-thinking/id1459098259?i=1000445718430 Website link: https://rahul-bhattacharya.com/2019/07/30/episode-11-the-intersection-of-agile-lean-and-design-thinking-with-jeff-gothelf/ SAFI BAHCALL ON COACHING FOR LEADERS The Coaching For Leaders podcast featured Safi Bahcall (author of the book Loonshots) with host Dave Stachowiak. They talked about what science has to say about the best ways to nurture new ideas. They started out with a discussion of children’s books and Safi’s first example of a loonshot was Dr. Seuss. He had just been rejected by every publisher he took his first story to when he ran into a friend in the street. This friend asked Dr. Seuss about what he had under his arm and when he found out it was a manuscript for a children’s story that Dr. Seuss was taking home to burn, the friend revealed that he had just taken a job at a publisher across the street and asked Dr. Seuss if he would like to come into the publisher’s office. The Cat In The Hat was born. Safi used the story of the moon landing as an illustration of the difference between a moonshot and a loonshot. A moonshot was Kennedy’s speech announcing that the United States would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. A loonshot was forty years earlier when Robert Goddard suggested getting to the moon with liquid-fueled jet propulsion and was ridiculed by many, including the New York Times. The reason it is important to understand the difference is because Goddard’s ideas, though neglected by the Americans, were embraced by Nazi Germany. German scientists used Goddard’s ideas to build jet engines and planes that flew 100 mph faster than any Allied plane. The mistake of neglecting Goddard’s ideas was fatal. Companies often ask Safi how they can innovate and create new products while continuing to keep their original product or service competitive. He thinks about these situations using three metaphors: the ice cube, garden hoe, and heart. He starts by thinking about the artists who create new product ideas and soldiers to execute on turning those ideas into real products in the marketplace. The ice cube is a rigid phase that suits the soldiers and a melted ice cube is a fluid phase that suits the artists. Understanding the problem starts with the ‘beautiful baby’ problem. The artist sees their new idea as a beautiful baby. The soldiers look at the same thing and see a shriveled up raisin. They’re both right. The garden hoe comes from understanding that the failure point in most innovation is rarely in the supply of new ideas, it is in the transfer between artists and soldiers. Great leaders are those who think of themselves as gardeners managing the transfer between the artists and soldiers. The heart is about loving your artists and soldiers equally. When we lionize the artists as the media often do, we demotivate the soldiers. I liked what Safi had to say about the problem with following the standard advice about active listening. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/418-the-way-to-nurture-new-ideas-with-safi-bahcall/id458827716?i=1000443895174 Website link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/nurture-new-ideas-safi-bahcall/ MIKE BURROWS ON A GEEK LEADER The A Geek Leader podcast featured Mike Burrows with host John Rouda. Mike talked about his career leading up to the writing of AgendaShift. He described the goal of AgendaShift as trying to introduce agility not by prescribing a set of practices or rolling out a framework but by getting agreement on outcomes and working out different ways of achieving them in an hypothesis-driven way. He then mentioned his newer book that he was working on at the time the podcast aired and has just come out this month, Right to Left. Right to Left is about working backwards from outcomes. John asked what the shift was that led to this outcome-focused approach. Mike said that while working in the government digital space in the UK, he witnessed rapid change. Instead of one supplier creating documentation for a new system, a second supplier building it, and a third supplier supporting it, and the whole thing being an expensive mess that disappoints its end users, he says they now have a system where projects will be halted if they are not serious about engaging with users, doing user research, understanding needs, and working iteratively to deliver evolving services. He says that if it can happen in the government space, it can happen anywhere. John asked about what a new manager coming from an individual contributor role would need to learn for dealing with the people side of managing projects. Mike recommended tempering any temptation to micro-manage. On his first day taking over a management position at UBS, he had people lining up at his desk looking to be micro-managed because that is how his predecessor worked. He told them that if this is how it is going to work, it is going to make him miserable and it is going to make them miserable and he encouraged them to self-organize. Mike’s second recommendation is to learn to value and respect people who come from other disciplines than technology, as he says in the above quote. John asked Mike to describe AgendaShift. Mike says that the best two words that describe it come from Daniel Mezick: it is an engagement model. Much like Daniel’s OpenSpace Agility, AgendaShift describes how change agents can engage with their organizations. In the Lean/Agile space, pushing Agile on people is self-defeating and creates more problems than it solves. Instead, facilitate outcomes that the people of the organization can agree on and start solving problems. AgendaShift starts with discovery. There are workshop tools to creating a high-level plan. Then they use an assessment tool for identifying opportunities to increase transparency, get workloads under control, or to engage better with customers. They identify obstacles and the outcomes hiding behind those obstacles. They use a “clean language”-based game to model a landscape of obstacles and outcomes and get people to think about the journey, their priorities, and what the key landmarks along the way will be. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/agl-081-agendashift-with-mike-burrows/id1043194456?i=1000424584602 Website link:https://www.ageekleader.com/agl-081-agendashift-with-mike-burrows/ LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

Mary and Tom Poppendieck on The Modern Agile Show, Daniel Mezick on Agile Uprising, Jennifer Tu, Zee Spencer, Thayer Prime, and Matt Patterson on Tech Done Right, James Colgan on This Is Product Management, and Matt Kaplan on Build by Drift. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting March 18, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. MARY AND TOP POPPENDIECK ON THE MODERN AGILE SHOW The Modern Agile Show podcast featured Mary and Tom Poppendieck with host Joshua Kerievsky. Recorded at the ScanAgile 2018 conference in Helsinki, Mary and Tom talked about their keynote on proxies and permissions. Inspired by Bret Victor’s statement that creators need an immediate connection to what they create, Tom and Mary presented on how the most effective teams are autonomous, asynchronous teams that are free of the proxies and permissions that separate creators from their creations.  This led to a discussion of lean thinking and Mary pointed out that the interesting thing about lean is that fast and safe go together. She gave the example of a construction site where nothing slows things down more than the occurrence of an accident. Mary talked about how Jeff Bezos is a good early example of someone who understood that if you want to get really, really big, you need to have autonomous agents acting independently and thinking for themselves. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/interview-with-mary-and-tom-poppendieck/id1326918248?i=1000407584120&mt=2 Website link: https://github.com/modernagile/podcast/blob/master/ModernAgileShow_26_Interview_with_Mary_and_Tom_Poppendieck.mp3 DANIEL MEZICK ON AGILE UPRISING The Agile Uprising podcast featured Daniel Mezick with hosts Jay Hrcsko and Brad Stokes. Daniel told the story of how the OpenSpace Agility movement was born from ideas he brought to a Scrum Gathering in Paris in 2013 under the name Open Agile Adoption.  He described Open Space as an invitational, all-hands meeting format in which there is an important issue, no one person has the answer, and there is an urgency to reach a decision. The Open Space format then creates the conditions for high performance through self-organization. Brad brought up that he imagines that OpenSpace Agility can be terrifying to some leaders. Daniel noted that the fear is due to the fact that we have failed the executive leadership of the largest organizations. In the name of “meeting them where they’re at,” we’ve traded away our principles and values and haven’t taught them anything in exchange. Daniel says, “Self-management scales. Not the framework.” This echoes Mary Poppendieck’s comments from the Modern Agile Show on how self-managing, autonomous, asynchronous agents are the only way to scale. Using Scrum as an example, Daniel said that, for the Product Owner to be successful, everyone in the organization must respect his or her decisions. If you do that, he says, you will immediately get culture change because you’ve refactored the authority distribution schema. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/openspace-agility-with-daniel-mezick/id1163230424?i=1000430511928&mt=2 Website link: https://agileuprising.libsyn.com/podcast/openspace-agility-with-daniel-mezick JENNIFER TU, ZEE SPENCER, THAYER PRIME, AND MATT PATTERSON ON TECH DONE RIGHT FROM TABLE XI The Tech Done Right podcast featured Jennifer Tu, Zee Spencer, Thayer Prime, and Matt Patterson with host Noel Rappin. Noel started by asking the guests what they thought the biggest mistake people make when trying to hire developers is. Thayer said, “One of the biggest mistakes anybody makes in hiring is hiring people they like and that they want to work with because they’re nice as opposed to hiring against a spec of what the worker is supposed to be doing.” This comment matches my own experience because this practice was rampant on previous teams of mine. Jennifer asked Matt how his company attracts candidates and he described using their current employee’s networks. Thayer called this the number one diversity mistake that all companies make.  Noel asked about what to do at the end of the process where you need to go from multiple opinions you need to turn into a single yes/no decision. Jennifer has everyone write down their impressions before they talk to anyone else and write down specifically what they observed to support the conclusion you come to. This is how I always do it, but I’m always surprised at how few teams practice this. Noel asked about good and bad uses of interview time. I loved Jennifer’s example of what a bad use of time it is to say, “Tell me about yourself.” Sometimes I have candidates jump into providing this kind of information even though I hadn’t asked. Such people steer the interview into a well-prepared speech of all their best qualities that doesn’t give you a full picture of the candidate. Thayer then made a comment about the tendency of interviewers to try to make the candidates sweat. I agree with Thayer that this is usually the exact opposite of what you want if you’re trying to make the interview as much like the actual job experience as possible. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-56-developer-hiring/id1195695341?i=1000430735771&mt=2 Website link: https://www.techdoneright.io/56 JAMES COLGAN ON THIS IS PRODUCT MANAGEMENT The This Is Product Management podcast featured James Colgan with host Mike Fishbein. James is a product manager for Outlook Mobile, which has 100 million monthly active users. James talked about his strategy for user growth being to make a product that is trusted by IT and loved by users. This led to their measures of success, such as usage and love for the product, measured by things like app store rating. James gave a great example of doing user research to create a product that is loved globally rather just in certain geographies. They did research in Asia and found drastic differences in the relationship between personal time and work time. They found North Americans and Europeans kept a strong delineation between work and personal time, but they found significant overlap between personal and work time among Asian customers. The data-driven nature of the product decisions payed dividends in both choosing the right features to work on and avoiding the wrong ones. They got the idea that they wanted to improve the ease of composing emails, but after looking at their instrumentation, they found that the average session length was 22 seconds. So instead they focused on consumption of emails over composition. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/188-listening-to-users-at-scale-is-product-management/id975284403?i=1000430581654&mt=2 Website link: https://www.thisisproductmanagement.com/episodes/listening-to-users-at-scale/ MATT KAPLAN ON BUILD BY DRIFT The Build by Drift podcast featured Matt Kaplan with host Maggie Crowley. Matt talked about how the book Creativity Inc. by Pixar founder Ed Catmull inspired him to see the similarities between creating products and telling stories. He says that every great story has a protagonist (the target user), starts with tension (the problem the product is trying to solve), has an end state (the vision for solving the user’s problem), has a core belief (the product differentiators), and consists of a sequence of events to get to that end state (the work we need to do to get the users from the tension to the end state). Maggie asked what the benefits are of thinking about products in this way and he explained that product management is about solving problems and telling stories. Stories could be used to convince salespeople that you’re doing the right thing, to tell engineers about what they’re going to build, or to tell customers about what your team has built. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/build-19-how-great-products-are-like-great-stories/id1445050691?i=1000430866513&mt=2 Website link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swz0TnLwbrA&list=PL_sQbSaZtRqCn6JJSkjma79c8c4bLdaJH&index=4&t=0s FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website:

This is a don't miss episode of Open to be Agile. Daniel Mezick surfaces why the power of decision making through the Authority Distribution Schema is a vital component, quite possibly the core component to the health of Agile and complete Organizational Business Agility.  Here why and we venture into some other very interesting topics as well. 00:21 – Show Intro 02:07 – Jeff kicks off the show w/ Lori 02:51 – Meet Daniel Mezick 03:35 – State of Agile Today discussion 14:30 – Where is Agile heading or evolving moving forward 18:13 – Can you shape organizational culture & how 28:11 – Rapid fire questions with our guest 31:36 – Close out & what to expect next episode   Dan’s Links: The Open Leadership Symposium – May 14-15 Boston https://openleadershipnetwork.com/ The Authority Circle https://newtechusa.net/authoritycirclepdf/  Inviting Leadership https://www.invitingleadership.com/  Open Space Agility http://openspaceagility.com/ Dan’s Twitter  @DanielMezick

In this episode we interview Daniel Mezick, author and creator of the OpenSpace Agility movement.  We start out talking OSA, but then we end up discussing themes such as how people learn in tribes, liminal states, and the importance of lower-level decision making as a true enabler of successful organizational change.  Enjoy!   Links: Dan's Website Dan's Twitter Dan's Books @ Amazon The Open Leadership Symposium

Today's episode features Kai Haley, Lead of Design Relations and the Sprint Master Academy at Google. We talk about design sprints and building a “sprint culture” as well as a much bigger question: The need for ethics in design. If you can build anything, faster, it's a kind of super power. And with great power comes great responsibility. While you might have heard Spider-Man say that, it also made me think of my favorite Plato's Dialog, Gorgias, which points out that power without knowledge of good (and evil) is pretty dangerous. Kai believes that training a sprint master means giving them the tools to keep people honest and mindful of their choices. What I really love about this episode is how open, honest and humble Kai is about how hard this work is. The Sprint can make it seem like solving big challenges is simple – all you need is five days and Google's list of activities – widely available on the internet! (and in the show notes!) But Kai makes it clear that any attempts to “copy & paste” the Sprint (just like any new way of working) into an organization will experience some turbulence. Adopting a new way of work can create a wave of change that will ripple out into the organization. To find sustainable success means changing rewards and recognition practices, building training and management support and lots and lots of flexibility and patience. We don't get into the basics of the design sprint in the interview so I'll say a few words of background. A design sprint is a structured process for getting a group of people to get together and make a big decision in a shorter—than—normal period of time. Sprints are a general term in use in Agile software development for some time and they have become really popular in the digital product design world as User Experiences Designers have had to contend with the spread of Agile in the world. In the last few years Google has developed an approach to design sprinting that blends parts of design thinking and parts of Agile into a powerful structure; building a clear, compelling narrative thread in the process. Inside Google, sprinting has developed into a key part of their culture, and the world is starting to take notice – starting with the NY Times bestselling book “Sprint” by former Google Ventures employees Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky who took their own unique flavor of the Sprint and wrote a clear, thorough, check-list approach to the method that made it seem simple enough for anyone to try. While it's often shorter inside Google and other organizations, the canonical structure is a five-day workshop that opens up a key challenge for a group or a company, explores several options to solving it and closes the loop with user research. Often workshops (that people like me run) *can* wind up feeling like Innovation Theater. Workshops can help teams get clear on a strategy and excited about big ideas. But those ideas can fade once the workshop ends. The ideas and the excitement get lost inside the organization. People who weren't there can question the validity of the ideas and power of their shared conviction. The Sprint format helps a workshop gain momentum and power though a key difference from the average workshop. For Kai, the key distinction between a workshop and a sprint is that a sprint develops a prototype and puts it in front of customers to get feedback on a key idea. A sprint helps end debate with evidence – and helps continue the conversation long after the workshop. The Sprint makes use of the Conversation OS in some interesting (and totally unintentional) ways – pulling on a few key levers of conversation design:  The cadence of work is sped up to force a decision and to create positive pressure, all while holding the work within a clear and powerful narrative thread. The visual map of the 5—day process helps get teams bought in on the power of working this way, establishing clear goals and agreements – regardless of how tough the middle of the week-long workshop gets, there are customers being recruited to test out the ideas, making it harder to give up and loose momentum! Pair this episode with a few others for a ricjer perspective on thes issues: - Dee Scarano, who's a Design Sprint Trainer and Facilitator at AJ and Smart, for more background on the sprint and being an awesome facilitator -Alistair Cockburn, one of the original Agile Signatories, if you're new to agile or want to go deeper into it -Daniel Mezick, who uses a unique, open-space approach to bring agile practices into organizations at scale You can find links for all of this and more in the show notes! Thanks for listening! Enjoy the show…and if you do, please take a moment and leave a review on iTunes. Google Sprint Kit https://designsprintkit.withgoogle.com/ GV Sprint on Medium https://medium.com/@gv.com Sprint Stories on Medium https://sprintstories.com/ The Sprint Book https://www.amazon.com/Sprint-Solve-Problems-Test-Ideas/dp/1442397683 Plato's Gorgias https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/gorgias/summary/ Gransfors Bruk Axes: We have unlimited responsibility for Total Quality. https://www.gransforsbruk.com/en/about/corporate-responsibility/ Changing the Conversation with Sprints https://medium.com/google-design/changing-the-conversation-with-design-sprints-3ba776145468 The Conversation OS Canvas http://theconversationfactory.com/downloads/  Everyday Design Sprints with Dee Scarano http://theconversationfactory.com/podcast/2018/8/3/everyday-design-sprints-dee-scarano-aj-smart Agile and Jazz Dialog with Alistair Cockburn http://theconversationfactory.com/podcast/2017/7/19/alistair-cockburn-on-the-heart-of-agile-jazz-dialog-and-guest-leadership Agile as an invitation to a game with Daniel Mezick http://theconversationfactory.com/podcast/2017/6/23/dan-mezick-on-agile-as-an-invitation-to-a-game

Have you ever had that feeling right before a party you were throwing starts? That creeping dread that no one will show up? Today I talk to Jesse Israel, who doesn't seem to have that fear. Jesse flips that feeling on its head. For Jesse, it's very simple: People *want* to connect. And the invitations we, as organizers and conveners, send out...they're just permission slips. The invitation gives people permission to connect. Jesse Israel is the founder of Medi Club and the Big Quiet, which hosts huge public meditations in places like Madison Square Garden and the World Trade Center's Oculus for literally thousands of people. I met Jesse Israel at a dinner party way back in early 2015 at a Rabbi's house. We had a great conversation and discovered a few shared interests. Somehow we discovered we both loved biking the city and he invited me to check out his cycle club, the Cyclones. And then he mentioned that he had a meditation club, too. As a life-long meditator (before it was cool!) I was intrigued. When I went to my first Medi Club, I was struck by the energy and the intimacy of it. How easy it was to connect with the crowd, which got larger and larger each time I came. The Medi Club meets monthly and regularly attracts a few hundred people ready to sit in silence with their peers. The Cyclones is similarly huge, and a blast, every time I make it out. So, to be clear: In Jesse's view, we connect *through* things: the bike, the meditation, is permission to connect. It's the connection we crave. He just opens the door. There are few key conversation design principles I want to pull out of this conversation, to look for as you listen, all around how to frame profoundly motivating invitations: What permission will you give for people to connect? What's the deep and clear purpose of it? What are the boundaries of the invitation? And something else I saw that Jesse does: he pre-invites. He builds a coalition of the willing early, before he opens up the larger invitation.  Deeper into the conversation, we talk about how to sustain yourself as a community builder: Jesse talks about how he's learned to develop compassionate boundaries, to maintain his internal integrity. If you don't say no to some requests, you can't continue to give. We also talk about how to trust and develop your team. When that trust is in place, that's where the growth really happens. For more in-depth consideration of this conversation, head over to the conversation factory.com and take a look at the show notes! I'd also suggest you take a listen to the episode with Daniel Mezick, founder of open space agility, who's thoughts on invitation match up with Jesse's profoundly! What Permission will you grant? At Medi Club it's okay to open up. When you step into the door, you know you're among friends. How is that permission granted? Jesse shares first. He leads the way and opens the floor. He makes the example clear: He's going to be real and so you can be, too. Over time, the community attracts more and more of this energy. Others take up the charge and spread the norm. What's the Clarity of your Purpose? Early on, Jesse wrote a medium post to declare the intentions of the community he was forming. The article lays out why Medi Club exists in extremely clear language and outlines the purpose of the club in a way that passes the T-shirt test (a rule of thumb that seems to be from Peter Drucker) Also: Is there a larger purpose? The Cyclones is a fun Saturday around NYC, but became something more when they started an Indigogo campaign to get bikes in the hands of 1,000 children in Tanzania.   Is there an authentic way to enlarge the purpose of your invitation over time? Boundaries Boundaries show up in two ways: Boundaries for the invitation and boundaries for the inviter. The Cyclones invites you to give up expectations and planning...for one afternoon. You don't know where you're going, and that's okay. Medi Club stretches that boundary with their circles: Anyone can host a Medi Club circle and create the same energy with a smaller group, anytime they want. Medi Club holds the larger circle and gives each smaller circle an "authorization" to share the same invitation. At min 26: Jesse talks about another form of boundary: A boundary for the convener. "If I don't have compassionate boundaries, I can't show up as a friend or a community builder." When he's at medi club, he's a public person, and everyone there feels some sort of connection with him. But after the club night is over, Jesse has to find a way to restore his strength and be with himself. And if he said yes to every interview, every request to "pick his brain" from the community...there'd be no time for anything else!  This compassionate boundary is a huge challenge, because saying no doesn't feel generous. Finding a way to create a generous no is a critical skill for leading communities. I'm terribly grateful that Jesse was willing to sit down with me for this conversation. I learned a ton from it and I hope you do, too. Links The Big Quiet Cyclones Bike Club Medi Club Medium Article Cyclones Indigogo

Today I talk with Kate Quarfordt,  the Founding Director of Arts Integration & Culture at City School of the Arts. My conversation with Kate was a rich and wonderful surprise! I found her 4-seasons framework someplace in the corners of the internet and was immediately enchanted with it. Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter as metaphors for the flow of work... The Framework is so powerful in the types of conversations it allows into the larger conversation about work, especially winter, a time to reflect and consider, to heal and incubate. It's rare to make space for that type of work! The opening and closing circles Kate hosts in her school to bookend the week...it touched my heart! It's such a beautiful way to work. And so similar to how Daniel Mezick gets organizations to shift how they work through Open Space Agility! Check that episode out here! This conversation has started to open up the idea of threads and threading in conversation design for me. I first got the sense of threading from my conversation with Nandini Stocker, Google's Head of Conversation Design Advocacy. As I see it now,  the arc of a conversation  is made of stories. And the way Kate describes our stories coming together to make a new one, using the word "Braiding", makes so much sense.  Conversations are the exchange of stories, and placing ourselves and others into the hero role, shifting perspective as empathy and generosity demands is the flow of real dialogue. Finally, we talked about how creative work requires an audience! An Audience provides a "pull" and "push" for work. At least, that's the way I experience it. Even when I don't feel like it, I push myself to finish work on an episode because I know people are waiting (pulling) for it. And there's a loop of feedback on the work: People write me to tell me what was great and where I missed the mark. That's one of the reasons that I feel the conversation between an organization and its customers is one of the most critical, missing pieces in companies that struggle with a sluggish work cadence. There's not enough urgency.  If you want to dig into that conversation more, check out the episodes from Rei Wang, Director of the Dorm Room Fund and Sarah Mitchell, Lead designer at Faraday Futures. Both helped me see principles at work in sustaining great conversations with customers and community.  Thank you so much for listening and I hope you enjoy the episode as much as I did making it !   Notes and Links ____ Meeting Kate on Twitter New York City Charter School for the Arts (CSA) Specials On C Gothamsmith Threading in Conversation Design: In Podcast Show notes What we need is a Montage (montage!) The X that we were solving for: Feeling out of synch, loss of clear cadence The Seasons Wheel applied to a Week or a Cultural Transformation: Open and Closing Circles: Open Space Agility with Daniel Mezick   Mary Oliver: making yourself visible to yourself in a way you never imagined! From Blue Pastures: I don't mean it's easy or assured; there are the stubborn stumps of shame, grief that remains unsolvable after all the years, a bag of stones that goes with one wherever one goes and however the hour may call for dancing and for light feet. But there is, also, the summoning world, the admirable energies of the world, better than anger, better than bitterness and, because more interesting, more alleviating. And there is the thing that one does, the needle one piles, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe – that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.     The Inner Winter Process: Leaving yourself voicemails! (creates a third point for reflection, just as a drawing or journal does) Dave Gray on Drawing creating a clearer interface for conversations https://medium.com/the-conversation-factory/the-math-behind-drawing-in-together-1a24fe4b9084 Morning Pages http://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning-pages/ The Inner Conversation https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/11/figuring-out-how-and-why-we-talk-to-ourselves/508487/ Spring Cleaning Script from Mama Gena: http://www.mamagenas.com/where-women-store-garbage/   Holding Space is incredible power: Who initiates the request? Who Has permission? The Paradox of Flow vs Framework: Absence of Structure vs. Structure vs. balancing who introduces the structure.   What's the Deal with Agile? http://theconversationfactory.com/podcast/2017/7/19/alistair-cockburn-on-the-heart-of-agile-jazz-dialog-and-guest-leadership   How is a school like a conversation? Moving from the School-As-Script model to the School-As-Dialogue model. Waterfall vs Agile http://agilitrix.com/2016/04/agile-vs-waterfall/   Kate's Post-call reflections on Winter and Work as a Relay Race: "As I was transitioning into the rest of my day I realized that there was one last thing that I wanted to share apropos of the winter phase and the importance of rest and rejuvenation--not just in the creative learning space, but also in the context of activism and resistance. As I mentioned, we are doing a lot of work with young folks around using the arts as a vehicle for activism, especially given how passionate they are about making their voices heard in this current political moment. On Monday night I had the chance to perform with the Resistance Revival Chorus, a women/femme-led singing group created by the leaders of the Women's March to keep the momentum of the march moving forward and also--crucially--to frame joy and rejuvenation as acts of resistance in and necessary elements of a sustainable movement. Paola Mendoza, co-artistic director of the March, and one of the producers of Monday night's event, said something that evening that resonated super powerfully with me. https://m.mic.com/articles/182826/the-womens-march-launches-resistance-revival-in-effort-to-keep-anti-trump-momentum-going#.GFf3ipI25)   She said, "The resistance is not a sprint, but it's not a marathon either. It's a relay race." I love that image because it evokes the sustainability that becomes possible when hard work and leadership are shouldered by a full community instead of by a single individual. There's a sense of permission implicit in this approach, the understanding that it's ok for each member of the community to pause and refill the tanks every so often, because there's always someone else right there who's ready to take up the baton and run the next leg. In the context of the season wheel, this is the idea that different community members can be in different phases at different times...  it's OK for you to be in winter, because you know I'm in summer and I've got you covered, and then we can switch so I get a chance to rest and reflect while you keep the work moving forward. I'm excited to bring that relay race image back to the kiddos when we gather to kick off year two.    

My conversation with Alistair Cockburn was Agile to the core! We revised our timeline and deliverable with a quick standup and got right into it: After all, Agile principle #2 is to welcome changing requirements, even late in development. To wit, I thought we had an hour, early on the call he asked for 20, tops! (Somehow I kept him on the line for 45, since I'm deft at conversational manipulation. And he was keen to keep it going, too.) Alistair quite the nomad, teaching Advanced Agile workshops all over the world. When he's not teaching, he might be dancing Tango in Argentina or brushing up on his French in Nice. But sometimes the location is too distracting, so he was holed up in Florida where he found a town that was *just* boring enough to allow him some time to get some work done. He was moving house unexpectedly the day we were slated to chat. I saw on Facebook that his AirBnB had a shag carpet and the humidity and mustiness mixed with a thick carpet was making him sick! I tried to give him an out, but he was adamant we do our conversation, even for only 20 minutes. His motto: Now is better than the future. One of the pleasures and inspirations of talking with Alistair is that he's a man who really lives his principles: Agile principle #10 is that "Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential". You'll hear how Alistair tries to design his life to make this principle a reality! As I mentioned two episodes back with Daniel Mezick, around Open Space Agile Transformations, Agile is kicked around a lot in the consulting world, but my sense is that all of those people haven't actually read the Agile Manifesto! Alistair was one of the originators and signatories back in 2001, and it was a response to a broken way of working. But just like any ideology, it's come to be interpreted in alot of ways by a lot of people. It was fun to go back to the source! I really enjoyed Alistair disagreeing with my characterization of Agile as a Design for Conversations. But I see it that way: Agile designs for some conversations and  not for others. And in fact, Alistair has a lot in common with Dave Gray, who I interviewed a few months back: Dave wondered about who has the right to design a conversation and if it can be overdesigned! Alistair is a proponent of Guest Leadership...that making space for momentary, voluntary leadership can powerfully transform work and teams. Alistair and I had what he would call a Jazz Dialogue: a conversation with a meta-conversation layered on top! I have listened to this episode a few times and it's a tough one to summarize or encapsulate. One thing that I'm left with is the idea that even the desire for agility or the hunger for no ideology is an ideology. Which leaves me reflecting on the ways that my own internal tendencies leads to my own ways of seeing things as "right". After all, designing a conversation is power and power should be exercised carefully...because I could be wrong! Show Bullets and Links Alistair Cockburn on the Web Agile Manifesto Crystal Clear Improvisation in Dance: What's Fixed and What's Flexible? "I expect people to decline my advice" The Oath of Non-Allegiance Precision vs. Looseness Crystal Clear: The Sloppiest methodology that could possibly work (Martin Fowler) "Arranging my life for the maximum amount of freedom" Anchoring Sloppiness in Essential details. (the opposite of an Overdetermined System) Cultural Invasion: Design as Cultural Imperialism Assuming that people bring their whole adult self to work: Agile Practitioners mentioned: Daniel Mezick Ken Schwaber Nic Sementa Kay Johansen Guest Leadership RE: When do people step forward and help: The Good Samaritan Experiment (hint: when they're not in a hurry) Be the Change you want to See can backfire Host Leadership The Art of Hosting Open Space Technology Going Meta: Talking about how we talk Jazz Dialogue The Heart of Agile Self Storytelling Kokoro: The heart Alistair's Poets: ee cummings and Emily Dickinson and a poem Alistair wrote in honor of ee: Mary Oliver's Wild Geese: You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves

On today's episode I talk to Dan Mezick, author of the Culture Game and the founder of Open Space Agility. Dan has a really unique perspective on culture, self management and how to make agile really work. At the core, agile believes that a team doing work is the authority on what needs to be done for that work, since they're closest to the work. This is self management at the team level. In trying to make a switch to agile ways of working, organizations often dictate new frameworks, patterns and procedures. To dictate a new way for how work is to be done is basically the opposite of self management...and a clear limit on how an externally generated conversation design can really work: Change from the outside is going to get push back. That Agile is implemented in a non-agile way is an irony not lost on Dan! in Dan's view, culture is a game, how work is done is a game, meetings are games, with rules, ways progress is measured...some of the rules are implicit, some are explicit, but it's kind of annoying to play a game with no rules, or with rules unevenly applied, or with rules that change without notice. If you're a reader of "Calvin and Hobbes" you've heard of CalvinBall, and you know how frustrating it is! Whoever *must* play, can't really play... (that's from james carse's excellent book on Finite and Infinite games) Dan suggests that agile be *invite only*, pull, not push, and that that "pull" invitation be in the form of an Open Space meeting. People that opt in, step into the circle, decide what to talk about, and leave with proceedings, outputs. That starts a new game, with new rules, written by those who want to play.  Dan's Open Space Agility process is an answer to the question of how to change the rules of a work culture in a clear and fair way, without hemorrhaging people in the process. Open Space dictates that whoever responds to the invitation are the right people, what conclusions they come to are the right conclusions, worthy of an experimental test, at the very least. Open space meeting philosophy has infected my own conversation design practice. I feel particularly uneasy when a facilitator I'm working with tries to massage or shift the decisions a group is coming to....it's one of the reasons I say a facilitator should ask better questions instead of giving answers. A great question is an invitation. An invitation is the start of a new conversation. This episode has me rethinking all the invitations I send out, for all my meetings, and all my conversations, moment by moment. Are my invitations inviting? Are people hearing an invitation to the game I want them to play? Check out the a bonus track where Dan and I talk about Holocracy and his work with Zappos....enjoy the episode! The Agile Manifesto: 12 values and 4 principles Jeff Sutherland Scrum: rules, roles, artifacts Planning Poker User Stories The Alpha Geek and the pecking order meetings as games Open Space Agility Open Space four principles and the law of two feet Butterfly and the Bumblebee Waterfall vs Agile Culture Pull vs Push Culture Triggering Self management AgileBoston.org four variables in software development: cost, delivery date, features, quality client's changing their mind is a feature, not a bug Pareto's Principle is the opposite of what you think 90% syndrome Code gets brittle The Big Picture Diagram of Open Space Agility Signal Events in Culture Buying into a process vs. Authoring a process Proceedings of an Open Space Meeting Organizational Cadence The Agile Imposition Beware the man of one book SaFE Framework Taylorism Extras: The Mandate of Holocracy at Zappos Holocracy or Quit