Exceptionally, the following blog post is in French.

Exceptionnellement, je vais écrire un article en français pour saluer les élèves pour qui j’ai présenté à l’école secondaire Jean Grou à Montréal.   Dans mon style habituel, vous désirez savoir comment j’ai trouvé ma journée?  Il va falloir que vous suiviez ce lien pour en savoir plus!

Cette aventure a débuté pour moi à la fin août, lorsqu’un courriel circulait au bureau pour demander des volontaires pour aller parler des technologies de l’information dans des écoles secondaires de Montréal. Je n’ai jamais eu le plaisir d’aller faire ce genre de présentation et je voulais aller vivre l’expérience au moins une fois, donc j’ai soumis mon nom sur le site web indiqué dans le courriel.

Septembre et octobre furent des mois particulièrement chargés pour moi et je n’étais pas sûr d’être capable de pouvoir présenter une présentation PowerPoint pour m’accompagner. Avant d’accepter de présenter, j’ai appelé l’agence de marketing et j’ai demandé ce qu’il fallait que je prépare avant d’y aller. La personne m’a dit que je pouvais faire ce que je voulais tant que j’étais capable de remplir mon temps.

« Êtes-vous sur M. Surdek que vous allez pouvoir parler à une classe d’élèves du secondaire et être intéressant sans aucun support visuel? » me demanda-t-elle.

« Bien sûr! » fut ma réponse, « ça n’est pas ma première expérience ou je parle en public, je vais raconter ma carrière en survol! J’en ai plus qu’assez pour remplir une heure! »

Pour les élèves présents à mes sessions, vous reconnaîtrez ici l’esprit du fameux « ça pourrait être le fun si » dont je vous parlais! Le soir avant, je commençais à douter un peu… Je commençais à me dire que je devrais peut-être préparer quelque chose juste au cas… La nervosité me rattrapa doucement et ma nuit de sommeil de fût pas très reposante.

Ça a bien été me rendre à l’école, j’ai été bien accueilli par le personnel. On m’a accompagné à la classe pour laquelle je devais faire ma présentation. La technologie est rendue pas mal cool dans les écoles avec les « smartboards ». Sur le coup, c’est un peu déroutant, mais c’est très naturel à utiliser.

La première session fût le fun à présenter, mais vu la présentation minimale que j’avais eue, c’était un peu chaotique et boiteux. Ces temps-ci, dans mon travail, je présente plus pour des gestionnaires, on l’humour est différent de mon public habituel j’ai trouvé que présenter à des adolescents est un autre défi entièrement! Il me fallait trouver le bon niveau de langage et trouver ce qui leur parlait le plus.

J’ai été très touché à la fin lorsqu’une étudiante est venue me dire que ma présentation avait été inspirante pour elle. Je ne la nommerais pas ici pour ne pas la gêner, mais elle va sans doute se reconnaître en lisant ceci! Je remercie d’avoir pris le temps de partager avec moi, ça m’a fait très plaisir d’entendre ça. Ne lâche pas tes rêves, va créer le futur que tu veux!

Je discutais avec la professeure à la fin de ma session et elle me mentionnait qu’elle se demandait à un moment donné si je serais capable de couvrir le temps au rythme ou j’allais, sans support visuel. Je vais vous faire une petite confession, maintenant que la journée est terminée… Je me suis posé exactement la même question après les trente premières minutes! Les périodes de questions que je laissais aux élèves me laissaient le temps de penser à autre chose à parler et me permettaient de repartir dans une autre direction sans que ça paraisse trop (en tout cas, j’espère!)

J’ai trouvé la seconde présentation beaucoup plus facile à donner. J’ai appris de ce qui avait bien fonctionné de la première et j’ai raffiné les messages importants et le rythme général de la présentation. En gros, voici les messages que je voulais que les étudiants retiennent :

• La persistance paie dans la vie. Trouvez ce qui vous allume et dirigez-vous dans cette direction!
• Vous décidez de votre futur, personne d’autre. Prenez le temps de vous arrêter régulièrement et identifier le futur par défaut de certains aspects de votre vie. Si vous ne changez rien de ce que vous faites actuellement, est-ce que les résultats dans deux ou trois mois seront ceux que vous désirez atteindre? Si vous répondez non à cette question, changez votre plan…
• Votre nouveau futur débute au moment même ou vous commencez à y penser. Vivez votre passion, courez après vos rêves et vous allez attirer le monde qu’il faut pour vous supporter autour de vous tout naturellement.
• Les échecs sont des opportunités d’apprentissage. Le plus gros l’échec, le plus que vous avez à apprendre. Le vrai échec est de ne rien apprendre de vos échecs et de reproduire les mêmes erreurs continuellement.

Une chose que les élèves ont l’air d’avoir aimé a été quand j’ai fait le tour de quelques présentations PowerPoint afin de leur montrer ce que je faisais en tant que conférencier. Ce n’était pas très évident pour un coach agile d’expliquer à des élèves ce qu’il fait dans la vie! Disons que ce n’est pas très visuel de parler de planification de projet, de daily scrums et de rétrospectives!

Je veux remercier la centaine d’étudiants que j’ai rencontrés aujourd’hui pour leur écoute, leur attention et leurs questions! Faire ce genre de présentation est un privilège et un honneur pour moi.  J’espère sincèrement vous avoir inspirés et vous avoir donné le goût de vous réaliser dans votre vie!

I am blogging less on the Tribal Leadership class these days, not due to lack of interest but because I am currently in that odd period between two jobs.  The situation is making it more challenging for me to use what I am currently learning in a work context.  Our triad identified our project for the course and I am looking forward to sharing the details with you.  To learn more about it, you need to read on!

Before I talk about the leadership project, I would like to share the thoughts that ran through my head in the last week.  The main thing I got out of the recent homework is the idea of meritorious relationships, meaning building relationships on merit instead of building them on trust.  For people not following the course, stop a moment and think about the meaning of trust for you.

My experience taught me trust is something very difficult to build but something you can lose forever in an instant.  I will give you a certain amount of trust by default and you can gain more by earning it.  My challenge is once someone breaks my trust, it is usually very difficult to regain.  This makes building relationships on trust difficult because I may be holding people to exceptionally high standards.

When building a relationship on merit, you focus on whether you are getting enough value in the relationship that it merits you keep investing in it after a setback occurs.  You may still reach a point when you are not getting enough value and you decide to end the relationship after a setback, but your view when examining it changes.

When I heard the audio file on this, I thought it was a very intelligent way of looking at it.  I am still unsure how to put this concept into practice, but the idea is definitely there now.  I cringed in a few meetings with people this week each time I heard someone mentioned relationships build on trust.  Not to say trust is bad every time, but I can definitely see the value on building on more solid ground.

In the class tonight, someone asked what to do when the people you are coaching are failing.  When I coach agile teams, my approach to handling failure varies.  I try to understand how the team operates and what they are open to working on.  If the team is open to working at trying new things, I will provide extra coaching to help them be successful more quickly.

I change my approach when there is resistance though as  I will let a team fail on different levels depending on how much resistance I face.  Mild resistance, I will let them fail in ways where I can provide enough coaching to cushion the fall.  This gives them the opportunity to feel some measure of success but they will be able to find opportunities to improve themselves next time.  I use regular retrospective meetings to coach them towards these areas and let them choose what they want to improve and how to improve it.

I experienced some teams and individuals with much higher resistance and unfortunately sometimes, there was no way to cushion their fall.  Usually, they needed to fail spectacularly before being more open to learning.  The best way I found overall when dealing with groups of people that resist is to identify the influencers of the group.  Once I identify them, I try to work through their concerns through one-on-one conversations.  I found that turning these people into allies also turns them into your biggest supporters.  The important thing to do is listen to their concerns and work to address them.

In our triad meeting last week, we came up with an idea for our project for the class.  We would like to create a workshop to allow groups of people to identify the core values of each individual and of the group.  There is a “mountains and valleys” tool on the CultureSync web site, but we are curious to see what we can build.

There are two dimensions of this project we find interesting.  The first is getting more people involved in building this with us.  We are reaching out to triad members from the first class to get help and we also posted a pitch in our LinkedIn group.  Right now, we form a group of six or seven people to work on this project together.  If you are part of the class and would like to help us out, please contact us through my website or the LinkedIn group.

The second dimension is building the workshop itself.  Last week, we took some time to build a strategy worksheet we identified the information shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: Workshop strategy worksheet

Figure 1 – Workshop Strategy Worksheet

During the class tonight, we did the six hats exercise to help us work through our project.  As usual, the breakouts are short and sometimes you need to stop when it starts getting interesting, but we got some good new ideas doing it.  I need to do some thinking around the six hats exercise this week, I feel there would be value in writing about how to use the exercise to build a strategy worksheet.

It surprised me during the exercise when we wore our green hats how easily James was just putting out ideas out there we never considered before.  It was as easy to see he lives in cool world as it was to see I live in solid world when we started talking next steps.

For the workshop, we need to talk through this with the participants, but we feel a good approach to building the workshop would be doing some brainstorming sessions and then breaking out in sub teams to build content.  Our next step will be to get some brainstorming activity started through e-mail or a phone call to identify the content we need to present.  We could then identify exercises we could do to pull out information from people.  It is a very exciting project for us and we look forward to seeing what we can come up with.

Tonight was the second class for Tribal Leadership Intensive Two and it was one of those classes centered mainly on discussions of various topics.  Gracious collaboration was one topic and strong versus weak links was the other.  As we broke out of the triad discussion on collaboration, I realized I had more to share.  To learn my thoughts on tonight’s class, please read on.

I find it is harder for me to keep my focus on classes centered around discussions but tonight was good for me in that regards.  The participants had compelling stories to tell and it was easier to stay engaged.  The gracious collaboration conversation resonated well with me for a couple of different reasons.  In the last couple of years, I took part in various projects with people spread across the world and it taught me some lessons about collaboration.  I will try to explain some of these lessons and adapt them to triad thinking.

Lesson 1: Keep the end goal in mind

When writing the book “A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum”, we had thirty to forty people working together in brainstorming sessions.  We were three people that took the result of the sessions and turned them into chapters.  When writing a chapter draft one of us would write it and seek feedback.  This resulted in another author rewriting or reorganizing half of the chapter while adding new content and the original author could then accept or refuse the proposed changes.  We repeated this cycle until we completed the chapter.

Honestly, it is humbling to see your efforts partially shredded but we always resolved our differences by focusing on what was right for the book.  That was always our starting point and we put our egos aside for the greater good.  As three authors make for a natural triad, there was always one of us making sure the relationship between the three of us worked.

Lesson 2: Use an interpreter

I once worked in highly collaborative team of four, but it did not begin this way.  Although we tried being collaborative, the personalities and values of the different team members caused challenges we needed to overcome.

One person in the team was upset with me and systematically tossed away any changes I proposed.  Another teammate realized what was happening and started repeating my proposals using slightly different words.  Somehow, the same ideas sounded better coming from this other person so my new goal became making sure my supporter understood what I was saying so he could help me sell the idea.

Lesson 3: Use the right language

You may also need to change your language to allow your message to resonate with someone else.

For example, Discovery Insights is an interesting personality test which can break people down to four different colors: Red, blue, yellow and green.  Everyone has a dominant color tied to them and some colors do not work well together.  For example, a red person bases everything on results, while a green person bases everything on people and emotions.

When two people with these dominant opposite colors work together, they must change their language to adjust to the other person.  To get traction with the green person, the red person needs to learn to talk about a situation through the human factor to resonate with them.  In contrast, a green person talking about emotions to a red person will probably get nothing but laughter in return.

Understanding the personalities of your triad members may allow you to bridge gaps by acting as the interpreter between people of two opposing types.

Other personality tests such as MBTI present similar breakdowns with similar challenges.

Lesson 4: Build trust and be genuine when offering support

Offering token support and not following up when asked does not build trust.  If necessary, set the proper boundaries for your help and respect those boundaries.

In another team, I offered to do copy editing for English documents the team was producing.  English was not their native language and they struggled in the past with someone else copy editing their work.  They were skeptical at first and expected me to rewrite their documents and they would no longer recognize their work.  I promised them I would copy edit while respecting the essence of what they were saying and they would have the final acceptance of my work.

One person decided to give me an opportunity to edit his work and was happy with the results of the editing process.  He shared this happiness with the rest of the team and once they saw I consistently respected those boundaries, I could rewrite significant portions of their documents with no conflicts.  They even came to discover they could also challenge me on my edits and I would adjust to their needs.

Lessons 5: Build a common understanding

When a two-person relationship breaks down, the first thing I recommend is to build a common understanding of the problem.

One approach I use it to parrot back what I understand using statements such as:

• “Let me make sure I understand correctly, are you saying…”
• “This is my understanding of what you are saying…”

Or I have them parrot back what they understand by asking questions such as:

• “What is your understanding of what I am saying?”

As you slowly build a common understanding on issues, recognize it openly with statements such as:

• “Good, I feel we are on the same page here”
• “Yay!  I feel we are making progress now”

I often experienced this when working with distributed multicultural teams.  I found that rewinding and starting from scratch to build a common understanding helped me better understand where the disconnect occurred.

Before trying to build a common understanding you may want to quickly explain to the other person this is what you are doing to build a cooperative spirit.  I usually mention I feel we have a disconnect and we need to take a couple of steps back to better understand each others viewpoints.

The challenge is working through the disconnect once you find it and the best advice I can provide here is to find ways to increase your collaboration level.  They say the highest level is face to face communication, but sometimes drawing on a whiteboard while explaining can do miracles as well.

Conclusion

Accepting you do not always have the best solution and fostering an environment where people build on each others ideas is the key to building a collaborative team.  In my experience, to achieve this you need professionalism, dedication and having the entire team commit to working in a collaborative way.

The first Tribal Leadership Intensive Two course was last week and I am completing week one!  What do you do when homework creeps you out?  You push through it and ignore the feeling!  I have a bunch of various thoughts on the last week and if you want to know more, please read on!

The first class was last Tuesday night and as usual, it went by fast!  My phone company messed up my phone line and I had to get credits at the last minute to dial-in through Skype.  The quality was surprisingly good overall and I may do it again this week.  We spoke of Leadership versus Management and it was a good discussion.

That conversation reminded me of various times in my career where people offered me management positions and I turned them down.  I enjoy playing a strong leadership role and I also have the skills handle the management side, but I do not enjoy that as much.  Instead, I prefer to leverage those skills by coaching managers so they can do their jobs better.

I have a new triad to play with in this course, James and Darrel are cool and I look forward to collaborating with them on our leadership project.  We had our first triad call this week and I think we have good chemistry together.  We started discussing our project but did not decide on it yet.

Writing an obituary for a designed life was brutal this week.  Me and death have a true love-hate relationship going.  My father passed away when I was twenty years old and dealing with death is something that brings back bad memories.  I shared a story with my triad this week that I want to share here too.  Over the years, to help me deal with death, I developed my theory of the first times.

Typically, the first year after someone dies is harder to deal with because of all the “first times” such as the first Christmas or first birthday.  Once you get past the first year, the pain remains but somehow is not as strong.  When you are young though, you will experience many other first times in your life that may bring back the pain of your loss.   For example, I felt that pain after the birth of my two kids and when I bought my first car and my first house.

The view I share with people now is that when you lose a parent when you are older (forties or older), there is comfort in the knowledge your parent saw who you became in life.  I admit, death is not easier to deal with, but I believe that knowledge helps cover many of those other “first times” and brings some peace.

To come back to the obituary, I found it difficult to write.  I finished it and shared it with my triad members via e-mail but I will not post it here because that would cross a line I am not comfortable crossing.  If you want to creep out your spouse, making jokes about writing your obituary is a great way to do that!

What did I learn from doing the exercise?  It was challenging to write because I realized that I am not chasing a specific dream in my life.  For example, if I organized a trip to Egypt to visit the pyramids with my wife that would probably make one of her life dreams come true.  I have nothing as specific, but the closest would be returning where I grew up in Africa, or going to see Switzerland.  Neither would give me the same thrill as her trip to Egypt.

To write the obituary, I started thinking about how I would like people to remember me after I am gone.  I thought about my current career direction and expanded it to where I want it to go and  I also incorporated information such as age, health and how I died.  Finally, I tried to find my weaknesses on the family front and identify ways I could fix them over the years.  This was difficult for me and I am happy with the result.

Looking back at Intensive One

One outcome of the Tribal Leadership Intensive One course was “people will seek you out”.  Talking with people on the call, I realized this is true for many people and I am one of them.  I started talking with various companies in the last few weeks and I will have a new employer come August.  Some opportunities, like writing a back cover quote for a book, just appeared out of the blue.

The last six weeks, I felt like I was living life in a different bubble.  My focus was much more positive and I focused on things that fed me and gave me peace of mind.  The EARN boxes (now LEARNS) allowed me to identify some baselines for what I want in my life.  I am starting to consider changing some of my definitions to allow me to tweak my focus in areas where I want to reach something different or higher.

I started to wonder recently about what type of people get inspired with the videos we watched as homework.  I wonder how many people watch them without getting anything out of them.  I found many of them energized me and gave me the gentle nudge I needed to wake up.  To circle back to the Making a Genius Tribe video, for a moment, I forgot all those great things I can do.  When those memories finally came back, I decided to accept them and not let anyone take away my personal power anymore.

In the last few weeks, some people told me they found these blog entries inspiring and I respect that.  Honestly though, from my perspective, I am just living life and I struggle through many parts of it just like everyone else.  Come to think of it, maybe the people in those videos would probably tell me the same thing!

Capacity Matters in Sprint Planning

The biggest challenge many teams new to Scrum face is to understand when they are over-committing themselves during the sprint planning meeting. Before doing any sprint planning, the first thing teams should do is identify their sprint capacity, which is the number of hours they are available to work on backlog items during the sprint.

Read the full article at Search Software Quality at Techtarget.com by clicking here.

I spent the day at Agile Coach Camp in Montreal today.  It was my first Open Space experience and I thought it was really amazing.  At the end, they asked us to write a letter to ourselves, which we will receive as an e-mail in three or four weeks.  They suggested writing about our experience, what we learned about ourselves and others and what we will be doing next.  Sounded to me like they were asking me to write a blog post!  To learn more about my Agile Coach Camp experience, please read on!

Truth be told, the camp activities started last night with some agile games, lightning talks and a group dinner.  My kids and the travel make it challenging for me to free myself up for events like last night , so I skipped last night and joined the camp today.  To register for the event, we needed to write a position paper in which we declared our super power.  Mine was using Jedi Mind Tricks to help bring change, I was happy to learn this morning that it was picked as one of the favorites last night.

The day started with a continental breakfast and networking session and then we did an opening circle for the open space session.  I never such a session before and I did not know what to expect.  The fascinating thing about this event is the fact the participants self-organize the sessions all day long.  We had five or six spots where people could group together to discuss different topics for around an hour.  On the wall, there were big post-it notes that started out blank and people proposed topics they wanted to discuss.

To create the first sessions the facilitator asked us during the opening circle to get up, introduce ourselves, propose our topic and put it up on the wall.  My first proposal was a session on using Agile with distributed teams which I scheduled for late in the afternoon.

Todd Charron presented the first session I attended.  It presented different ways to use improvisation to liven up daily scrum sessions.  Todd facilitated a creative and lively session with lots of laughs.  I intend to use some of his games with the teams I work with.  I will need to figure out the correct context, but he had some interesting little games.  My favorites were:

• A group of people in a circle with their eyes closed trying to count to 21.  Random people call out numbers in sequence and if two people mention the same number at the same time, the group must start again at 1.  It took us a few tries to succeed, but we managed to do it.
• Having a group of people in a circle count numbers sequentially going around the circle.  When they reach a number containing a seven (i.e. 7, 17, 27) or that is a multiple of seven (i.e. 7, 14, 21) the next person calls out “buzz” instead and the circle changes direction.  It is more difficult than it looks!

Michael Stayd hosted the next session I attended which was about systemic constellations.  Early in the session, I was skeptical but seeing it in action was cool.  We recreated a situation that someone in the session was experiencing by having others represent the people involved in real life.  The person whose problem we were trying to help with positioned these people and they explained how they felt based on where they were.  This is all very symbolic in nature is very hard for me to explain so I will provide a couple of links on the subject instead:

• Wikipedia explanation
• Website for a company offering this with various links

Having no topic of interest in the next slot, I added a session to present the concepts behind Tribal Leadership based on the book and the course I just completed.  I enjoyed presenting the subject matter and hopefully made the participants curious enough to go check out the audio book.  One thing I found myself doing when looking at the available sessions in a timeslot was trying to identify if I was in a mood to give gifts or to receive information.  I consider adding this session a gift and trying to share some of the knowledge I gained in the last few weeks.

After lunch, I attended a session by Kate McGaw on using Kanban to manage your personal life.  Kate, if you ever find your way to reading this, my wife will most certainly thank you!  I told her about your session when she got back with the kids and she got quite a laugh at my plan of building a Kanban board in my home office so that she can manage our home improvement list.  At this point, I am unsure if I should thank you until I see how much work I acquire in my backlog…   All kidding aside, your session was a good takeaway for me!  Thanks!

My final session of the day was the one I hosted on Agile for distributed teams.  I tried taking a different approach to my morning session by mainly facilitating, taking notes and letting others do most of the talking.  I told some personal stories and share some information from “A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum” but I did not want the session to be an informercial for the book either.

I was too drained to attend a final session after that, so I walked around and spoke to individuals instead.  I had a tremendous day containing many positive experiences.  Some people there knew of the book I co-wrote with Elizabeth and Matt and offered nice words about it which was a pleasant experience.

I want to apologize for not going to supper after the event.  I had a free night as my wife went to see her family with the kids, but I want to share a little secret…  I am very awkward socially even with friends, so imagine with people I barely know.  I understand this is strange coming from someone who speaks comfortably to large groups of people, and blogs openly about his life…  But for some reason there is a difference and it is both challenging and difficult for me.  I appreciated meeting you and I hope we will keep in touch!

Thank you to all of you for sharing your stories and experiences as you gave me a very rich experience today!  Many more thanks to the organizers for taking your personal time to get this up and running for all of us!

We completed the last class of the Tribal Leadership Intensive One class last week.  My life is so crazy recently that finding time to blog is a challenge.  To learn more about my recent adventures, my overall thoughts of the course and what I got out of it, please read on!

I am going to do something different tonight, I will break down this post in multiple sections to cover different topics.

Adventures in Podcasting

In my last blog entry, I spoke about how my disembodied genius Jim Bob helped me find a way to be able to record the first part of the podcast.  After the class last week, I decided I was going to get through recording the missing part of the podcast.  When I tried to merge both parts together, I realized my previous recording was corrupt so because I was more comfortable with the script, I recorded the entire podcast from scratch.  Because of the now completed script, I made the raw recording in a single twenty minute take.

It took me around two hours to edit down those twenty minutes down to the thirteen minutes of the podcast, add in the music and produce an MP3 I could listen to the next day.  I made this draft version available in the LinkedIn group and to select friends.  To do my own quality control, I put it on my iPod the next morning.

When listening to the podcast the next day, I realized one of the effects I put on the mix caused the sound to clip occasionally.  To correct the problem, I needed to regenerate a mixed version without the offending effect.  To do this, I returned to my original twenty minute recording, found the offending effect, regenerated the mix down and then spent two hours editing it all back down again.

Lesson Learned:  When creating a podcast, first record the raw clip as a WAV file and then edit it down in a WAV editor.  Once you finish editing, bring the new clip in a mixing tool (such as REAPER or MixPad) and then add tracks for the music and the podcast track.  You can then add effects (such as EQ and Compression) on your vocal track to sweeten the sound and finally, generate a mix down of the tracks.  Following this sequence would have literally saved me hours of effort!

For those laughing because you already knew these tricks, remember you were a newbie once too!  Part of the goal of doing this was to learn tricks to make it easier next time.  I believe I learned enough in the last few weeks to allow me to create a podcast regularly.  It scares me know to think about how long the post-production will take on a ninety minute talk if a fifteen minute podcast took me two hours to do.

Triads Triads Everywhere

We spoke a lot about the importance of triads in our last class and I am beginning to see them now around me.  I also recently learned what can happen when working in a dyadic relationship (two people) instead of a triad.

The Dave Logan video from TedxSinCity called “Making a Genius Tribe” had a great explanation for a triad.  He explained it as a three person relationship where everyone is responsible for preserving the relationship between them.  When conflicts arise between two people in the group, the responsibility of the third person is to help them patch things up.

As the left side of figure 1 shows, a dyadic relationship is a direct connection between two people.  The right side shows how two dyadic relationships can transform into a triad.  In the illustration, John knows both Frank and Mark.  To help them become a triad, he needs to introduce them to one another because of a common bond and help them build a working relationship so the three can work together.  In this role, when John sees an issue between them, he will work to help them preserve their relationship.  Eventually, as they know each other better, they share the responsibility for preserving the three-person relationship.

Figure 1: Dyadic to Triadic Relationship

I was in a situation recently where being a dyad with a friend caused me headaches.  I have a good friend that I enjoy talking to and respect the opinion of very much but this person lives far away from me.  We had a communication breakdown recently and I realized that having been part of a triad would have helped us work through our challenges much faster.  Unfortunately, aside from our spouses, I am not sure who would take us up on that.

I was in a few business meetings recently where I saw potential triads right in front of me.  I noticed something interesting in a meeting where I had a difficult conversation with someone.  I spoke about what happened to someone else who decided to clear things up to make the relationship work.  I find it interesting to see group chemistry in this light now.  I find it gives a clearer explanation for something I could notice happening at times.

Building a community

I started engaging in an interesting project at work this week.  I am working on building a community of practice and am currently speaking to different people to encourage them to join the leadership team of the community.  It is a nice stage four project and I find it stimulating to engage all these people, sometimes complete strangers and hear their excitement as I talk them through the project.

I built a presentation to walk them through how we would like to build this community.  The deck also explains their potential role as community leader and what they should expect if they decide to join in.  It was just like a pitch, but much longer than three minutes!

When I worked at IBM, the agile community of practice was a great example of a stage 4 tribe.  The community leaders worked alongside the community members to deliver all sorts of interesting results.  Building a community like this from nothing is a fascinating experience.

What I took out of the course

I really enjoyed my experience in the course.  They could improve the course materials and I found it more difficult to remain focused during the calls without decks to follow along.  The trainers were engaging and seemed genuinely interested in helping all participants grow.  My triad was amazing and I met many other interesting people I will work to keep in touch with after the course.

The following are my favorite takeaways from Tribal Leadership Intensive One:

• You can take control of your life, but you need to want to take control.  Did you hear the old joke about how many psychologists it takes to change a light bulb.  You only need one, but the light bulb needs to really want to change!
• Notice the bad patterns you keep repeating in your life…  When a similar situation occurs, be bold and risk making a different decision.  The outcome may surprise you!
• Learn to build and work with triads.  Be more aware people around you and how you can connect them to form new triads.
• Build strategies for what is important to you.  Take the time to think them through and then carry them out.  Engage the people around you to get feedback, support you and allow you to reach the outcomes you want.
• A leader LEARNS something new every day.

For those of you who followed my blog regularly during the course, I would like to thank you.  At times, knowing some of you were reading gave me extra incentive to write.  The experience of writing for you allowed me to assimilate the course materials.  It excites me to know I will continue the journey with many of you in Tribal Leadership Intensive Two.

I committed to deliver this podcast as one of my outcomes from my Tribal Leadership Intensive One class.  I struggled for months to record this and make it sound right, in the last four weeks I pushed through and made it happen!    I am so happy and proud to finally put this out on the website!

Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to finally introduce Agile Talk, my monthly podcast discussing my experiences using agile methodologies.

In this broadcast:

• How Steffan got interested in Agile methodologies
• How to use Scrum outside the software development world.
• New to Scrum?  Take the Scrum Yourself challenge!

Thank you to all in the Tribal Leadership class for being so supportive and encouraging.  I dedicate this first broadcast of Agile Talk to you guys!

I spent the last two evenings working on executing on my strategy with various degrees of success.  As I was struggling with recording my podcast on Monday night, my mind started to wander to Elizabeth Gilbert and disembodied geniuses.  What an incredibly good teaser for people outside the course!  To learn more about what I am talking about, please read on!

On Monday night, I decided to start recording the first podcast for my website.  I worked on it close to an hour with no results to show.  It was fun and maddening and just as I started blaming myself for not getting through the recording, I flashed back to the Elizabeth Gilbert talk about creativity we watched last week.

I started thinking back on those disembodied geniuses she was telling us about and decided I needed to one of those to help.  I started by looking for the “Disembodied Geniuses” category in the Yellow Pages but could not find it.  I also considered posting an ad in the classifieds section of my local newspaper but in the end, I decided it would be faster if I just made one up for myself instead.  To make it easier to communicate, I even gave him a name…  Ladies and Gentlemen, please allow me to introduce you to my own personal Disembodied Genius:  Jim Bob!

To give some context to this post, Figure 1 below shows the assets and challenges I identified in an earlier post for doing my recordings.

This week, I discovered my Powerpoint deck did not address the challenge of not being able to improvise a fifteen-minute podcast.  There was still a fair amount of improvisation going on.  I had a long chat with Jim Bob (good god I must sound nuts right now, but I am enjoying myself) and we came to an agreement.  We agreed if I took the time to write a script for my slides, Jim Bob would help me get through the recording unscathed.  So I did that for the first slides and got five minutes of usable audio for less than ten minutes of recording.

If you take another look at Figure 1 again, you will see that I identified “I want it to sound natural, like when I do a live talk” as one of my challenges for recording the audio CD.  Originally, I was afraid that scripting it, as per Jim Bob’s suggestion would add this pitfall to recording the podcast.  I weighed the pitfalls against each other and decided I could overcome making it sound natural more easily than to deal with the improvisation issue.

To make it sound natural and not as if I am reading from a script, I decided to give myself creative license when I am recording.  I can change words going through the script but having it takes away part of the hesitation I had.  To address my stumbling issue, I decided to just stop for a couple of seconds and restart from the top of the last paragraph each time I stumble.  When I do the post production, I will keep the good parts and edit out the rest.

I was reflecting today on places I worked and the cultures I met.  I came to an interesting epiphany doing this reflection and I wanted to share my observations on a group of people that shows an interesting paradox.

I once worked in an organization of about twenty people split in multiple teams.  When thinking back to the management team, you could see stage three (I am great) thinking where some managers would talk terms of their own personal success (perceived or real).  Most teams in the group performed at stage two (my life sucks) because those managers enjoyed having them there.  They systematically immediately squashed any perceived threat to their decision making ability by reaffirming their authority.

Despite the environment they were in, one of the teams found a way to consistently work at stage four (we are great…).  The core values of their manager, who valued teamwork and collaboration above all else encouraged them to work that way.  The team had growing pains when they started working together, but even through those growing pains, they found ways to work through their differences and collaborate.

Here comes the epiphany…  As I was reflecting on this group, I realized the paradox between the stages at which the teams performed but I had a hard time putting that last team at stage four.  I came to realize the difficulty came from my personal definition of greatness.  To me greatness is perfection, or at least achieving something at a very high standard.  Using my high personal standards, this team did not achieve that, at best, they were good.  When I stepped back and took a closer look, I came to accept that stage four is not literally about “being great”, it is really about the “WE” part.  I broke it down to the following short list:

• Their collaboration level
• Their personal interactions
• Their ability to work together
• Their ability to deliver “something” consistently

Another example came to mind after I had this epiphany.  I thought back to a conversation after the call last week when I spoke with the trainers about the content of these blog posts.  I am aware what I write here can have an impact if someone interested in the class reads my blog before signing up.  If I consistently write bad things, that person may not sign up because of my impressions.  I was very careful when I wrote about not liking the second class because of that.  When I asked them about it, one of them answered: “You know Steffan, it is ok.  No matter what, we know we are great!” My realization about the team I discussed earlier made me look back at that statement in a different light.  Today, using the criteria I outlined above, I can confirm they are great!

On a personal note, the participants in the course are really great!  After hearing about my challenge defining one of my strategies in the course, a few people e-mailed me to talk about their experiences and offer advice and help.  I am really grateful to you guys for taking the time to do that!

How much are you willing to demand of yourself? That was a question the trainers asked us in the first class. I was walking to work one morning and feeling overwhelmed by this experience. My inner voice was reminding me of all the stuff I need to do and I started feeling overloaded. As I neared the office, the inner voice chuckled and asked: “So Stef, how much ARE YOU willing to demand of yourself?” I could give you the answer here, but I would much rather you read on!

A few years ago, my mother-in-law went to see her son play in a bowling tournament for four days. We knew she was leaving and planned a special surprise for her. During the time she was away from the house, we redid her kitchen in four days. We repainted the cabinets, changed the counters, removed the vinyl tiling from the floor and installed ceramic tiles. I remember two days into it, just after removing the vinyl tiles walking around the kitchen and thinking: “Oh my god, what have we done! Do we have enough time to put this back together?”

It looked like some form of natural disaster occurred in the kitchen. We could not go back, all we could do was charge on. Let the record show, we finished on time! When I walked to work this week, the same feeling came to mind. They call this course Tribal Leadership Intensive and now I understand why. Between the homework, blogging and trying to carry out my five week strategy, I am spending much more time than I anticipated.

To answer the question how much I am willing to demand of myself, anyone who knows me will tell you I will find a way to carry out my strategy. By hook or by crook or by any other means necessary! Sometimes I wonder if I am the only one feeling overwhelmed right now, maybe I should ask around in the LinkedIn group. The hard part about this class is there is a lot of introspection going on and you need to go places you maybe did not originally expect.

The EARN boxes are a tool I will keep working on after the class ends as it is a great introspection tool. Sometimes we go through life without thinking of the way we are living it and this tool allows you to do that every day. I am seeing some of the relationships between the boxes and I am slowly edging up my weekly scores.

The theme this week is disassociation or rather letting go but before you can let go, you must first notice what is there. I found myself driving back from work one day with anger and negative thoughts, I noticed they were there, but shutting them down was a challenge. I tried imagining crushing them and throwing them away, but my car seemed to be filling up quickly with crushed negative thoughts. I think I will throw them out the window next time. What I found worked for me was playing songs from my CD collection and singing out loud to drown out the noise.

Our triad call was good this week. I believe I experienced an epiphany but I cannot share it entirely now because it is time sensitive and personal. A member of my triad gave a pitch that made me question my approach to an upcoming event. This forced me to realize I needed to create a strategy for this event over the weekend because I was approaching the event from a stage 3 perspective instead of stage 4.

I watched a video this week I really enjoyed from Dave Logan speaking at TedxSinCity. I strongly recommend you watch it! The Batman story resonated with me. I stopped writing since the site relaunch of December because last year I made a bad decision that caused me to lose myself. I am working to correct that decision but it caused me to lose my fire. I became someone I did not recognize anymore but I wanted the old me back. Last fall, I bought an audio book for “Lynchpin” by Seth Godin. That book reminded me of who I am and this course is pushing me through a similar process. I am learning to use these tools we are learning in this course to get my life back.

Before I go tonight, I have a silly story or rather I should say a confession… I am a horrible gardener and every couple of years I try to grow grass (real grass, not anything I could smoke) on my property and fail miserably. My property has several pine trees and the needles choke out the grass. I am so bad, one year, one of my neighbors told me: “What, not giving up yet?” In fairness, grass grows until I mow it the first time and then it dies away on me. In the spirit of visualizing this week, I am making another try with a couple of twists:

1. I am working on three specific small patches
2. I manually water these patches every day there is no rain. As I water, I imagine I am growing something good for myself.
3. I will baby the darn grass to grow successfully if I have to!

As for my five week strategy, I am recording my podcast tomorrow night which was my goal of the week. I am a tad behind on the overall strategy but I believe I can still deliver what I said I would. I am looking forward to recording that tomorrow and see how it sounds!

Have a great week everyone!