More than a year ago I was training and consulting with a company that was deciding how to adopt Agile software development methods across all of their teams in the organization after some successful pilots. After a 2-day private Scrum course we decided to use the 3rd day to run a workshop on how to take their organization’s strategic business goals and support that with Agile methods adoption and Lean thinking across their project portfolio. This article will share the facilitation techniques and exercises that I used, which spanned many techniques that could helpful to others supporting strategic decision-making meetings:
For more information on Innovation Games®, please check out:
For more information on Cynefin, please check out the following articles and videos:
Hope this gets folks started in looking at Cynefin and methods around complexity. My one suggestion for anyone getting to know Cynefin is make sure that you don’t look at the “Cynefin Model” and misjudge it to be a basic 4-box model. There are actually 5 domains and a fold at the bottom that have tremendous significance in the model. Not only that, the model is about sense-making rather than categorization. With a focus on these suggestions while learning more about Cynefin I think will help make the experience more beneficial.
As for an experience report from the actual client. A company that I was asked to work with wanted a 2-day Certified ScrumMaster course along with a 3rd day workshop to focus on their specific needs. Of course, during the 2-day class we pulled many specific areas of opportunity and ideas that the group had. The participants were about 1/2 Director and above and the other 1/2 were development team members and project managers. There were about 30 folks in the class and the 2-day class was providing plenty of insights.
One thing that I am focused on in every class is not how can Scrum be implemented but what is the most valuable next steps an individual, team, or organization can make starting the very next day. In the 3rd day workshop we decided to focus on the business goals that implementing more agility would help achieve and a strategy to attain these business goals. Overnight I came up with a loose facilitated session with the following exercises:
1. Impediment Management Exercise using basic facilitation techniques:
- Brainwriting: 10 reasons per individual that Scrum and other agility cannot be implemented effectively at company
- Affinity grouping: on a wall place all items and affinity group them with names to provide context and insights into to the data
- Multi-voting: not a scientific method necessarily, but quick way to get feedback on what is most important on the wall
- Debrief actions to take
2. “Give them a hot tub” – an Innovation Games® exercise (http://innovationgames.com/resources/the-games/)
- Used to identify goals and initiatives that would improve business outcomes focused on software development
3. Ritual Dissent – http://www.cognitive-edge.com/method.php?mid=46
- set up tables with 6-7 folks per table
- each table comes up with a strategy for implementing agility to attain business goals and value of agility (20 minutes)
- 1 person is chosen by table to go to another table and present the strategy for 5 minutes – important that all tables have a chair at the end of it to have the visitor form the other table sit at
- folks at the table that are listening to the strategy are not allowed to speak during the presentation
- at 5 minutes the person presenting turns their chair around with back to folks at table and takes out a notebook
- the folks at the table now ritually tear apart the presented strategy (be sure to tell all of the participants before the exercise that this will be occurring and that their duty is to be as cutting as possible) (3 minutes)
- at 3 minutes the person that presented does not turn around and make eye contact or talk with the table of folks and then just goes back to their own table with all of their notes
- the table uses those notes to modify their strategy (10 minutes)
- the presenter goes to a different table 2-3 more times
- you can end with a round where the folks at the table talk about what they liked about the strategy once it has went through 3-4 rounds but we did not do this (this is called “Ritual Assent”)
- Find out more alternatives and ideas on Ritual Dissent at the Cognitive Edge web site
4. Combine Strategy
- at the end it was fairly simple to pull strategy from all tables and since they shared with each other we decided what the combined strategic alignment and implementation would be presented to executive management
As an epilogue to this, the company did implement most of the strategic plan and found effective changes in their organization even 2 years later since I was there. Hopefully this article provided some opportunities for those facilitating strategic decision-making sessions and added some other options to learn about, Cynefin and Innovation Games® in particular, to your facilitation tool belt.
