Wow! Again it was a wonderful day at the Amplify Your Effectiveness (AYE) conference in Phoenix, AZ. My only regret is that it is the last day of the conference. Here is what I gathered on the day:

Writing Workshop presented by Naomi Karten and Johanna Rothmann

I have been doing some writing lately and I this workshop was a great way to help improve my skills in writing. The first exercise that we did included gathering 4 random words from others and including those words in a 5 minute writing exercise. Here was my output from the words inspiration, care, limber, and diagram:It was an inspiration that Dwayne took tremendous care in developing such a limber diagram of Monty Python’s influence on American culture.

We then discussed some techniques and topics of interest such as:

• Personas - identifying your audience through pictures and names for the different audiences you are writing to
• Adjectives - use singing adjectives that truly inspire
• Adverbs - don’t use with some exceptions identified by participants such as fiction and when it “really” works (really and very are adverbs we should stay away from)

We did a second exercise which was 15 minutes of writing on any topic we are interested in. Here is my output from this:

Why does news only constitute bad news? Are shock and awe strands soldered into our DNA? I despise what current news portrays yet I am drawn to it on occasion.

One day I sat in my care with my ears fluttering in and out of public radio broadcasting. A broadcast caught my attention. A boy in his teenage years started a charity for building wells in Africa. I was immediately baffled. How could inspirational news seduce my passion?

After dodging and judging my own life’s charitable inadequacies I stood in a parking lot embroiled in an idea. Are we desensitized enough as a society to thirst for narratives of virtue? If so, what could I do about it?

Now, here’s where my story begins…

This workshop was lots of fun and I recommend it to anybody interested in writing.

Putting your Power to Work presented by Dale Emery

It was interesting to discuss “power” with such a great group of people. Our first exercise was to define “power” by ourselves and then get into a group of 5 people and agree to a definition between us. Here is what the team I worked on agreed to:

power - def. Potential to manifest change

I won’t be able to discuss each word and alternatives we went through in coming to this definition but I can tell you it was quite interesting to participate. During the team part of this exercise we were asked to list examples of power that manifested in the exercise. The activities which were identified as indications of power were fun to talk about and understand in terms of perspective.

We discussed the beauty of abstraction in values. Here is an example from Dale:

An executive told me about one of the core values which was “fun”. While going around the company we asked people what the company’s core value of “fun” meant to them. They seemed to all have a different definition of “fun” and I asked the executive if that meant it had no meaning to the company. He replied that this was the beauty of the abstract value “fun”. Each person owns and crafts that value into something that is important to them.

I found this profound and a great way to discuss values including those in the Agile Manifesto.

Dale brought up another topic called the “Abilene Paradox” which is a book by Jerry Harvey. Here is the story as I remember it:

A group of people were together at a house about 50 miles out of Abilene and were starting to get quiet. One of the group members said to the rest of the group “why don’t we go to Abilene for something to do?”. The rest of group looked at each other and decided to do it. It was a very hot summer day and they had to travel 50 miles in a car with poor air circulation, go into Abilene and walk around in the heat, and then make their way back to the house. When they got back to the house one of the group members said that they didn’t really want to go into Abilene. That started a procession of other group members concurring with them and even the person who originally asked the group. That person had just been posing a thing to do and if the group said yes they would be alright with it but didn’t necessarily want to do it.

We got into this story because one of the groups discussed how they came to agreement. They said that each person looked around after a question about the definition being sufficient was asked. Each person was nodding their head “yes” and so everybody assumed that all team members agreed. This is not necessarily the case and many people recommend that you use a consensus technique such as the “fist of five”.

Overall this conference was incredible and walk away with some “relearnings” and new tools to use in order to be more effective in my work and life. If you are interested there is going to be another AYE conference next year and all are welcome. It is capped to a certain amount of people allowed to register for the conference and it is first come, first served.