Today was an exciting day for me. Two people that I have great respect for, Esther Derby and Diana Larsen, are conducting conflict negotiation training for a group of us at SolutionsIQ. If you do not know about Esther and Diana, they have just released a great book called Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great. They both bring an incredible amount of expertise in better management skills, conflict negotiation, team improvement, and group facilitation.

Within the first 30 minutes of our class today I saw the effects of this expertise as Esther and Diana ran us through a simple exercise, “paired introductions”. In that short period of time I was able to become closer to the rest of my colleagues attending the course. We broke into pairs to gather information about the other person that we may not have known. A couple of minutes later we started going around the room with each pair introducing their partner. It seemed that everybody shared stories from outside the technology environment about each person they were introducing. This small amount of information about my colleagues is quite powerful for improving our organization as a group.

I won’t go into great detail about the other exercises of the day because I believe that you must experience these for yourself. I will provide one quote which was written on a white board by Brent Barton at work which also came up during our discussions today:

“The opposite of conflict is not harmony, it is apathy”

I do believe that everybody in that room today has already gained something from today’s discussions and activities. Luckily, we have another day with Esther and Diana. Today essentially revolved around conflict and tomorrow will be more about negotiation. What a great job I have!