"I love the people; I love my community. But it’s hearing new problems and understanding where they fit in the landscape of how people are trying to advance agility in their company. For me, that’s always the best part of the summit!" - Eric Willeke

The Berlin SAFe Summit brought most of the Shaping Agility community together in one place for the first time since we formed. We seized the opportunity to record a face-to-face podcast, which was, more truthfully, the beer club than the coffee club.

Eric started the conversation by asking Ali, Saahil, and Mark what we were most looking forward to about the Summit. Somehow, that detoured into the backstory of how Shaping Agility began and the journey we’d been on together for the last year.

A joke about how we’d emerged from ‘early access’ kicked us down the gaming path. We found ourselves discussing vintage pinball machines and using mame emulators to record ancient video games so young students would understand our metaphors.

It was truly a joy to sit around a table in an Airbnb with rugs draped on the walls to reduce the echo and podcast-in-person!

Cast:

Eric Willeke

Mark Richards

Saahil Panikar

Ali Hajou

“What’s the moment when you can help people understand the cause of some pain they’re in and offer them something that’s going to help with the pain?” - Mark Richards

Rebecca’s back from Disneyworld! Mark’s discussion with two of his children about BDD triggers a fun exploration of our experiences with introducing it. We detour through Mark observing some people trying out Eric’s new PI Objective toolkit before life gets a little contentious.

Somehow, a chat about introducing tools and concepts ‘when people need them’ rather than ‘because you should’ triggers an exploration of motivation. Rebecca never strays too far from joy, Mark gets accused of being anti-joy, and Eric believes you don’t have to find joy in the workplace to be a great employee!

Cast:

Eric Willeke

Rebecca Davis

Mark Richards

Book References:

• The Cucumber Book – Mat Wynne, Aslak Hellesoy, Steve Tooke
• Specification by Example – Gojko Adzic

"First you sit in the moment, then you dance in the moment, if a little bit later." - Eric Willeke

Rebecca's in Disneyworld this week, so Eric and Mark are unsupervised again! We've both just finished our second draft of our talks for the Berlin SAFe Summit, so naturally, we start by sharing a little of that process. Talking about managing the timebox somehow leads to dancing in the moment, tap dancing, and journeying through the agenda mosh pit while facilitating.

With that, we're off – since we’re both passionate facilitators heavily influenced by Jean Tabaka! We chat a bit about the challenge of being a participant while poor facilitation happens. Then Eric takes us on a more positive spin as we share some moments where we've seen incredibly powerful facilitation from others.

We can't escape our Summit talk preparation, though. It's been an interesting process. Firstly, we co-created the first six episodes of our Lean Portfolio Management podcast between draft one and draft two, and it involved deep dives into some of the topics we're covering. Secondly, we've turned a happy accident into a deliberate approach by recognizing the obvious connections between our talks and those of Rebecca Davis and Harry Koehnemann. We riff on this for a bit before we head down the path of how AI and visual skills have changed our approach and some techniques we've figured out for telling real stories without breaking confidentiality.

Cast:

Eric Willeke

Mark Richards

Show Notes

Book References:

Resonate - Duarte

"I deeply love curiosity-driven learning. Go figure" - Eric Willeke

Rebecca leaves Eric and Mark unsupervised this week, and the conversation winds up revolving around Mark's highlight of the week, which is his excitement as he experiences the power of cohort-based training.

The exploration begins by comparing our mental models of what a training course is and the realization that although it's Mark's favorite new toy, Eric is no stranger to it. After a chat about how COVID forced us to learn to facilitate engaging virtual collaboration, we can't resist a trip down memory lane to reminisce on our early training experiences (a scary 30 years ago for Mark).

Moving on, we reflect on how often we jam too much information into people's heads in a multi-day course. Eric shares his love of the Kirkpatrick model for evaluating training effectiveness, which prompted a long discussion about the importance of making sure you're using the right training at the right time rather than just sprinkling it around.

A fun chat about the pros and cons of world-building to provide a useful 'created' context for training exercises versus using a series of exercises to establish a local 'in-house' context follows. After exploring the differentiation between a 'workshop which includes training' and 'experiential training,' we wrap up by chatting about some of the logistical trade-offs between multi-day and cohort-based.

Cast:

Eric Willeke

Mark Richards

Show Notes

References:

The Kirkpatrick training model

"This is a very real concern for how we make decisions that need to filter all the way down to what people are doing day to day. Otherwise, it's just going to stay in that ethereal layer of well-intentioned statement that doesn't actually get acted upon." - Michael Casey

This week, Eric, Rebecca, and Mark are joined by Michael Casey and Saahil Panikar. Weekly highlights included likening the journey of a feature to a kayak on a river, deep dives into AI and machine learning, dodging monster trucks while camping on the beach, teaching kids to use power tools, and the fun of co-creation.

Rebecca seeded the idea of exploring the role of sustainability in product development, and it turned out she had done so much research in the area that we all wound up being inspired by the ideas she'd been finding. She kicked us off chatting about building a recycling strategy into your products before Saahil shared a story of a client he'd worked with who'd explicitly modified their Cost of Delay formula to incorporate environmental impact. Michael took us down the path of long-term thinking, which led us into the world of 'patient capital' and the influence of environmental awareness on market segmentation. This led to some fascinating discussions about situations where people have been able to link economic drivers to sustainability drivers on the way to the Systems Thinking disciplines and how many of their examples are environmental. Eventually, we got to a wrap exploring the parallels between 'Built-in Sustainability' and 'Built-in Quality.'

Cast:

Eric Willeke

Rebecca Davis

Mark Richards

Michael Casey

Saahil Panikar

Show Notes

Book References:

• Lean Product and Process Development - Allen Ward
• Manifesto for a Moral Revolution - Jacqueline Novogratz
• The Fifth Discipline - Peter Senge
• Thinking in Systems - Donella Meadows

"If you can get somebody to be brain melty and gooey and actually happy about it, man, go you!" - Rebecca Davis

Our second coffee club took a very wandering path. After Rebecca kicked us off talking about the RTE Summit, Eric's highlight of the week was the Princeton Panel discussion he participated in on the Future of Agility. Mark followed up with a geek-out about the joy he was having iterating his Product Owner mastery course.

This led us into a deep discussion on iteration. We started by chatting about the significant iteration to the format of the SPC's Unleashed show but quickly got deep into why teams find it so challenging to truly iterate. If we want to build the concept of 'learning your way towards the outcome through iteration,' what are the cultural and interpersonal elements that inhibit it?

This led to a fun (and deeply personal) chat about building team feedback protocols, developing techniques for healthy feedback, and the joy of finding your 'Square Squad.' Eric then brought us through a journey into the joy of distilling complex concepts into very targeted, digestible information that inspires action.

Cast:

Eric Willeke

Rebecca Davis

Mark Richards

Show Notes

Book References:

• Slide:ology - Nancy Duarte
• What did you say? - Gerald Weinberg
• Braving the Wilderness - Brene Brown

"I think being a leader and running an organization, especially one that's hard, that's big, is actually really hard. And it frustrates me when I read something and people are trying to make it sound easy or simple." - Rebecca Davis

As 2023 wrapped, we decided two things about the Saturday Sessions livestreams. One was to shift to midweek at a more humane time for our US folks, and the other was that our conversations were much better suited to a podcast than a Livestream. This is the kick-off episode for 2024. It's called "the coffee club" because that's how we want it to feel for ourselves and our listeners. What happens when a group of lean-agile experts get together once a week and talk over a virtual coffee about what's exciting them or making them curious?

We were all fresh from our holidays, and lots of reading time in this episode, so the conversation was a ramble through the books, we'd all read and the inspiration we'd found. The conversation started with the challenge of sustained focus on changing an executive leadership culture and moved to the importance of reflective conversations in creating a learning organization. Nancy Duarte's amazing books on Slide:ology and storytelling then took us on a long journey through presentation skills and lessons we've learned over the years we've been presenting.

Cast:

Eric Willeke

Rebecca Davis

Mark Richards

Show Notes

Book References:

• Slide:ology - Duarte
• Resonate - Duarte
• Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge - Willis
• More than a Motorcycle - Teerlink and Oxley
• Out of the Crisis - Deming
• American Icon - Hoffman
• The Fifth Discipline - Senge
• The Lean Machine - Oosterwal
• The ART of Focused Conversation - Stanfield (ORID technique)
• One Mission - Fussell, Goodyear
• Team of Teams - McChrystal, Silverman, Collins, Fussell
• Second Mountain - Brooks
• Organizational Traps - Argyris
• Influence - Decker

Other References:

• Problem-Solving Leadership Course - Derby
• Relationship Temperature Check - Satir