Our family enjoys hosting people from all over the world through a service called Couch Surfing. My daughter Malia and I put this map together of where some of our guests came from. We used Google Spreadsheets and a Google map widget.
Agility Café 10: what’s in a name, time management and video blogging
If you are wondering “What’s an Agility Café?” then read this.
We welcomed two new people to the café, Birgit Kroll who owns Personal Fit Meal Catering and Sandra Hodge, owner of Sandra Hodge Studio. Regulars Robert Bonell of Bonell & Associates and Cindy Crawford, our host from Sault Downtown Association were also there.
Proposed topics:
Topic map, what we discussed, learned, and will act upon:
Topic: What should I name my business?
Action for this week: decide whether or not to go with personal name as company name (at least for now)
Topic: How can I better manage my time?
Action for this week: make work to do visible by setting up a task board flip chart with columns To Do, In Progress, Done. Put all tasks on stickies and use board to track and prioritize work.
Topic: How can I get started video blogging?
Action for this week: set up a YouTube account and try uploading a test video recorded using camera.
Satisfaction scores
The Café continues to resonate well as-is. In Sandra’s words, “I’ve been looking for something like this.”
Experiments for next time:
- start session at 12:05, so people should arrive no later than 12:00
- Birgit to brainstorm some ideas for shared lunch (who better?)
If you are wondering “What’s an Agility Café?” then read this to learn more and register for the next one.
Workshop tales: scaling games to teach Agile/Scrum
How would you introduce Agile/Scrum to participants of a Tourism conference in 2 hours? For me, the Tourism Brochure game seemed like a natural fit. Participants get a chance to experience the entire Scrum process, from feature brainstorming and prioritization to product demo and retrospective.
All was well, until I discovered later that there might be 70 participants at the session (note to self: inquire about session size when making proposal). Yikes! I then went to work on ways to scale the game with just one facilitator aka my plan to keep my sanity intact.
Scaling the resort brochure game
Preparation was key. I spent an inordinate amount of time creating supplementary material:
- sample brochure to see what the final destination will look like
- task boards and progress charts drawn up for each team
- pre-made backlog of stickies for each team (thanks Don for the feature suggestions!)
- slides (see below) to indicate at every step what we are doing, how much time we have and when to stop current activity
- music to play during activities, with the end of the music signalling end of activity. My iPod came in handy for this.
- material kits for each table, with plenty of fun stuff to keep the spirits up
- a concept map to fill in the Scrum Framework and a sample note taking sheet
View more presentations from Gerry Kirk
Insights from facilitating
- Provide clear instructions for people to understand concepts, which includes multiple learning methods. This workshop in some ways ran smoother than some smaller ones I’ve facilitated. There was less confusion, increased flow of activity. You can scale much better with the right supports in place.
- Keep steps as simple as possible. Each step in the process was kept small and focused, making it easier to follow.
- Demonstrate by example. For the product review/demo, I helped one team do their demo while the other groups watched. That gave me a chance to go through what needed to be done and why. It produced several teaching moments, and increased the value of the other group’s product review sessions.
- Keep the fun and energy levels up to make everything go smoother. The music and materials added a sense of play and excitement to the game.
- 8 teams need more than one facilitator. Had there been one more person, teams could have had questions answered more quickly, or gone less astray during an activity. To compensate, I added time to some activities in order to get around to tables.
- Sharon Bowman‘s Training from the Back of the Room continues to yield excellent results for me. I had plenty of energy left, even after a hectic two hours because the participants, not me, were the centre of attention. Opening and closing discussions, small table activities kept them busy and learning together, with me as their ‘guide on the side’ as Sharon likes to say.
Agility Café 8: Co-working and Cindy’s amazing update
If you are wondering “What’s an Agility Café?” then read this.
We welcomed two new people to the café, Trevor Swenson and a co-owner of Scripture Gift and Book shop, whose name I’ve sadly forgotten. I haven’t forgotten the amazing brownies she brought however. 🙂
Cindy had lots to update us on since our last session, she is really on fire. The other half of the session was spent pondering the feasibility / desirability of a co-working space in Sault Ste. Marie. The idea resonated with everyone present, with a number of ideas for how to keep building momentum. Andrew Ross, expect some emails from us. Darryl Buck from RBB Innovations is keen on the idea as well, so we’ll continue to discuss this with him.
Overall rating this time: 7
Likes:
- venue
- open discussion
- rich update from Cindy
- silent brainstorming
Improve:
- time was short for topic discussions
- interruptions by people coming in late
Experiments for next time:
- time box updates
- expand Agility Café overview online so newbies can become more familiar with format before attending
- pull out mind map from last session for during the update
If you are wondering “What’s an Agility Café?” then read this to learn more and register for the next one.
Agility Café 7: Creativity, Engagement and New Breakthroughs
We met for the first time at the Downtown Association, in their spacious board room overlooking Queen St, the sunlight pouring in. Combined with the quiet and large table for note taking, this created an ideal space for rich discussion. This was the best café yet, just keeps getting better.
See the mind map for most of the details. Note that:
- Each topic is listed, with the challenges, observations and ideas captured.
- Each person whose topic is discussed selects one or more actions to take in the next week. Those action steps are circled in red.
- We also check in at the start. Cindy had a lot of exciting breakthroughs to share (highlighted in yellow). That’s what makes this all worthwhile, seeing people get excited, moving past obstacles and closer to their goals.
Topic: Creativity in the Workplace
Darren gives a one minute summary of what we discussed and action steps he plans to take:
Overall scores out of 10:
- 9, 9, 8, 10
- we liked: no noise, sun, focus and flow of conversation
Improvements to get a perfect score:
- better parking
- more people for next session
Want to know more about Agility Cafés? Read when they happen, what you’ll get out of them, and how to register.
Agility Cafés 5&6: what we learned
Why go to an agility café? People keep coming back because it’s
- a chance to connect and collaborate with a diverse group of people
- get useful, practical tips and support to apply immediately
- fun 🙂
Next café is on Feb 25 @ the Downtown Association. Read more and register.
Topics from the last two sessions:
- End of road discussions – requests for assistance outside of our capacity
- How to create more chances between each other to collaborate?
- How to handle marketing multiple services?
- How to prioritize projects?
- How to manage committees as clients?
And… the results:
End of road discussions – requests for assistance outside of our capacity
Key takeaways:
- Make it clear what can and can’t be done, in a friendly way. FAQs are useful, provide information in form of scenario/response.
- Not all customers can be served and satisfied. It’s ok to choose who your customers are.
- Choose not to listen to ongoing complaints – set boundaries
How to create more chances between each other to collaborate
How to manage marketing multiple services (or, how to gain focus and traction when dealing with many choices)
How to prioritize
Key takeaways:
- Decide on the prioritization attributes that matter, and use those to compare options. Profit, capacity, deadlines are a few examples.
- Give yourself breathing room to be able to make choices, to re-prioritize as needed
- Don’t try to please everyone! Making choices means choosing not to do some things, or to delay responding to requests until more important stuff is taken care of.
How to work with clients who decide everything by committee
Problem: committees taking too long to make decisions, or re-visiting decisions again and again, thus delaying project and value, increasing cost.
Ideas:
- Find a lever to motivate decisive action: project cost, schedule, or scope reduction due to increase costs and delays.
- Set up contracts to provide incentive to collaborate. There are examples of Agile contracts that do this, encouraging both sides to work as a team to deliver faster, reduce cost and increase value.
Agility Café #4: How to support remote sales team?
At this café, we came up with 3 topics, and got through two:
1. Functioning on a board of directors
2. Linking remote sales efforts / people
3. Marketing multiple services
Bill Murphy shared his situation, with sales agents working individually in various parts of Canada, and a desire to have them as a group better share ideas, build camaraderie and feel connected. Listen to his 1 minute video summary for what we came up with:
About Agility Café
The Agility Café happens every Friday at Dish, 12 – 1:15 pm. Register here to get one of the limited seats. Drop-ins welcome too.
We eat business obstacles for lunch. What’s in your way of delivering more value, at higher quality, with wayyyy more fun?
Format is simple. Come with a topic or two in mind or just an open mind. We’ll brainstorm at the beginning all the topics people want to discuss, then prioritize them. We’ll try and get through as many as we can. Learn from each other, and get your caffeine fix. When it’s over, it’s over. 🙂
This is a free event, an experiment in informal coaching and mentoring, and building community.
Citizens of San José play Innovation Game® to prioritize the city budget
The start of a new year means budget time once again. Councillors have dozens, maybe hundreds of choices to make, and the tradeoffs aren’t often clear. It’s a daunting task to make those decisions, especially for new councillors. They want to better understand the priorities of citizens regarding key budget initiatives, but how in a time and cost-effective manner, in a way that people want to participate?
Engagement with a twist: the city of San José brought in community leaders last Saturday to try their hand at making budget decisions (Mercury News article). They played budget prioritization games, a variation of an Innovation Game® called Buy a Feature. Diverse groups of citizens sat at tables, each possessing play money to purchase items. The key is that no one has enough money to buy the items they care most about – they have to persuade others to pool their money together, and that’s the magic of the game. Each table group also had a list of reductions to choose from to free up money to spend, provided they reached unanimous consent to cut something, like the building of a new police station.
Photos of game materials (best viewed in full screen):
I was there, at the invitation of Luke Hohmann, CEO of Innovation Games, to work as a volunteer observer and learn from the experience, in the hopes of holding a similar event in the Sault. For corporations, this type of event isn’t so unique, but for government, it’s pioneering stuff. My role was to capture both quantitative data, like who spent money on what, and qualitative data, like why an item was purchased, how the discussions went, what items were easy for the group not to purchase. After 90 minutes I had 30 index cards worth of data from our table.
Photos of my work and the team (best viewed in full screen):
As an observer, the passion people have about their city was evident, the options they had to choose from mattered. They struggled between choices, like funding a children’s health initiative vs a fund for community-based organizations. To help citizens, subject matter experts from the city were available to answer questions. People are passionate about their community, and when given a chance for meaningful engagement, they jump to the challenge.
So what was the result?
The Innovation Games team will report back on the results within a couple of weeks, which I will then share.
I interviewed two participants to get their impressions. In a nutshell, what I heard was the event went well beyond their expectations, based on their experience from previous years. This one was highly collaborative, informative, and even (gasp) FUN! Watch the short 1 minute videos to see for yourself.
A true measure of an event like this is that besides better understanding citizen priorities, a community grows closer together. This event delivered on that. They heard each other’s stories and dreams. They shared their diverse knowledge to make better decisions, collectively, and they had a fun time getting to know each other.
I believe this is just the start, an appetizer for what is possible in how citizens and government can engage each other. My intention is to learn from the San José experience and try a similar event in my home town of Sault Ste. Marie. I’m already getting enthusiastic feedback from members of council and Mayor Amaroso, who are also passionate about citizen engagement. Thanks to Luke and his hard-working Innovation Games® team, who poured in over two months of effort to make this one day happen. Citizen engagement, stronger community and better budgets – that’s worth investing in.
More photos:
Agility Café #3: Being Overwhelmed and Discovering the Root Cause
Agility Café has found its home! Fridays at noon at the Dish. Last week we tackled two issues raised at the café:
- how to avoid becoming too overwhelmed
- how to nurture the creative process (though we discovered a deeper underlying need)
You can watch short 2 min summaries of both discussions below, starring the lovely Darren Jorgensen.
The café this Friday is the last one this month, sadly as I will be away the following two Fridays. If you have something you want help with, or just want to get out of the office, then come out and join us this week. 🙂
RSVP for Café #4 on Friday, Jan 14 @ 12 pm, or just show up.
Biz Agility Café #2: Sustainable pace, timely invoicing and the multitasking monster
Jennifer Wendling from Fuzed Notions and Darren Jorgensen with his partner from Molly Media Studios joined me last Friday for warm eats and dialogue at the 2nd ever Business Agility Café. It was as fun as productive since Jennifer and Darren know each other so well. Darren was beaming at how reducing multitasking is helping Molly Media get more stuff done, something he learned about at the Business Agility workshop a couple of weeks ago.
Topics we covered:
- From Jennifer: how to decrease time from completing projects to getting invoices out? Some of Jennifer’s projects take one or even two months before the invoice goes out, creating cash flow issues and awkwardness asking for payments well after the project is done. We quickly recognized that there are many steps in the process, with Jen involved in most of them, leading to delays. I left Jen with the task of documenting the workflow from project completion to invoice sent to see visually what is happening and how long each step takes. A favourite quote of mine is you can’t manage what you can’t see.
- From Darren: using a task board for video production projects. We discussed adding checklists for each status of a task, so that a task cannot move from one status to another. Looking forward to seeing photos!
- From Darren: how to find a sustainable pace – too much work leading to burnout. Darren’s new studio will be ready in then new year (yay!) making it less tempting to do work from home (when the equipment isn’t there). I talked about how time boxes and Scrum can create a rhythm and flow that provides the confidence to know when things will get done, lessening the need to work around the clock due to worry about uncertainty.
- From Darren and Jennifer: how to reduce feast or famine cycles. Jennifer made some excellent points about nurturing relationships on an ongoing basis, keeping in contact with people so they think of you when a need for your services arises. Most of all Jennifer drove home the need for a marketing plan, so these activities align with company goals and are baked into the work plan instead of being starved for time. Good points that I took home with me!
Having done two of these cafés now, in the spirit of inspect and adapt, I’m planning to make the following improvements for future cafés:
- At the start, give returning participants a brief chance to update others on their experiments since the last café. Participants can use the Business Agility group to provide more-indepth information if they want to.
- Provide concept maps for people to jot down information as it’s discussed. Concept maps are a visual tool useful for capturing small bits of information in relation to each other. Writing down helps to retain learned information.
- Record and publish a video summary of each topic discussed, with new insights gained and planned next steps.
- Use the last 10 minutes to reflect on what we learned, the format and next steps for each participant.
Would you like to join us for the next Business Agility Café? Join the Business Agility group to be notified when the next one will be scheduled in the new year. It’s a low-volume email list for sharing and supporting each other in our experiments to increase value for our clients, our teams, ourselves and the world. What more reasons do you need? 🙂