I found four:

• Coaching for Education has as its aim the provision of knowledge, skills. Training, workshops, skills mentoring, establishing reading and coding groups.
• Coaching for Performance entails helping a team improve what they’re currently doing - to deepen and consolidate abilities. Retrospectives play a key part.
• Coaching for Innovation is all about helping a team or organisation generate ideas - for products, technology, ways of working.
• Finally, coaching for Change means working towards transformation - of individuals, teams and organisations.

EPIC - a handy (but—honestly—unintended) mnemonic. Another way of looking at this:

• Education—increase what we know
• Performance—optimise what we’re already doing
• Innovation—find new things to do, new ways to work
• Change—change the sorts of teams and individuals we are

Day-to-day work will, of course, involve aspects of each of these: they’re not independent. But knowing where to focus helps answer some questions, and will suggest in turn appropriate coaching styles and approaches (for example, Shu-Ha-Ri and Dreyfus models in education and performance, techniques such as Luke Hohmann’s Innovation Games and Michael Michalko’s Thinnkertoys for innovation, Cynefin/Cognitive Edge and social network stimulation for change).

When talking to clients about an engagement, try to understand what the main goal is. In particular, be on the lookout for the common mismatch between the customer’s stated goal (which is often performance, maybe driven by education) and what really needs to happen with the teams and organisation (change).

Tobias Mayer put me onto the work of Augusto Boal - I’m reading Games for Actors and Non-Actors now. In Boal’s work, theatre is put at the service of community learning, empowerment and reconciliation: powerful stuff, with lots of lessons for work in organisations.

A book I’ve had for a long time - sadly now out of print - is Michael Laver’s Playing Politics. A brief description of the first game in this book will give you a flavour:

Primitive Politics (2 - 2 billion players, 1-1.5 hours)

• One player takes the role of nature.
• Each player gets a fixed amount of ‘cash’ at the start of the game.
• Nature has a large amount of additional resources, represented by the same ‘cash’

In each round

• each player contributes an equal amount to the pool
• nature matches the total amount, doubling the size of the pool
• players then bid in turns for the pool, raising a previous bid or passing if they wish
• when all players have passed, the pool goes to the highest bidder, nature keeps all the bids made (including the winning one)
• side deals and payments between players are permitted, but according to the rules of the game are not enforcable. However, only individuals can bid, and only an individual can receive the pool.

Sounds simple, but I think you can see there’s an interesting balance between the amount nature adds every round, and the amount it removes (by collecting all the bids). The game only gets to a stable state if players cooperate, but there’s plenty of scope for making and breaking agreements… Laver spends eight pages analysing and discussing the consequences of these rules, which leads on to my last point…

The value of all of these exercises lies in the quality of the debriefing afterwards. There’s a real skill to this - understanding the sorts of questions to ask, things to remind participants of (without explicitly directing the debrief, which spoils the learning). A good place to start, and a question I always put to participants, is - how did you feel when playing? A lot can be unpacked following this seemingly innocuous question.

So - what are your experiences of games and simulations? And do you have any favourite games, sources of ideas, questions for reflection?

Happy New Year everyone!

The Heckscher paper is long and carefully-nuanced: he’s not, for example, making the case that bureaucracy is inherently bad, though he does observe that over time, and without an impetus to change, this mode of organisation becomes less and less adaptive. There are times and circumstances where bureaucracy might have value, but it’s clear, I think, that Post-Bureaucracy is a much more humane, habitable and sustainable place to be.

The key distinctions Heckscher makes are summarised by Hodgson:

These all feel remarkably familiar, and congruent with the aims and values of lean and Agile thinking.

I’m doing a lot of thinking at the moment on organisations and how they change. I like the distinction drawn by Ronald Heifitz between Technical Change and Adaptive Change. Technical change – the equivalent of following a diet book or joining a gym in the vain hope of losing weight or getting fit – is about changing what we do. Adaptive change is about changing who we are: being the sort of person who eats healthily or enjoys being fit. So much agile adoption, especially in large and bureaucratic organisations, is about the former.

On a related note, I’m being challenged and stimulated by Ricardo Semler’s Maveric just now, and finding a distinct relationship to a much older book on organisations, Robert Townsend’s Up the Organisation (sadly out of print, but well worth grabbing a second-hand copy). Townsend was writing without the dubious benefit of the last four decade’s explosion in organisational theorising and organisational change: allowing for different times and circumstances, everything he says makes sense. Semler and Townsend are – maybe – different points on the journey to the post-bureaucratic organisation, Townsend on the path (from the perspective of a challenge to received 1960s business wisdom), Semler an extreme example of an achieved organisation, in which sustainability and quality of (organisational) life is the goal, and profitability only a means.

So some questions:

• Do Agile and Lean need a post-bureaucratic organisation to succeed?
• If the environment in which they’re introduced is not such, do they tend to create one or evolve towards one?
• Is such evolution inevitable?

What do you think?

I’ve already blogged about the value of improv, and the day reinforced my feelings about this. Key things in the success of improv are being in a good state and being good to work with - what could we achieve if we strove for these in all our work? Something else which struck me this time about the games we played is related to the value of games in general: by playing to the rules, we give ourselves an opportunity to play with the rules, which is something some people and organisations seem to have lost the ability to do.

Here are some notes on the games we played, which will be updated with feedback and learning points in the next few days.

Even so, there are dangers. It’s good to meet like minds, but I see a lot of group-think in the agile world just now. We can have any number of entertaining and stimulating discussions amongst ourselves to sustain a strong community in Europe, but increasingly we need to take these conversations to the businesses we work in. We need to talk sense, and in the appropriate language, in our businesses, who really are not interested in whether we call things Agile, Lean, Kanban, Scrum, Scrumban or whatever, and who won’t take to team coaching (for example) if it’s described in some of the new-age ways I’ve seen. Let’s continue, and spread the habit of, speaking the language of organisational effectiveness: we need to work on making good some of our beliefs and assertions with sound data backed by pragmatism and experience.

Specific highlights for me? In Helsinki, Dave Snowden’s talk (and talking with Dave before and during the conference) – put most if not all the other sessions in the shade. In Munich, Harvey Wheaton’s keynote on agile practice at Supermassive Games (good, solid, pragmatic experience), and Liz Keogh’s Haiku workshop – 90 minutes of innovation, leaving diehard programmers with confidence in their inner poets and suggesting many powerful ideas for coaching (paying attention to what happened, not pre-interpreting, and more specifically some ideas for innovation coaching, which is a subject I’m getting particularly interested in just now).

Both conferences ran “alternative” streams. In Munich, I’m not sure that the discussion room was heavily used as an innovation space, though it was a great venue for the Haiku workshop and the Scrum Clinic (this was a great idea: individuals could sing up for 20 minute sessions as doctor or patient, the patient posed a question which was then discussed, result some good conversations and good advice. The screen-and-chairs layout made it feel more of a confessional than a clinic at times…). Open-space sessions in both worked less well than they could have (and yes, I know that “whoever comes is the right attendance” etc etc, but still). Both reinforced for me the fact that this style of session needs effective facilitation: you can’t just say “let’s have an OS” and hope it will magically organise itself. [DH: see comments below. “preparation/organisation’ probably better words here. No criticism intended of the people who worked hard during both OS events to make them work, rather a point of reflection and improvment for the next ones.]

Outside of the conference: in Munich, it was good to visit the Alte Pinakothek and stumble across some of my favourite paintings: this Dürer self-portrait, two gorgeous works by Boucher, Altdorfer’s stunning narrative painting The Battle of Issus, and an amazing Rembrandt self-portrait.

Looking at all of these – especially the Altdorfer and the self-portraits – I find myself wondering what it would be like to encounter these images in an era without extensive images in print, on TV, DVD, youtube, the Internet. It’s easy to develop image-fatigue: visiting a gallery and going with open eyes and mind is a great refresher.

What is missing from this picture? Here’s a hint: the previous version of picture:

Sure, it’s less polished, less glossy, less professional-looking, but at least there are people in the picture.

But there’s more. Even when you put the cheesy clip-art back, the picture is incomplete. The focus in the picture is the product: the two cycles organised around sprint planning and review and daily Scrum meeting provide feedback and steering for product. But in any development process the product (in the sense of everything that the team produce, which includes tests, documentation and so on) is only one of the deliverables. The other deliverable from the process?

The team. As far back as 1995, Jim McCarthy (of Microsoft!) was writing: “The ends of software development is software developers.” (Dynamics of Software Development, and “ends” as in end result, goal.) There’s a parallel process around retrospectives and actions, which is just as important, and which is talked about extensively within Scrum and the wider Agile/Lean community. But it’s never part of the picture. Nowadays, whenever I draw the picture, I draw it like this:

Let’s make the other deliverable explicit: the team, and it’s growing capability.

I’m increasingly interested in the effect that social objects have on the way we work. There’s a growing body of research that demonstrates the ways in which our environment affects our behaviour[1]. The scrum picture has become a social object around which groups form - you see it in books, presentations, printed and stuck on walls, even (here at the Munich Scrum Gathering) on tattoos (the stick-on variety, though I wonder if any of the diehards has gone as far as making it permanent…). I worry about what happens when we surround ourselves with process pictures which (1) don’t include people, and (2) only tell half the story. As soon as we regard ourselves as “means” to some other group’s “ends”, or even worse to some process’s, we are disempowering ourselves (thanks to Ari Tikka in his Scan-Agile 2009 presentation for pointing this out).

Several things follow from this. The picture is frequently used in presentations to managers and executive teams. The visual impact of this picture should not be underestimated: it’s the “icon” of Scrum, and it’s underlining the proposition that simply by following a (people-independent) process you’ll get better software, faster and cheaper. No matter how often we talk about the people, and describe Scrum as an engine of organisational change, what people hear (and buy), is better software, faster and cheaper. Reinforced by the picture.

Within a team, if all you see and understand is the original picture, the role of Scrum Master/coach readily becomes a clerical or secretarial one: make sure the process is followed, run interference and clear impediments. By adding the capability feedback loop to the picture the job - a large part of the job - of the Scrum Master or coach becomes clear. The product owner’s job is the product. The Scrum Master/coach’s job is the team.

People thinking about organisational change have started talking about two models: “theory E” (which maximise economic effectiveness, in practice often by vigorously attacking cost and waste) and “theory O” (which are models of change which seek to maximise organisational capability). One way of looking at this picture is to think about the part above the line as addressing theory E, and that below the line addressing theory O.

Finally, Lean is not immune from this. The focus on value just now seems to be creating a dominant discourse where customer value is the only good (Steve Freeman has dubbed this the “value fetish”). I don’t think there’s anything wrong with valuing customer value, but we do need to be aware that there are many sources of value, and many people and communities besides the customer for whom things may be valuable. Customer value is hugely important, but we’re in danger of losing an explicit focus on team and organisational capability as an end in itself, and once again surrounding ourselves with pictures in which the people have vanished.

A suggestion: what would happen if we started thinking about the picture like this:

Incanto is on the Amstel, in Amsterdam. The light, airy restaurant is on the first floor: the kitchen is actually above, rather than below. The building is a corner property - in fact, at an intersection in the old town that means that the kitchen gets light from three sides. This, with the high ceilings, makes it feel very different from the dark and noisy interiors of many restaurant kitchens. The area is one of the centres of Amsterdam’s historic diamond trade: I like to think that in their previous life the rooms bathed in light were used to inspect gemstones from around the world.

21212 in Edinburgh is Paul Kitching’s new restaurant. (Kitching has a Michelin star for his previous venture, Juniper - in Altrincham, of all places - it can’t be long before 21212 repeats the accolade). As in many new restaurants, the kitchen is visible from the dining room: a full-height glass partition, nicely stencilled, makes an effective screen. Again, the room is light and airy (and again, high-ceilinged, in a gorgeous 19th century town house). As in Incanto, there’s a single large range in the centre of the room, rather than a number of stations arranged in rows: It wasn’t ucommon to see all the chefs standing together around one corner of the range, heads together, working on a presentation. What’s particularly unusual here is the fact that it’s an induction range, not gas (sure there are others, but this is the first one I’ve seen in a restaurant kitchen at this level, with the sole and notable exception of the Villa P). So no flame, much less wasted heat (and therefore a cooler kitchen), no burning oil, charred cloth, singed eyebrows: the kitchen is a place of calm concentration, with the layout and nature of the equipment supporting the team’s practice of all contributing to the cooking and assembling of a single dish.

Needless to say, the food in both places was sensational.

Looking at the way these kitchens overcame some of my preconceptions on how restaurant kitchens “need” to work made me wonder again about the way we organise the physical environment for software development. There are still too many places that play with agile, but don’t move the furniture. Giving teams control over their work and practices makes little sense if they don’t have control over their physical environment. Big companies seem to find this particularly difficult.

The third and fourth studies are more subtly a pair, but their most obvious feature is clear. They are – suddenly and dramatically – characterised by strong and memorable patterns: one might almost call them “hooks”. This contrast – between the textural simplicity of the second study and the skittish staccato chords and off-beat accents of the third – is a great moment in performance. Op 6 features many of these sharp contrasts in texture and mood between pieces: this is a great reason to perform the set as a whole rather than cherry-pick individual pieces.

Study no 3 in E major: Of Schubert and the Shaggy Dog

Like much of the study literature, the piece is built from a single idea which combines a musical pattern with one (or in this case, two) consistent technical themes:

The technical challenges: firstly, even, well-placed and balanced chords followed by rests. Avoid letting them ring on except where notated (the distinction between the short chords and the one or two places where chords and notes in the texture are sustained is one of the main musical points of the study), conversely avoid also playing them as short as possible.

Secondly, a descending or (just twice!) ascending three-note ligado pattern: a specific guitar technique where notes are sounded by the left hand, pulling off or hammering onto the strings:

It’s vitally important to play these in the rhythmic pattern notated. It’s all to easy for the “scotch snap” rhythm to degenerate into something like this:

If this happens, you’ll spoil the joke at the end of the piece (it’s one of the wittiest moments in guitar music that I know, up there with the behind-the-string plucking in Villa-Lobos’ second etude). As a preparatory exercise, try thinking of – and playing – the opening like this:

Keeping this rhythmic precision throughout is one of the keys to making this piece effective in performance.

Two more things to bear in mind about the piece. Like the previous piece, there’s a metrical ambiguity. It starts halfway through a bar, so the phrase boundaries and the metrical pulse are at odds. It’s important to keep this in mind, and avoid the four-square feeling you’ll get if you give the beginning of the phrase a metrical accent. And like all of Sor’s music, listen carefully to the way the inner voices in the chords move. There are some lovely moments in this piece: the descent from B to G# in bars 5 and 6, for example, and the single inner note under the ligado idea which draws light but irresistible notice to the melody in the inner part in bars 6/7.

The middle section of the three-part-plus-coda form turns to the minor, modulates to its related major key, then back. The higher rate of harmonic change, the expansion of range and the turn to the darker minor key give an opportunity for more dramatic contrasts of dynamic: though it’s a standard harmonic and tonal sequence, in miniature this feels to me like some of the dramatic middle sections that Schubert slipped in to some of his otherwise innocent-sounding impromptus. It’s only in this section, too, that Sor inverts the direction of the ligado: just twice, but it’s enough to artfully break the pattern (how many of his lesser contemporaries would not have done this!)

The reprise of the opening section isn’t quite the same as first time around – so, tempting as it is to slip back in the middle-voice B of bar 6, don’t. In the coda, the texture opens out: from bar 32 the sustained open E of the guitar’s lowest string signals the approach of the end of the piece. But Sor has one more delicious surprise in store: the ligado motive, having been confined to the top two strings up to now, echoes the top voice in the lowest part of the texture in bars 36 and seven, before wrapping itself around a gently rocking inner voice, alternately on the top and bottom strings of the guitar, like a satisfying punchline to long story, maybe of the shaggy dog variety.

(As noted earlier, if your rhythmic articulation of the motive has become sloppy, you’ll spoil the joke: for all three parts to fit together convincingly, your rhythm here needs to be precise, and if it’s at all different from how it’s been played previously, it will sound as if it’s the ending to a different piece.)

Study no 4 in G: Trumpets and Drums

The third study’s hook was an upper-voice feature: in the fourth, the movement moves to the bass with a drum-like rhythmic figure in repeated notes that appears in all but six of the piece’s 48 bars. With drums come trumpets and military associations: perhaps the opening is an echo of the fanfares that Sor will have encountered in the military career he abandoned for music.

The obvious right hand fingering uses thumb (p) and first finger (i – so p p-i p p), but it’s worth experimenting: middle finger (m) on the second note avoids the temptation of over-emphasising the off-beat (p m-i p p) and makes the second beat of the bar a little more interesting. It’s such a strong idea that it’s tempting to make it the focus of attention in each bar by playing it loud: you should do the opposite, though. Because it is ubiquitous in the piece, it’s not as if a listener isn’t going to notice, and there’s plenty of good stuff happening in the other voices. Left-hand position in the first bar should take both the first and last chords over a barré at the third fret: the extension of the fourth finger to the first-string B shouldn’t be too much of a challenge. And – as always – listen to Sor’s voice-leading: a good way to do this is to play the piece without the distraction of the rhythmic pattern:

Once again, pay attention to the rather precise rhythmic notation. In the opening section, observe the rests in the upper part and the bass. After the repeat, the pattern moves to an inner voice and the rests disappear: the top voices sing in thirds, sliding chromatically, and should be as legato as you can make them:

The climax of the piece comes as the texture opens out to a resonant C-major chord, then a “German 6th” - five notes, which are (authentically) played by tacking the bottom three notes with the right-hand thumb, the top two with first and second fingers. Finally, in a low-key echo of the end of the third etude, this ends with the characteristic pattern of the study relegated to an inner voice, one last appearance sustained into the last sounding chord of the piece:

Although the central repeat mark would seem to indicate that both sections of the piece should be repeated, there’s no corresponding mark at the end of the study in the early published sources (unlike, for example, in the second study). Because of this, and because I think the end feels conclusive first time around, I don’t repeat the second half in performance (though Sor’s practice, or his publishers, isn’t particularly consistent in this regard).

Online resources

(Repeated from part 1)

Guitarists are well served online for copies and information on Sor. I’d stongly recommend downloading and playing from one of the early prints of the studies: once you become accustomed to the conventions of nineteenth-century music engraving it’s a pleasure to use these old editions, though you’ll sometimes have to make decisions about obvious misprints.

• Hebe Online — part of Brian Jeffrey’s Tecla Editions. Many of the shorter studies available for download here in modern engraved versions
• The Rischel and Birket-Smith collection at the Danish Royal Library — follow the link on the page to search, alternatively here’s a listing of composers and works , with links to the documents. An amazing collection of more than 1200 nineteenth-century publications. Includes two printings of Sor’s Op 6 in Simrock’s edition, the earliest of these is here.
• Scottish guitarist Rob McKillop hosts a small site dedicated to the authentic performance of nineteenth-century guitar music . Videos, sound recordings and thoughtful and informative essays.

You’re a team or group working in a large organisation. You’re trying to change the way you develop software, but there are organisational structures and processes in place which govern how projects are started, managed, and run. As a committed agile/lean/kanban enthusiast, you’re certain that this is no way to run an army, but you’re not sure how to explain these new ways of working to your organisation, nor are you confident of being able to effect any immediate change either for your team and the way it works in relation to the rest of the company, or outside the scope of your team and its work.

It’s all to easy to rail against organisational structures that seem to you to be getting in the way of adopting a lean or agile approach. The zeal with which the agile case is sometimes put, particularly by people with little experience outside software development, can generate resistance or incredulity. Conversations between agile evangelists in the technology organisation and experienced project managers might as well be conducted in two different languages, and serve only to lower understanding and respect.

I’m not going to tell you what points to make in favour of your new way of working, but here are some things to bear in mind about the conversation itself.

If you enter the field with the belief that everything the other person believes is wrong, you’re not going to have much of a conversation. Don’t forget the agile manifesto’s recognition that there is value in many of the things that characterise traditional approaches to projects. After all, if (as we’re often told) 70% of waterfall projects fail, then 30% succeed.

The person you’re talking to is likely to have had plenty of experience in what they do, and will often be more aware of the organisational big picture than you are. Program and product managers see projects from beginning to end, and often have to navigate the treacherous waters of long-term planning and corporate governance. Respect that experience, and learn from it. After all, why should they listen to you? (if you’re really lucky, this remains a rhetorical question).

What sort of relationship do you have with the person you’re trying to convince? And what sort of relationship would you like to have? Is this person going to be a collaborator? An ally? Or are you just needing to keep someone informed?

What is the goal of your conversation? It’s one thing to enter a discussion about running a single team’s development in the context of your organisations larger practices around planning, project and product management, it’s a very different thing to be involved in taking a whole group or organisation agile.

A conversation is always with a person, not with a set of ideals. Try to understand the individual’s motivation – are they individualistic or group oriented? Will they dare take a risk and pioneer new ideas, or is security and group belonging more important to them? For people who’ve progressed within and find safety within an existing organisational group and process, you won’t have much success in promoting radical notions of self-organisation, responsibility and entrepreneurship.

The beliefs and activities of traditional project management support a set of values. Don’t limit your polemic to the outward signs of the traditional approach. Before you wade in with the “agile is best” arguments, understand those values, and how the existing project/program management regime embodies them. For example, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to take account of and manage project risk: if you can talk to those values, understand how they’re expressed by current practice and convincingly demonstrate how what you’re doing embodies these values then you’ll stand a much better chance of creating genuine understanding.

Some sources: I’ve been impressed with the Harvard Negotiation Project’s books: Getting to Yes, Getting Past No, and Difficult Conversations are all classics, and should be on the bookshelf of anyone who needs to communicate as part of their work and life (that’s all of us, isn’t it?). Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work is the best sustained reflection I know on getting beyond the obvious in conversation to uncover values and motivate real change.

(Thanks to David Joyce for a question in advance of a CATeams Clinic for prompting these musings)