thekua.com@work

I’ve really enjoyed my time facilitating and training experienced co-workers. It’s a great opportunity to share some of my stories and given me some time to focus on really refining some skills and deepening my knowledge as a coach and facilitator. I’ve learned some important lessons that future trainers or coaches may benefit from.

Balance your energy
A day of successful training should leave you with that satisfying yet slightly exhausting feeling. Presenting, facilitating and responding to the needs of the class take energy and students respond well when you demonstrate your own passion for it. Putting this energy into all your sessions will take its toll and makes you susceptible to falling ill. For my first two training courses, I fell ill immediately the week after and I’ve noticed this same cycle with the other trainers.

Find your sustainable pace by understanding your own limits, getting enough rest, and spending enough time on yourself to recharge. The alternative of a lethargic, sick, trainer running a class is definitely not effective.

Learn about learning
Training experienced hires brings a different dynamic compared to those straight out of college or university. The vast array of backgrounds, different working experiences and varying degrees of openness to the material requires a more versatile approach to the material. Understanding everyone’s different learning styles, and understanding different models equips you with better techniques to help everyone in the class learn.

Learn about things like Shu Ha Ri, the four stages of competence, Visual-Auditory-Kinaesthetic approaches, Kolb learning models,

Avoid sticking to the same training technique (such as lecturing) as it gets boring (and ineffective) very quickly.

Work as a training team
We work as a team of Subject Matter Experts (SME) and trainers with a background in training. Each role brings different aspects and understanding how to bring out both during a session is important. Respect the trainers that bring with them a plethora of training techniques, and (more likely) a deeper understanding of learning models. Respect the SME who brings the material to life with their own personal stories and (more likely) a deeper understanding of the material and its relevance to the real world.

Find ways to work together and to be able to support each other during a session. Use special signals or cues to allow seamless flows between each trainer.

Become aware of your own biases
I think it’s important to separate what people say, and how you feel about it. An important part of facilitation and training is ensuring everyone is listened to. Immediately reacting to a student’s comment doesn’t do this and the level of participation will drop off. Encourage contributions by first acknowledging their comment – “What I hear you say is … Is this correct?” Separate the observation from the evaluation.

Read the book on Non Violent Communication as it explains it much better than I do.

Comments(1)

On one project I’ve been on, all the tests began with the word “should”. Though not necessarily taking on full on BDD using anything like NBehave or JBehave, I think the simple effect of reframing tests using the word “should” worked wonders on this particular project.

We had quite a lot of people pass through the project over a year and a half, so I found it interesting to see what impact it had on tests. I observed that:

• People focused on understanding intent first, and followed through with how it was implemented.
• People had better conversations around differences (the test name said it should be doing this, and it’s actually doing this. They asked questions like, “Is the name of this test wrong, or is the test incorrectly implemented?”
• The statement is not as strong as assert or must so I felt people could challenge it more, leading to better quality conversations. “I though the domain was supposed to be like this, and the test and the code does this – Am I misunderstanding something?”

I think this subtle focus brought many qualitative benefits that I think a lot of projects could benefit from.

Comments(0)

Then get the guide here. It’s written from the perspective of staying relative to the Thoughtworks office, though will hopefully have lots of information for the ever intrepid tourist. Thanks to all the immersion students who gave me feedback – it really does work!

Comments(0)

In trying to change my return flight to London from Bangalore, I’ve been trying to reach British Airways. Calling two of their numbers (the only ones given to me in fact) resulted in the following experience:

*Ring*, *Ring*

“This is British Airways. You have reached our India free number. This service is currently unavailable. Please redial using the advertised number.”

*Click*

That’s it. No greeting. No explanation. No alternatives. A simple message offerings many lessons to learn from.

Comments(2)

Shouldn’t be sitting in ivory towers dispensing design documents or ideas with no basis of reality.

They should be coding. They should hang around to see how their decisions pan out.

They should be hunting down smells, listening to the team about painful areas, thinking about how to turn them around. They should work with the team to co-ordinate a strategy for redesign or a series of refactoring to turn complex code into simpler designs.

They should be sharing their experience in collaborative ways with the team to create several design choices, to clarify the pros and cons and to refine them to a best choice.

They should still be looking at the bigger picture, and always looking for ways to share that big picture. Part of it might be an XP Metaphor (or the Shared Vision). It might come out looking like an architecture diagram.

I’m sure of missed some things, and I know for a fact, most software architects can’t meet even these. Fortunately I get to work with many who do.

Comments(0)

I’ve been lucky enough to meet Jean Tabaka before I’d read her book. She’s a very humble and knowledgeable lady, and you can see both of those attributes in her book about effective collaboration. It’s probably heavy reading for some people. For the right kind of people, I imagine it’s very easy to digest. If you’re working on projects in a team, especially as a team leader or a project manager, it’s a great book that equips you with lots of practices and tools that come in handy every single day. Even if you’re not working in any of aforementioned roles, as a member of any team, it offers lots of gems worth digging for.

Don’t be daunted by the book’s thickness – Tabaka’s laid the four hundred or so pages well with a decent index and table of contents, making it easy to jump around to topics that interest you. I fortunately had a few hours in the airport and the plane to give me a good chance of reading the detail of the sections that interested me.

A lot of the topics that Takaba covers are very relevant to any environment in which you’re working and even more so in agile development teams where collaboration is key. I definitely relate to many of the stories that she talks about, littering the book and giving real examples of the tools in practice. It’s well written and many of the models are useful straight away.

There’s a little bit of repetition – some of it probably because it’s written in a way that allows you to digest chapters on their own, and maybe so that it really lets the lessons sink in. It also talks about a number of topics that aren’t directly related to facilitation though are still useful in their own way for setting a better context such as leadership and specific agile methodologies. In a way, a lot of the practices draw from many other disciplines and although not necessarily completely new, are presented in a very easy to digest manner.

I’d definitely add this to my recommended reading list, especially for people who want to improve the effectiveness of their teams.

Comments(0)

I’ve been looking for alternatives to the standard Create Safety (1-5) Exercise. I’ve found this sometimes fails me when you have new people to a team you’re facilitating a retrospective for. It’s hard to distinguish between “I’ll just smile, nod and agree everything is okay” because they have nothing to add, or they feel very uncomfortable because of things going on in the environment. I adapted this exercise from a coaching technique that a fellow trainer (JJ) suggested. I feel this exercise helps set the scene and mood of the group and gives the facilitator additional qualitative insights. I call it the Three Word Starter.

What it is: A way of gauging the general mood of the group using a qualitative technique.

Time needed: 10 minutes

What you need:

• 3 sticky notes per person
• A marker pen
• A place you can put them up

How to run it:

1. Ask each person to take 3 sticky notes each
2. Ask the group to consider how they’re feeling about the retrospective
3. Ask each person to write down a single word per sticky note. Remind them to avoid pictures or phrases if possible.
4. Collect them and post them up on the wall/chart/board (you have the option of doing this anonymously or asking them to do so)
5. Group words together (exact/common ones) and talk through general themes.

Tips for facilitating the 3-Word Starter

• Ensure everyone is made aware of the overall mood of the group. Depending on the size of the group, get everyone to read each other’s feelings or read them out to the group.
• If you see large themes of concern or indicators of low safety, address them directly by asking them to Check-In. Say something like “We recognise that the group is feeling a little bit [insert word or theme here]. I’d like to ask you to “check in” these feelings and be open to this discussion that aims to strengthen confidence and improves effective. It is an exercise for celebration and improvement. It’s not about blame or criticism. At the end of the session you are welcome to “check out” these feelings again”.

Variants
As the group size diminishes think about increasing the number of words per person. For a group of 15 people, I used a 3 word starter. For a group of 8 people, I used a 5-word starter. The aim is to get enough words to draw common themes, but not so many that it’s overwhelming.

Summarising
Group together words that are exactly the same, or have the same meaning. When I report back the results of the retrospective, I use a Text/Tag Cloud generator to help put common words together so you get a good feel of how the group is going. I’ve been very happy with the ones TagCrowd produces.

Comments(5)