thekua.com@work

One of the most interesting observations Ajit and I made when we finished our inception a while back was that defining a system too early puts constraints around the way you work and potentially hinders learning.

We set out putting together a mental model of what we thought the system should be and what the scope of the project entailed. We did lots of brainstorming, gathered tons of input, asked lots of questions and inevitably, had fair amounts of discussion as we tried to understand it from different points of view. We tried using some software based systems like a spreadsheet, or some modelling software to capture the information we had, and eventually got too frustrated as we struggled to deal with both what we needed to model and how we were going to model it.

We found it’s much easier to work out how to model things once we understood what sort of things we needed to model. It didn’t mean we didn’t try modelling it at all. Rather, we used cheap techniques to quickly change the way we wanted to represent them. In the end, we used colour coded papers, index cards and broad categories on flip charts to represent different types of information, allowing us to group, category and reclassify bits of information quickly and easily.

Our system let us deal with larger concepts when we needed to, with the ability to drill down into enough detail to have better conversations with people closer to the project. We ended up distributing the information we modelling into more common formats – a simple spreadsheet for stories, and another for a risk log as well as some high level diagrams representing the system.

It felt much more satisfying to uncover the natural groupings of information instead of trying to cram information into the system we happened to pick.

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Ajit and I ran a mini-retrospective for one of the inception activities we just finished. We kept it simple, skipping a safety check, and running a simple two column Prouds/Sads activity. It lasted about twenty minutes and we came away with some key learnings that I know have helped at least one other person since then, making the time completely worth it.

We focused on a short brainstorming phase, noting items for both columns and skipped sticky notes all together, writing them directly on to a whiteboard wall. We then moved into a discussion phase talking about what we wrote up, noting additional ideas as we talked about them. We focused less on action items, and focused on mining tips and ideas that other people running inception activities might benefit from.

We ran it extremely informally since we’ve both used these practice many times before, and share a high degree of trust and safety. If I’d been working with someone else who I’d never worked with before, or someone who’d never participated in a retrospective, I would’ve looked much harder for an independent facilitator and suggested a little bit more structure. I think this was only possible because we’d been through the ritual many times before, and the frequent practice helped us tap into the more effective parts much more quickly.

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• Design comics – An extremely useful website under the Creative Commons license that lets you create stories with a series of people.
• Cayra – Free new mindmapping Software built using WPF
• Kuler – Nice browsing for looking through different colour schemes

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