This week I attended the TriAgile 2017 Conference in Raleigh, NC. What an amazing event! I was unable to attend last year, but according to all I spoke with this year was even better. This was the fourth time they hosted the event, and it appears to get better every year. The opening keynote by Linda Rising was incredible. She gave a talk on the The Power of An Agile Mindset. I got some great takeaways on the fixed vs. the growth mindset in both a professional and a personal way. She had a segment about bright little girls, and it made me really reflect on the way I want to approach parenting my children. Find more insights in this article: How Not to Talk to Your Kids
I attended 5 workshops, and one of them exposed me to a powerful facilitation technique called the Consensus Workshop Method (CWM). This is one of many techniques available through the Technology of Participation website. I wanted to share my take on it and how I think it would be useful for an agile retrospective or for any brainstorming session where the goal is consensus. The beauty of this technique is that it can be used with a rather large audience. There were nearly 100 participants at the workshop and we reached a consensus on “how to make meetings more productive” in about 30 minutes. No small feat.
The model has five phases. Context, Brainstorm, Cluster, Name, Resolve.
In the workshop, we brainstormed ideas in small groups (3-5) of how to make meetings more productive. Here is a shot of my ideas:
We then selected our top 3 ideas and wrote them on cards. The facilitator posted the cards. She then facilitated a clustering exercise to identify “buckets” of related ideas (for a smaller group you could have the group do this). Then she asked for second round of ideas. Each group put up at least one more idea that was different. Once we had solid buckets identified, the facilitator put shapes on each group to identify them but not yet name them (you could just use large colored stickies).
Then there was a third round, asking if anything was missing. They real trick here was that by the third round we really dug deep into the well of ideas from the group, and made sure they were captured. The goal is to get around 50 ideas. This is unlike the much overused procedure of dot voting in the agile community, where participants often “follow the dots” and vote where they see momentum.
Finally, we worked in a collaborative way to name the clusters as action items to improve (facilitation required). In the end, we had a very clear idea of how to make meetings more productive. The final think I would add is just do a Fist of Five sanity check at the end to make sure everyone is aligned. What a great technique. I cannot wait to try it out!
Until the next iteration . . .
Jason