My Wednesday morning session at the 2008 Amplifying Your Effectiveness Conference was Don Gray‘s session, Building on Strengths: Making Better Use of Personality Resources. This session was about recognizing our differences, and our strengths, based on our personalities. Read More
As I slowly work through my notebook from the Amplifying Your Effectiveness Conference (having blogged about sessions on Unearthing the Data You Need, Remembering Your Resources When Stressed, and Congruent Coaching), I come to Jerry Weinberg’s session of Tuesday afternoon, Moving Projects Forward: The Clinic Method.
As long as projects are staffed and led by people, we can be sure that they will sometimes get stuck, or headed in the wrong direction, or something. This is true no matter what sort of methodology you follow. Even if the methodology is perfect, the people following it are not. They will make mistakes. They will have blind spots, and not see what it is that they’re not seeing. Projects will still get in trouble. (Yes, even Agile projects.)
So, what do you do about this certainty? Read More
If I had time, I would re-read Tom DeMarco’s book Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency, because I have precious little slack in my own life, these days. So it is that I just now got around to reading Jakob Nielsen’s article, Agile Development Projects and Usability, which William Pietri noted on the Agile Usability list on November 17.
The statement
“For a project to take interaction design and usability seriously, it must assign them ‘story points’ (i.e., resources) on an equal footing with the coding”
jumped out at me. Alistair Cockburn wrote a thoughtful reply where he noted the same statement. I agree with Alistair’s comments, but I’d like to comment on this statement from a slightly different perspective. Read More
Continuing with my recap of the AYE Conference sessions I attended, I come to Johanna Rothman‘s session, Choosing the Right Coaching Approach: Congruent Coaching. This was a time-slot where I wanted to attend every single session. I chose this session because coaching is a big part of what I do, and Johanna is one of the best people I know to learn to coach more effectively. Read More
On last Monday afternoon, I attended the session, Remembering Your Resources When Stressed: The Self Esteem Toolkit led by Jerry Weinberg. This session dwelt on a idea Jerry borrowed from Virginia Satir. We have the capability to do the things we need to do, but we often forget our powers when we’re stressed. The toolkit is a set of reminders of the capabilities we have. Jerry has added to Virginia’s original list, and published them in More Secrets of Consulting. Read More
The AYE 2008 (Amplifying Your Effectiveness Conference) is now history. I never have time to blog about this conference during the conference–I’m always too busy. Besides, it’s so rich with learning that it takes me awhile to process it. This year (my fourth at AYE), I’m going to look back through my notes and blog a little about each session I attended.
The first session I attended was titled First Steps for Organizational Change: Unearthing the Data You Need and was presented by Johanna Rothman. I say presented, but like all the sessions at AYE, the word “presented” doesn’t convey the essence of the session. Johanna presented a lot of information, to be sure. (And you can find some of the same material on the AYE Wiki.) But the power of AYE lies in the fact that all the sessions are experiential. In this session, we took turns, in small groups, interviewing each other, and observing each other interviewing. And after each interview session, we examined the experience in a debrief. The debrief is the heart of the experience, for it’s where we make our actions explicit to ourselves. And it’s where we share our insights with others, and share theirs.
A few Johanna tidbits from my notes:
Thanks, Johanna, for a wonderful and rewarding session!