Hi All

Here is my simple, patent pending method to use to help users design good SharePoint sites. It combines two very effective IA methods into one and its amazing how it turns people from wanting 1990’s era sites complete with horizontal scrolling banners with animated GIF’s into usability and IA gurus within minutes.

The tools of the trade you need for this method is:

• Balsamiq, a terrific wireframing tool that I previously reviewed.
• http://www.websitesthatsuck.com/ – a hilarious site dedicated to teaching people how to design sites by looking at particularly crap ones

So now you know the ingredients, let’s run through the recipe

1. Put key stakeholders into a room (ensure the ones with poor taste are there together)
2. Visit websitesthatsuck.com and review the 2010 contenders for worst websites of the year. (For what its worth, my personal vote is Yale School of Art)
3. Have a good laugh and discuss all the crappy aspects to those sites – make particular note of the write-up on websitesthatsuck for each contender
4. With the group’s sucky website radar now primed, have them load up their existing intranet (if they are really big organisation, go around to various departmental sites around the intranet). This time they will not laugh, due to the effect of your “crapness calibration” ™ exercise, they will see many faults in the existing site straight away.
5. At this point, crank out Balsamiq and start to wireframe what the site should look like while you have the fleeting moment of clarity (crapness calibration fades with time and needs to be re-primed). The wisdom of the crowd should ensure that most of the common mistakes will be avoided there and then.
   • Statistically, one of every three times you do this, there is always one user who’s taste is so bad that calibration will take another round of deprogramming. So if you have someone that persists with crap taste or has ideas that 99% of the user base would balk at, move to the 2009 hall of shame for sucky sites. Faced with the reaction from their peers, as well as the parallels that can be drawn between their current site and the contenders, it usually does the trick.
   • Also be sure to draw attention to sites that have similar underlying concepts, but where one works well and the other has agonising lameness. For example, the New York Times compared to Havenworks. Discuss the layout, colours, fonts, images, navigation, search and the like and relate back to the site being envisioned.

In about 30-90 minutes, one of two things will happen.

1. You will have a pretty good wireframe or three
2. The group will realise that they have more soul searching to do.

Although your business development manager will whine at you if outcome 2 happens, consider it a good thing. You will be saving yourself and the participants a mountain of stress later and have them thinking more holistically about the outcomes they are trying to achieve.

(Final serious bit at the end alert)

What you will notice when performing this process, is that with a recent and clear frame of reference, some of the biases that people carry with them can be temporarily lifted. In some ways, this exercise is very similar to the “down the pub” calibration of estimates exercise that I wrote about previously. The trick is to find ways to change the lens people look through to see other aspects or facets to the problem at hand.

To that end, if you are in the UK or nearby, consider coming to my Governance and Information Architecture Master Class in London with Andrew Woodward and Ant Clay. Lots of other (more serious and rigorous) methods for developing shared understanding will be covered.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

                      

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As you may have noticed, this blog has been a bit of a dead zone lately. There are several very good reasons for this – one being that a lot of my creative energy has been going into co-writing a book – and I thought it was time to come clean on it.

So first up, just because I get asked this all the time, the book is definitely *not* “A humble tribute to the leave form – The Book”! In fact, it’s not about SharePoint per se, but rather the deeper dark arts of team collaboration in the face of really complex or novel problems.

It was late 2006 when my own career journey took an interesting trajectory, as I started getting into sensemaking and acquiring the skills necessary to help groups deal with really complex, wicked problems. My original intent was to reduce the chances of SharePoint project failure but in learning these skills, now find myself performing facilitation, goal alignment and sensemaking in areas miles away from IT. In the process I have been involved with projects of considerable complexity and uniqueness that make IT look pretty easy by comparison. The other fringe benefit is being able to sit in a room and listen to the wisdom of some top experts in their chosen disciplines as they work together.

Through this work and the professional and personal learning that came with it, I now have some really good case studies that use unique (and I mean, unique) approaches to tackling complex problems. I have a keen desire to showcase these and explain why our approaches worked.

My leanings towards sensemaking and strategic issues would be apparent to regular readers of CleverWorkarounds. It is therefore no secret that this blog is not really much of a technical SharePoint blog these days. The articles on branding, ROI, and capacity planning were written in 2007, just before the mega explosion of interest in SharePoint. This time around, there are legions of excellent bloggers who are doing a tremendous job on giving readers a leg-up onto this new beast known as SharePoint 2010.

So back to the book. Our tentative title is “Beyond Best Practices” and it’s an ambitious project, co-authored with Kailash Awati – the man behind the brilliant eight to late blog. I had been a fan of Kailash’s work for a long time now, and was always impressed at the depth of research and effort that he put into his writing. Kailash is a scarily smart guy with two PHD’s under his belt and to this day, I do not think I have ever mentioned a paper or author to him that he hasn’t read already. In fact, usually he has read it, checked out the citations and tells me to go and read three more books!

Kailash writes with the sort of rigour that I aspire to and will never achieve, thus when the opportunity of working with him on a book came up, I knew that I absolutely had to do it and that it would be a significant undertaking indeed.

To the left is a mock-up picture to try and convey where we are going with this book. See the guy on the right? Is he scratching his head in confusion, saluting or both? (note, this is our mockup and the real thing may look nothing like this)

This book dives into the seedy underbelly of organisational problem solving, and does so in a way that no other book has thus far attempted. We examine why the very notion of “best practices” often makes no sense and have such a high propensity to go wrong. We challenge some mainstream ideas by shining light on some obscure, but highly topical and interesting research that some may consider radical or heretical. To counter the somewhat dry nature of some of this research (the topics are really interesting but the style in which academics write can put insomniacs to sleep), we give it a bit of the cleverworkarounds style treatment and are writing in a conversational style that loses none of the rigour, but won’t have you nodding off on page 2. If you liked my posts where I use odd metaphors like boy bands to explain SharePoint site collections, the Simpsons to explain InfoPath or death metal to explain records versus collaborative document management, then you should enjoy our journey through the world of cognitive science, memetics, scientific management and Willy Wonka (yup – Willy Wonka!).

Rather than just bleat about what the problems with best-practices are, we will also tell you what you can do to address these issues. We back up this advice by presenting a series of practical case studies, each of which illustrates the techniques used to address the inadequacies of best practices in dealing with wicked problems. In the end, we hope to arm our readers with a bunch of tools and approaches that actually work when dealing with complex issues. Some of these case studies are world unique and I am very proud of them.

Now at this point in the writing, this is not just an idea with an outline and a catchy title. We have been at this for about six months, and the results thus far (some 60-70,000 words) have been very, very exciting. Initially, we really had no idea whether the combination of our writing styles would work – whether we could take the degree of depth and skill of Kailash with my low-brow humour and my quest for cheap laughs (I am just as likely to use a fart joke if it helps me get a key point across)…

… But signs so far are good so stay tuned

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

                      

Technorati Tags: Book, Beyond Best Practices

Vulgarity warning. Its the silly season, I am winding down and being more low-brow than usual with this post

There is this wonderful way to look at the world, through a lens of something called “Complex adaptive systems”. Unfortunately with a name like that, it is automatically doomed to be only spoken of and understood by, a small subset of those sort of dishevelled looking nerdy guys who others take the piss out of when they are not around.

The notion of complex adaptive systems explains many things, including why salesman can unintentionally really be damaging to an organisation. I thought that I needed to write about this, and given that I am going to talk about sales guys, I had to write in a manner commiserate with their level of understanding of how the world works. Since the chances of a sales guy reading my blog is probably low, I should be safe

So here we go.

Here is a sales guy. Although us geeks think they are assholes, for this metaphor we have to change our context of what an asshole actually is. I think of him more of a guy who gathers food and brings it to you.

Here is the world for a sales guy. He finds work, and feeds that work into the mouth of the organisation. For performing such a feat, he gets to nibble off a small morsel of the meal to keep for himself. If he feeds the organisation enough and makes it grow, he will get enough morsels to grow rather nicely himself. This is a pretty sweet deal if you are good at finding food, because your reward is a percentage of what you push into the organisations mouth. Therefore it is in the sales guys interest to find as much food as he can for the organisational “body”. In fact his performance is directly attributed to doing exactly that in the form of quotas or sales targets

At the other end of the chain, the implementers have to digest what has been fed them from mouth and produce output that makes clients happy. Therefore it is the people in the organisation that actually implement a project who are actually the assholes, not the sales guys. As a result, I can say with some confidence that most people reading this post, like myself, are all assholes.

As this cycle perpetuates over time, the body in between these two ends grows. To continue to feed this body and keep it growing, we need to seek out more food. To do this we try and incentivise our sales people to supply more food by offering them larger morsels if they make more ambitious targets.

Never forget the assholes

Now we all know that we have to eat a balanced diet with healthy foods. But some people find it a pain to do all of that preparation and effort and instead go and grab some Chinese takeout instead. To a sales guy who is being rewarded for the amount of food being delivered to the organisation, fast food is great! Remember that the sales guy only takes just enough of the food for no lasting effects and is the furthest away from the assholes to feel the negative effects on the organisational as a whole.

Now our sales guy starts to look like the image below.

Therefore, this process of incentivising sales guys by the amount of food that they pass into the mouth is not without its risks and often can damage the long term health of the organisational body. Fast food can be tolerated now and again of course. For example, we all get the occasional hankering for Kentucky Fried Chicken every 6 months or so, and delude ourselves that this time, unlike all of the other times, it will actually not be oily enough to power a small town and leave you with that queasy feeling that you get when your heart labours against your cholesterol.

This can be a self perpetuating cycle. For example, the sales guy feeds the organisation a blisteringly hot spicy lamb vindaloo. Naturally is a very unpleasant experience for the assholes and as a result, what is delivered to the customer is (literally) crap and costs much more than anticipated. This cost bleed puts pressure on the sales guys to feed the body to make up for the wasted time, effort and cost. But the sales guy is so far away from the assholes, it does not occur to him that it was the spicy lamb vindaloo was the wrong meal. Nor too, does he receive any feedback to let him know that the burning sensation still lingers.

So what does he do? He feeds an even spicier lamb vindaloo to the mouth. Why? because he now has learned how to find spicy lamb vindaloos and is reaping the rewards of many tasty morsels – a perfectly reasonable practice given that he is now put under pressure to deliver more food.

Despite good intentions…

This cyclical phenomenon is called the “ring of fire” and afflicts many organisations who just can’t seem to deliver projects on time and budget. The customers of these organisations, fed up with getting nothing but crap, start to look elsewhere, thereby increasing pressure and starting the cycle again. Management get all flustered and usually blame the assholes.

The essence of the notion of the complex adaptive system is that the assholes and sales guys need each-other. Attempting to optimise the sales guys performance in isolation, ultimately has a negative impact on the assholes, which in turn has a negative impact on the organization as a whole.  The organisation is a system that comprises of many parts that interact in different ways. The system is perfectly capable of self organising and self optimising. For example, if the sales guy feeds the organisation sushi and next time it is fed a burrito, the assholes have a certain amount of tolerance to deal with that. But when you optimise one end (reward for food) without considering the assholes at the other end, you actually reduce that tolerance to deal with change!

The lesson that should be learned here is that the command and control methods of problem solving or project management that operate by optimising one part of the system, will usually work in the short term, but to the long term detriment to the system as a whole. The result that I have seen first hand for many IT organisations in particular, is that they have developed a certain reputation in the market for being a bit on the nose because of their seeming inability to get a project completed. Once this happens, it is very very difficult for them to regain the lost trust.

Microsoft for example, has taken years to win back the hearts and minds of geeks for their actions more than a decade ago.

What sort of fast food is SharePoint?

If SharePoint were a fast food, it would either be one of those giant steaks that you get your name on the wall if you finish, or the Guatemalan chilli that sent the normally invincible Homer into the spirit world. It is so seductive to the sales guys because it is in demand, but their distance to the assholes means that they will think it should be just like any other IT infrastructure oriented project to install. Therefore, some integrators will be doomed to repeatedly bite off more than they can chew and by the time they realise it, the long term damage will be done.

So what do you do?

If you accept that the organisation is a system and that optimising one part of it will likely impact the rest of the organisation, often in unpredictable ways, then incentivising has to be more strategically focussed. In other words, the true performance indicator on a good sales guy is actually the success of the project, because it is a much more reliable indicator of the sort of food being passed to the mouth and results in customer goodwill – social capital. If sales guys received their morsels based on the success of the project as a whole, then it would force them to interact more with the assholes to achieve that end and think a little more carefully about what they feed the organisation.

But self interest is a very strong force and there are very few sales guys that would be enthusiastic about that idea. This is of course the other big problem. The longer you leave it, the harder it is for an organisation to make the changes necessary to produce the outcomes that they aspire to.

If you want to see that in practice, look no further than the Copenhagen climate change conference.

Final note about thinking in terms of systems

Of course, if we are taking a complex adaptive systems view, then one could argue that the affect of all of this would be that your sales guys will leave and find organisations who feed them bigger morsels with much less effort of (heaven forbid) being judged on real outcomes. As a result, opportunities for sales may be lost to competitors and the organisation still suffers as a whole

This is the dilemma of systems thinking and what frustrates the hell out of the “command and control” world. You can just end up with a giant talkfest and never actually make a decision on anything because systems adapt in ways that can’t be predicted.

Is it any therefore wonder that command and control usually wins out? 

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

                      

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Three weeks ago my plasma TV broke, freeing the family from the magic spell of hi-def television. My family took the loss in different ways. My four year old was devastated at the lack of Nintendo Wii, and constantly whined about being bored. My ten year old is a bookworm anyway, and continued to be one. I suddenly found mountains of time to write, churning out three Dialogue Mapping articles that I had been meaning to write for ages.

Today the repair man came and fixed the TV. I expect that the glow of the plasma screen will once again induce that zombie-like state, where my work-rate is dependant on what show happens to be on at the time (NCIS as I write this). Luckily, this is the last article of this particular series on Dialogue Mapping for now and I might have enough active brain cells to hang on long enough to squeeze this article out.

This article builds on the last section of part three that was entitled “Nurture the holding environment”. In that section, I introduced the concept of the “holding environment” and I offered a basic example (the bus trip that was conducted prior to the Dialogue Mapping session). This concept is so fundamental and important to the success of Dialogue Mapping and projects more broadly that I want to do it proper justice here in part four.

The paradox of individuality

Put a bunch of right-brained geeks in a room to solve a problem and you will probably find that they get on relatively well. Put a bunch of creative left-brained marketing people in a room to solve a problem and you might expect the same thing. The solutions offered, when compared to each other, are likely to be quite different and will also likely be sub-optimal. For a truly good solution, we need diversity in perspectives and, although this pains me to say, marketing people are therefore actually needed. This creates a bit of a problem though with the paradox of individuality because, as geeks, we all know the notion of marketing people being needed goes against everything we stand for.

I first read about the paradox of individuality in a book called Team Talk: The Power of Language in Team Dynamics and it was described as follows:

The only way for a group to become a group is for individuals to express their individuality, yet the only way for individuals is to become fully individuated is to accept and develop more fully, their connections to the group.

What? Geeks and marketing people accepting each other as equals? Unifying the laws of physics will come sooner and this is a classic example of what Conklin calls “social complexity”. Of course, social complexity goes much deeper than geeks vs. marketing people, but one of the effects of social complexity is a distinct lack of direct communication between parties. This is because conflict is not fun and avoidance is a natural reaction to situations that are not fun.

The idea of the “holding environment” is best summed up with the image below. Here, you can see that we have an area set aside for kids to play in a safe, controlled environment.

A holding environment for an organisation or a team is actually not that dissimilar to the example above. You are attempting to create a state where participants can step out of their comfort zones, but at the same time, are shielded from counter productive tensions that cause paralysis, chaos and pullback.

For this reason I maintain that beer is one of the best holding environments available and it forms a key part of my professional skill set

As I stated in part 1 of this series, Dialogue Mapping is a very useful holding environment on its own, but it can be augmented with other things as well and you should always be on the lookout for complimentary tools and techniques. In the following sections, I will outline where Dialogue Mapping has augmented another method, or where we have augmented Dialogue Mapping itself with another method.

Information gathering for 40+ people

There are practical limits to how many people should be involved in a standard Dialogue Mapping session. Mind you, there are practical limits for how many people should attend a meeting too and that limit seems to be any more than one person .

By “standard”, I mean the sort of session illustrated below. The exact number that test the limits of Dialogue Mapping varies because it really depends on the wickedness of the problem being discussed and the past history of the group. For example, one of the teams I map for consists of around fifteen to eighteen members. They are working on a particularly wicked problem, yet I can work with this group alone quite easily. This is because over time, the group has worked out their decorum for the Dialogue Mapping sessions that work for all concerned. I also know everybody on a first name basis and some of the group have become personal friends of mine outside of work. In short, people are comfortable with each other and the process, and despite things getting heated people know that it is not personal. This is a simple, yet effective, example of a working holding environment.

A while back, my client invited representatives from academia, charities as well as various public sector government departments, to a half day workshop on the topic of social sustainability as part of a significant redevelopment project. There were approximately 40-45 attendees who were there for the first time. There was no way we would be able to cover off the required topics using a standard Dialogue Mapping set-up. With so many people, it would be hard for all attendees to have a say in the allotted time, let alone set up the room to handle that number of people for the process.

The way we got around this issue was to run a pre-workshop session among a much smaller group, to create a series of “seed maps” for each of the sub-areas of social sustainability. By the end of this process, we had around a dozen maps on various subtopics with a few questions, ideas, pros and cons. These maps were not complete at all, but that was not the aim. Instead they were well formed IBIS argumentations.

We then printed each of these maps out at large size. Initially each map was pinned to display boards, and when the attendees arrived they spent time wandering from map to map, examining the argumentation while mingling with other attendees. Below is a photo showing some of the seed maps prior to the attendees arriving.

Below is a diagram representing the table arrangement for the workshop. We started with a half hour overview and introduction as to the purpose of the workshop and why they had been invited. At this point, we removed four of the maps from the display boards above, and put a map on each table. We explained to the group that each table had a unique map on it and each map was on a particular topic. At this point attendees had the opportunity to move to a table where the topic was of most relevance or interest to them.

Each table contained copious amounts of marker pens. I then took the stage and explained the basics of IBIS grammar to the attendees and explained to them that we wanted them to start adding ideas to the existing maps. I did not belabour the grammar, nor did I expect them to suddenly know how to do IBIS properly, but what I made clear, was that I was going to walk from table to table and interrupt if I felt the additions to the map made no sense or were ambiguous in some way.

The group had just under an hour to work on each map and at the end of the hour, we removed the updated paper maps and replaced them with the next four from the display boards. The process was then repeated and I walked from table to table, asking for clarification or calling out implied questions on parts of the maps that made no sense to me. Interestingly, IBIS novices seemed to have little problems with the usage of ideas, pros and cons, but they would forget to make the underlying question explicit. I would ask them what was the question being answered by a particular idea and would write the question into the map and redraw the lines.

After the third iteration of this process we were done. The last half an hour was a “Where to from here?” session and an opportunity for the group to provide feedback to the organisers of the workshop.

After the workshop was completed, I took all of the updated paper maps and added the additional rationales into the seed maps in Compendium. The process was surprisingly quick because the majority of the additional argumentations that were added were actually pretty good IBIS form. I think that having existing argumentations on the seed maps made it easier for attendees to add rationales that looked similar to what was there already. It wasn’t perfect IBIS by any means, but it was not a difficult task for me to refactor the additional information without losing any of the intent behind the rationales.

For the record, additional workshops were conducted, but these reverted to standard Dialogue Mapping workshops with a subset of the attendees who had specialised skills and knowledge in the topic area. But what this particular process demonstrated was that with a little planning a single Dialogue Mapper could still manage to capture quality rationales from a very large group in a short space of time.

Dialogue Mapping with a facilitator

Dialogue mapping for a large group can be augmented with a facilitator and I have done this a few times. For a large group, this can be very helpful because the mapper can concentrate on capturing the dialogue and less on directing the meeting. Equally though, a facilitator can actually make the process more difficult. The key to a facilitator situation working is when the facilitator either knows IBIS or has been present in a number of Dialogue Mapping workshops and understands how the process works. This is because the facilitator is usually facing the group like the mapper, asking probing questions, directing the course of conversation and therefore is not looking at the map or listening in terms of IBIS translation of the dialogue. As a Dialogue Mapper, it is important for participants to verify what you have captured is correct, and if the facilitators are not following the map, they can easily get in the way of this verification process.

Facilitators can also get you into trouble at times because they can sometimes be conditioned to traditional meeting decorum where topics are allocated at particular times with an agenda that can preclude deeper exploration of a topic. Dialogue Mapping is a rich enough container to allow a group that deeper exploration, but this is not something that some facilitators are used to. One prime example that sticks out in my mind to this day was a workshop where we had a lot of options to explore. Conscious of the agenda, in an attempt to make the process more efficient, the facilitator asked the group whether any of the options had any “fatal flaws” that enabled that option to be quickly discounted. It soon became apparent (in a negative way) that one person’s “fatal flaw” was diametrically opposed to another person’s “fatal flaw”. This attempt to shortcut deliberations backfired badly and resulted in this line of question being completely abandoned.

This is a great example of the importance of nurturing the holding environment (lesson nine from part 3). After this “fatal flaws” episode, I deliberately stopped mapping while the group resolved the fatal flaw issue and resolved to try a different approach. This subsequent approach proved to be much more successful and we never deviated from it after that. “No fatal flaws” became a bit of a mantra among this group.

A key to working with a facilitator is to remember the lesson on confidence and assertiveness from part 3. Just because a facilitator is directing the meeting and influencing the direction of the conversation, it doesn’t mean that the mapper is purely a scribe. Work out a system with the facilitator where, if you raise your hand or signal in some way, you are not ready to move on straight away. Another technique that I have used in a large group situation was to assign someone else the traffic warden role, where if I am having trouble keeping up with the various conversations, and my eyes are on the map, they can call the group to order.

Dialogue Mapping, in tandem with another Dialogue Mapper ,can work very well and I have done many times with my colleagues at Seven Sigma. In this situation, you are both thinking in the IBIS grammar and both of you are mentally unpacking the conversation, although only one of you is actually performing the mapping. We have used this technique with particularly good results in SharePoint requirement gathering workshops, where one of us asks the questions and the other performs the mapping.

Dialogue Mapping and Debategraph

Compendium is one of several tools that can be used to create and render argument grammar like IBIS. For me, Compendium is the absolute best for Dialogue Mapping. Being a desktop application, I do not need internet access and once you are proficient with it, Compendium is very fast. This is of course, the biggest factor for Dialogue Mapping live. You do not want to be hindered by the limitations of the software tool that you are using.

I noticed that some CleverworkArounds readers created IBIS maps in Visio and were also using mind mapping tools after I published the “One best practice” series. But the problem is, although you can technically make an IBIS map, those tools would never work in a live session because of how slow it would be to add rationales to the map. Seriously guys, it might be technically possibly but do not attempt to use those tools live.

One size does not fit all and this is especially true of sense making tools. There are actually two main audiences for maps like this. Those who create the maps and those who consume the maps. The key point is that the ultimate audience for any map is quite often not the group creating the map in the first place. The whole point of capturing rationale is to make visible the process that a group went through when working on a problem, which ultimately shows why a particular decision was made or why a course of action was taken. Those who want to review the rationales are a very different audience to those who made the decision and wish to demonstrate justification. Just because the tool works well for the problem solving process, does not automatically assume that the tool is then best suited to the communication of that rationale to a wider audience.

Compendium maps work brilliantly well during the Dialogue Mapping process and from a broader communication point of view, work exceptionally well when detailed maps are printed onto large sized paper. But as a communication and distribution tool, Compendium is weaker than some of the alternatives. Compendium maps do not translate overly well to the web at this point, and asking all interested parties to install compendium is out of the question. For the sake of article length, I will not go into detail why this is, but to appease the Compendium fanbois, this is direct feedback from my clients and not just my opinionated rant.

For communicating the rationale that has come from Dialogue Mapping sessions to a wider audience, Debategraph is ideal. Unlike Compendium, Debategraph is a cloud based argument visualisation tool, designed to leverage the freeform updating capabilities of a wiki, along with the rigor of an argument grammar much like IBIS. Debategraph does not use a top down or left to right visualisation method. Instead each node is at the centre of the screen and surrounding issues, ideas, pros and cons surround the node, requiring the user to click nodes to explore further argumentation.

The beauty of Debategraph is the combination of its argument navigation, along with the streaming view of related content as shown below. My clients absolutely love the stream view because it is so simple for people to explore and work with. The ability to embed a map at any point in the debate on any web site is also pretty handy and I have pasted a sample map below to illustrate this. Click a node on the left pane (the “*” means there are sub arguments) and the content in the right window will change, based on which argument node is currently being examined.

Compare this to Compendium maps, where additional rich content like images, documents and the like are treated as additional nodes in the map. As you can see in the example below, it is possible to integrate rich content into the map very easily, but that rich content is linked in the same manner as the argumentation itself. Debategraph on the other hard, separates the argumentation from the supporting content and I think that this works much better and supports a richer form of argument based content delivery.

But once again, use the best tool that fits the purpose. From a dialogue and rationales collection point of view, Debategraph is an excellent way for a bunch of geographically dispersed people to debate a particular issue because the map will refactor on the fly as people self-contribute to it. But I personally would not use Debategraph for the Dialogue Mapping process, because it is not as fast as compendium and it is not as easy to view the map in full context as shown above. The over-arching point with all of this is that if the rationale has been captured in the first place, there are many ways to make creative use of it.

Note: To be fair on the Compendium makers there are many excellent examples of Compendium being used for some pretty impressive things. I am talking here specifically about online collaboration and communication to a wider audience.

Conclusion

This series of posts has examined the practical aspects of Dialogue Mapping, explored some of the techniques that I have used to augment it. Although I do not intend to write any more articles on this topic right now, the series is by no means complete. This is an ongoing learning process for all practitioners of this craft and I am sure that other Dialogue Mappers have tried different techniques than those that I have covered. (Some interesting things are happening on the SharePoint integration front too, which should enrich this experience even further, but that is a whole separate topic )

But one final request. If you have used techniques such as these to enrich the experience for participants, then I’d love to hear from you. Even if it is not for Dialogue Mapping, any technique that is inclusive and augments the holding environment, please drop me a line or leave a comment.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

                      

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Hi there and welcome to part 3 of my series on the practice of Dialogue Mapping in the real-world. To recap, in part 1, I provided a brief overview of Dialogue Mapping and in part 2, I described a common real world usage scenario that we perform fairly often as SharePoint consultants.

The rest of this series will change tack a little. In this article I am going to describe a very different Dialogue Mapping scenario to you. This was a huge challenge and a large leap from what I described in part 2. There were some wonderful lessons learned from this work which I will cover off here.

The most “wicked” problems are not technical

My first Dialogue Mapping gig where I was not a subject matter expert also happened to be a real baptism of fire. Here was a problem that I had no understanding of, no discipline knowledge and no sense of background history of the project, the dynamics of the group, nor any idea of the positions of stakeholders on the problem.

By this time my IBIS fluency was pretty much down and I felt very confident with the usage of Compendium. I had not yet travelled to the USA yet to train under Jeff Conklin directly, but I carried his book around with me, and had read it many times over. I had performed Dialogue Mapping many times, however until this point all the projects or subjects that I was involved in I knew a lot about. This time I felt very vulnerable. Your domain knowledge is a form of armour, and it was unsettling to know that you’re going in stark naked. I was intimidated, yet excited at the same time.

So imagine this scenario. There was myself, a facilitator, and *fifteen* strangers sitting across from me. This was double the group numbers of the typical IT scenarios I had previously mapped. I remember emailing Jeff for advice when I heard that there would be so many and I recall him saying that 15 was a lot of people for a newbie. What was I in for!

Little did I know at the time that this group had been meeting for quite some time before that, but were really struggling on a complex urban planning issue. When I say complex, I mean complex in a social way, rather than technical. Interestingly, the issue was not a technically complicated issue at all. Anybody could have sat in the room and understood most of the dialogue (not necessarily the full context but you would not be completely blinded by science). What made this particular issue complex was the fact that the group members came from several different organisations, representing some quite diametrically opposing viewpoints. In part 2, I wrote about how it was hard enough just to get one IT department to come to the party and that was just one department of a single organisation – sheesh! If you have complained about organisational silos and think it is hard enough to get some degree of consensus within the realm of one organisation, imagine it when over a dozen representatives from different organisations are involved, organisations that straddle the full spectrum of public and private sectors, as well as the community.

There were simply so many stakeholders and interconnected issues that it was very hard to not get bogged down into tangents, repetition and frustration. Now, imagine eighteen months of this environment and the stressful social complexity impacts.

This is a long-term project that I am still involved with, so I will not be taking you through the specific details of this project just yet. Rest assured though, it has been such a great experience that I will write about it in detail in the future. For now, I will focus on lessons learnt so that others aspiring to perform this craft can learn from my own experiences.

People often tell you the best way to learn is to dive right in, and Dialogue Mapping is no exception. No sooner than I had put up a “what should we do…” type root question, it didn’t take long for debate to get … shall we say … rigorous! So I will go over some of the key lessons that I learnt from this experience thus far.

Lesson One: Confidence and assertiveness

The first thing that I had to contend with was not being in control of the conversation to the same extent as before. As previously stated, with SharePoint workshops I tend to direct the flow of the workshop as a mapper and as a subject matter expert. But this scenario was very different. I didn’t know the topic area at all and therefore some of the terms and acronyms made no sense to me. Also being new and unused to the decorum of the group, I erred on what I thought was politeness, rather than annoy the group by being direct and at times, interrupting them.

This, in my opinion, is a mistake and does a disservice to the other participants. It is also probably the most common thing a newbie mapper will experience when starting out, especially with a new group. As a result, the mapping in this first workshop ebbed and flowed. There were a few times where I was mapping the conversation really well, and the participants really engaged with the argumentation as it unfolded on the screen before them. Participants gestured to the map and asked me to add additional arguments and issues to what had already been built there. I could literally hear some of the initially sceptical, suddenly have that magic moment where they see it working. But at other times, during, say a particularly contentious issue, the conversation would fly at a rapid rate of knots. With so many people in the room, many wanted to have their say on these topics. This led to:

1. Side conversations started up
2. Some participants looked away from the map, and started debating directly to each other

As soon as one of these happened, and especially with the latter, I, as the Mapper, had no hope of following the conversation. As you might expect, I would lose focus and the quality of what was captured suffered (hence lots of idea nodes with no connections to anything). The focussing power of the map would be diminished and the wheels would start to fall off.

So remember this above all else. No matter what you do, you must be confident and assertive from the very start to keep the group focussed on the map. Don’t be afraid to interrupt someone to clarify a point, or pause them before they go too fast. If someone else starts to interject, interject back and make it clear that you will get to them as soon as you have finished capturing what someone else has said.

Here is the other critical thing: You must be consistent. It is the first ten to twenty minutes that will set the tone for the rest of the session. This is where people will implicitly learn the decorum of a Dialogue Mapping session and know what to expect. Your actions as a mapper, during this period, is critical to the overall quality of the session. Start it well and it will generally end well.

Jeff Conklin, of course, offers advice for this in his wonderful book on how to dealing with this. But of course, in the heat of dialogue, all of that advice goes straight out the window as you struggle to keep up with the rapid fire dialogue heading your way. Reading about how one should dialogue map is one thing, doing it is another. This is why I call Dialogue Mapping a craft and leads me to my second lesson learned.

Lesson Two: Remember that one guitar lesson you had? (Be realistic)

I think just about everybody at one point has had romantic notions of being a rock guitarist, banging out the blues like Clapton or blistering solos like Kirk Hammett or Brian May. A surprisingly large number of people have actually bought a guitar at some stage in their lives and have tried to live the dream. Most give it up once they find that the gap between their ability to play a G chord and their dream of playing the solo to Hotel California stretches to the moon and back. Inevitably, many guitars ends up collecting dust in the attic, along with the home gym set and many other items that were bought from late night infomercials.

You will hit this with Dialogue Mapping. Remember that wicked problems breed social complexity. Some problems may have some stakeholders with diametrically opposed views and discussion can be quite heated. The romantic notion of your group suddenly solving their wicked problem from your wonderful dialogue mapping has to be viewed with the reality that you still have to learn the G chord and audience can be fickle.

Thus, as far as audiences go, don’t go playing a stadium gig until you feel that you can handle sitting in the corner of a local bar or the school disco. In other words, start small and work your way up. A small, successful meeting will help you develop your style, confidence and then empower you to take on larger groups.

As Ali-G would say, keep it real.

Lesson Three: Stick to your domain of knowledge (at first)

This is a logical extension of lesson two, and also a tricky one because it can be just as much of a worst practice as a best one. This I suspect is probably a lesson on where Jeff Conklin or other dialogue mappers may disagree with me. One of the transitions that you have to make as a mapper is to move from what I would call Issue Mapping to real Dialogue Mapping. Just because you are doing mapping in front of a group, doesn’t actually mean you are necessarily “dialogue” mapping. Dialogue Mapping is often called “Issue Mapping with facilitation”, and when you work within your domain of expertise and you are a mapper as well as participant. Therefore you are not an impartial facilitator. This is the situation I described in part 2 and discovered very quickly, that pure dialogue mapping was much harder and mentally tougher.

But in terms of developing your skills, you will have good results when you are working in an area that you know well. You don’t have to worry about the meaning of acronyms and half of the questions you have likely heard before anyway. Remember though, that in a way it is kind of cheating because you are in effect, using the craft to get people to confront questions that you want answered. But it is an important stepping stone and will help you master lesson 4.

Lesson Four: IBIS grammar in the reptile brain

IBIS is the grammar that you use to map discourse. When mapping rapid-fire contributions from a group of people, they do not want to sit and wait for you to mull over whether their statement was an idea followed by a pro or an inferred question with an idea. If you find yourself having to do this, it is like trying to play a song on guitar and having to consciously think about how to play that G chord. Just think about how much you’d enjoy a Metallica concert if James Hetfield stopped every minute or so on a hard bit of a song and said “Wait, wait.. I’ve done this before… ok, hang on…oops, sorry”. This translation needs to burn itself into your reptile brain so that the process is as automatic as possible. To do this, you need to initially not worry about getting up in front of a group. As Conklin suggests in his book, listen to interviews on the radio or take an article, pull out its main points and create an IBIS map for it. There are a zillion ways to do this.

For all of you SharePoint people, a really excellent, highly relevant way of practice that I use, is to sit in the audience of a presentation at SharePoint Saturday or a conference and issue map the presentation. Below is a sample of some of the sessions where I have done this and the image after that demonstrates how much rationale I captured in the “NZ Web Standards and SharePoint” session.

Another great way to learn is to send one of your maps to an IBIS practitioner and let them pull it to bits. Even those of us who have done this for a while need that constant reinforcement and feedback. Like any grammar, different things can be written in different ways and one person’s IBIS will not always look like someone else’s. (There is another blog post in the works that will show this in a funny way). At various times I have sent maps to Conklin for constructive feedback (and then ducked for cover! – hehe)

Finally, if you are serious about this and like what you are reading, then do what I did – the 5 week Issue Mapping webinar based workshops that Jeff Conklin runs, or if you are in Australia and want something local, then contact me for a half or full-day in-house Issue Mapping intro workshop. Both will not teach you to dialogue map, but by the end of them you will dream in IBIS

Lesson Five: IBIS translation in the reptile brain

Once the language of IBIS is familiar to you, you can take any argumentation and form a consistent IBIS map. You then have to learn how to listen very carefully because that is half the art. Now you have to take prose and pontification by participants and somehow unpack the points made, articulate them into a summary, and form an IBIS based model in your head, and then commit it to the map.

This can be hard – very hard, and it is nigh on impossible to do without applying what I told you in lesson one. A dialogue mapper is not superhuman and does not have photographic memory. The skill you are developing here is one where you pick out the IBIS elements of some dialogue quickly, as well as knowing when to interject to make sure you do not miss anything.

A great example of this working is when someone has stated something, and although I cannot remember all points, I know that there was a question and three ideas offered. I might pause the conversation before it goes too far and say something like “Ah, that was important and I need to get this right. I heard you say three things there. You questioned the idea of X, and you offered an answer with 3 pros. One was Y, and what were the other two again?”

Conklin explains meeting discourse and question types in his book and the aforementioned workshop in a lot of detail. But once again, to apply it to a real-world situation can only be done by practice (and more practice). The absolute best way to do this is to watch an experienced dialogue mapper perform this and look at how they handle the situation, which brings me onto lesson six.

Lesson Six: Observe

One of the most enjoyable training experiences of my career was to travel to the picturesque town of Annapolis and learn dialogue mapping from Jeff Conklin himself. Up until then, I had been practicing the craft, but after those two days, I returned as a much better practitioner.

The single most important part of the time spent there was when we, the students, dialogue mapped each other as we discussed a real-world issue. We each sat in the hot seat for fifteen minutes or so, trying to map the discussion. We were all being completely evil, deliberately starting side conversations, interrupting and interjecting, playing the role of the dominant type A style participant, jumping all over the place and, overall, just being as difficult as we could.

Unsurprisingly, we all sucked big time trying to dialogue map this. However, when Conklin took the floor, we then saw how exactly Dialogue Mapping was done and what twenty years of practice does. He effortlessly brushed off our attempts to trip him up by observing all of the lessons that I have thus far described, but also with some subtle tricks that we didn’t even notice until he told us afterwards.

After Conklin had wiped the floor with us, so to speak, we all got to have another crack at it, with the benefit of observation and hindsight. This time the difference was significant in our performance and the way that we each handled the “mob”.

Moral? The very best thing you can do is to be involved in a Dialogue Mapping session where it has been done well. Watch carefully what the mapper is doing and how they are conducting themselves and the process.

Lesson Seven: It will make you tired

If you think of all the various things that you have to do simultaneously (for examples listening, understanding, mapping, and managing the group) during Dialogue Mapping, it is amazing that anyone with a Y chromosome can manage it, given that men usually cannot multitask at all. (Case in point: If sport is on the radio and my wife is speaking to me, one of them has to be switched off…Sorry honey ).

When you are first learning this craft and you are going to be up in front of a group, plan for only an hour or so. While you have to think quite consciously about things, it will exhaust you even more. Once things become more automatic, you can go for longer. From my own experience, the limit for Dialogue Mapping a big group on a really wicked topic would be about four hours at the absolute maximum. (Usually by then the participants also need to take a break and sleep on it anyway).

Some sessions can be intense, and you, as a mapper, need to be switched on for that entire time. You are listening carefully to every person speak because you are trying to form it into IBIS. So unlike everybody else who can sit there and look interested, yet be mentally switched off, you have to be interested by definition.

One thing about this is that, while you are in the zone, you don’t need coffee. When mapping, you have enough endorphins racing around your system to keep quite alert, but as soon as there is a break, you can find that you will feel quite tired at times, and a well timed coffee can be very handy (real coffee, of course – none of that instant junk!)

The one thing that compensates for what Dialogue Mapping can take out of you mentally, is that exhilarating experience when the group is really getting into the process and the positive feedback that you receive when a really well formed map has been developed.

Lesson Eight: Learn to love “transclusions” and CTRL+R

I thought that I would drop in a left-field lesson learned at this point that is still very important.

Trans-what? Don’t worry – I don’t know why they called it that either. Ted Nelson, who also coined the term “hypertext”, came up with the name but I think the day “transclusion” sprung to mind, he was having an off-day. I asked Conklin what it meant and he said “It’s technically accurate … an "inclusion" of material *across* (‘trans’) several documents”. When I whined about the geekiness of the name he added “There was a time when the word "hypertext" was a wacko term for geeks, you know”. Damn! He’s got me there.

My explanation that will suffice for now? Transclusions is a fancy way of describing the process of breaking your big map up into smaller, linked up sub-maps. I have also heard it referred to as chunking, and when maps get too big, this is a necessity. (For the hypertext nerds that is somewhat incomplete but suffices for this point).

The compendium software that I choose to use for this work also has a great feature in it. Your map is re-drawn automatically when you hold down the control key and press R. I am now in the habit that after entering a node or three, I redraw the map via this method to keep it all looking orderly. That way, if there has been a lot of dialogue captured, you do not end up with a messy, cluttered map that participants find hard to follow. Like lesson number three and four, stopping conversation while you refactor a messy map will cost you group momentum so ideally if you have gotten into the Control+R habit, all you have to do is a quick transclusion at an opportune time.

The best time to perform a map transclusion is when a thread of discussion has been exhausted and the group has moved onto a new idea or area in the map. A trick I learned from Anapolis was to sit up and say something like “Okay, let’s just pause for a minute.” (Holding up my hand), congratulate the group on the quality of what they have captured and then say something like “Let’s just put this stuff into its own pigeonhole, so we can now focus on X idea”.

Lesson Nine: Nurture the holding environment

Okay, so if there is to be one big serious lesson learned, it is this one. To make the point, I am going to quote Heifetz and Linsky from their excellent book Leadership on the Line. You can read a PDF press release here, specifically the section entitled “Control the temperature.”

Changing the status quo generates tension and produces heat by surfacing hidden conflicts and challenging organizational culture. It’s a deep and natural human impulse to seek order and calm, and organizations and communities can tolerate only so much distress before recoiling.

If you try to stimulate deep change, you have to control the temperature. There are really two tasks involved. The first is to raise the heat enough that people sit up, pay attention, and deal with the real threats and challenges facing them. Without some distress, there is no incentive for them to change anything. The second is to lower the temperature when necessary to reduce a counterproductive level of tension. Any community can only take so much pressure before it becomes either immobilized or spins out of control. The heat must stay within a tolerable range—not so high that people demand it be turned off completely, and not so low that they are lulled into inactivity.

Heifetz and Linsky talk about maintaining the “the productive range of distress” but I have heard many metaphors like this. Another I like is “creative abrasion”, coined by Leonard and Swap in their excellent book When Sparks Fly . Both are essentially talking about making the whole environment conducive to getting the best out of the participants.

The key takeaway is this: Each group is different and each situation is different. In the normal discourse of the meeting, there will be times where the group works together in almost perfect unison and times where one wrong word will destroy that balance and require the group to stop, reset things and move forward. This is not about IBIS either. The fact is that over time, a particular pattern will emerge in the decorum of the sessions, where conducting the sessions or approaching the mapping in a particular way, will work consistently well for the group.

Let me give you a classic example that was absolute genius on the part of my client who did exactly this. Before Dialogue Mapping for a group of concerned residents who were facing the prospect of significant change to the amenity of their homes, a bus was hired and the residents were taken to an area where a similar urban transformation had been made ten years before. We all walked around the area for an hour, soaking in the vibe, learning about the history of the area, how the area was redeveloped and how certain planning challenges were overcome.

This allowed the participants to get a real sense of the issues they needed to confront, and they felt it with all senses, sight, sound and tactile, rather than some cold, rather detached room with a projected map on the wall. Later, when I dialogue mapped the session after the bus tour, the group did a fantastic job and the quality of the rationale that was captured was much richer and faster, through that sensory immersion that took place before the mapping process began.

So just remember, Dialogue Mapping is a great holding environment in the sense that Heifetz and Linsky talk about. It is a wonderful “rich container”, as Conklin puts it, for fostering and maintaining creative abrasion. But as the bus ride example shows, there is a lot of things that you can combine with it to enhance the experience further.

More examples like this will be covered in part 4 of this series.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

                      

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Hi there.

Welcome to part 2 of a series of articles on the craft of Dialogue Mapping – something that forms a significant chunk of my SharePoint and non SharePoint work. In the “One best practice” series of articles, I explained IBIS. In part 1 of this series, I introduced the facilitation part that goes along with IBIS. In this article, I’ll spend more time on how Dialogue Mapping works in real world scenarios.

In the previous article, I wrote about how important it was for tools and methods like this to be intuitive and inclusive, allowing you to start from any given point. I also wrote about how methods need to be adaptable and grow, accepting and accommodating for the fact that understanding of the problem changes over time. In any project or problem that is novel or new, there is, invariably, a large degree of unknowns and uncertainties among participants. Solutions are not always obvious and we should be careful not to presume that we are doing something wrong if we reinterpret the problem, as a result of learning more or seeing a suggested solution.

New IT projects, by definition, often fall into this bucket and SharePoint is a poster child for this type of project. But in saying that, some of the toughest problems on the planet are not technically complicated at all and SharePoint is actually not the most wicked problem that I have used this craft on. More on that in part 3…

So, the first example of the practice of Dialogue Mapping that I will tell you about is how effective it is in dealing with IT department physics and nerd law.

IT department physics and nerd law…

Before consulting on any IT project, it is important to understand the inner workings of the IT department. For SharePoint this is particularly important because of its amazing ability for exposing the inherent constraints of IT departmental physics in a negative way.

There are certain fundamental principles of how IT departments work that I have classified into several immutable laws. They are:

1. The web team dislikes the corporate marketing team because marketing always wants the same garish lime-green colours they have for their printed brochures;
2. The infrastructure team dislikes the web team because they see them as a bunch of cowboys who mess with forces they do not understand and do not have to deal with the consequences of it;
3. The web team dislikes the infrastructure team because they are a bunch of control freaks who won’t even allow you to fart without filling in a change control form; and
4. Nobody likes the misunderstood compliance/records management team at all. They unfortunately perpetuate this by droning on continually about whatever compliance standard/s the organisation has to adhere to.

There are some interesting sub-laws that go along with the four immutable laws. For example, you have only one shot to ask the right question to a good infrastructure guy. In other words, the way you word the question will tell them a lot about your technical chops and if you word the question badly, you will be forever banished into the same sin bin where they hold most project managers and sales people. Once sin-binned, it takes an enormous amount of effort to get out. Similarly, when approaching an application developer, always start the question from the presumption that the error you are encountering is *not* in their code, despite you being fairly certain that it is.

Ted Dzubia is a tech writer equivalent of Dr House. A terrific writer with brilliant insight woven between layers of blistering attitude and well placed vulgarity. He cites a classic example of what he calls “nerd law” and it cuts to the heart of the problem that projects like SharePoint face.

The only way to adjudicate Nerd Law is to write about a transgression on your blog and hope that it gets to the front page of Digg. Nerd Law is the result of the pathological introversion software engineers carry around with them, being too afraid of confrontation after that one time in high school when you stood up to a jock and ended up getting your ass kicked.

If you actually talk to people, network, and make agreements, you’ll find that most are reasonable…

Defying the laws of IT physics

One of my earliest uses of Dialogue Mapping was to deal with a classic case of IT department physics and nerd law. A completely new SharePoint project, with no in-house staff having significant expertise in the product, has decided to implement SharePoint for an intranet. To make it interesting, the project is instigated out of the web team. As the immutable laws explain the forces of IT nature, this means that several things happen by default:

• The infrastructure team will automatically be against it because they don’t want to get saddled with, yet another, enterprise application to support and manage
• The records management team, having already been scarred from trying to convince an uninterested workforce that the existing records software does not suck, now will assume that SharePoint is going to take over their area.
• The software development team will assume that SharePoint is here to replace all of their lovingly coded, yet bloaty and insecure line-of-business systems.

At this point, each side starts googling and discovers that the means by which they will address the “obviously” out-of-bounds web team is via this thing called “Governance”. Governance is then mentioned in every second sentence, in a manner to improve their respective positions. This is the nightmare scenario where governance is used as a tool to perpetuate nerd law. This is to be avoided at all costs.

In this project, I introduced the dialogue map from the very first meeting with a simple root question “What are we going to do with SharePoint in Organsiation X”?

Now in this case, SharePoint is my core discipline, so unlike some of my subsequent engagements. I already had a bunch of questions that I wanted the client to start pondering. Being well aware of the destructive forces of the immutable laws of IT, I put down some immediate sub-questions.

• What are the goals of the project?
• What are the governance requirements of this project?
• What are the infrastructure requirements for SharePoint?
• What should we do about operational support for SharePoint?
• How will we develop the project?
• What else do we need to be aware of?

The web team had also developed a project charter which explained, in some detail, the background to this project and how we came to be where we were. I linked this into the issue map. Something that also came up fairly quickly was that the organisation had just completed a large strategic review project and an Information Management Plan had been drafted and approved. This was a key document that pretty much set the direction of the organisation for the next four years.

Below is the map showing these initial questions, along with the project charter and Information Management Plan. Note how I can attach documents into the IBIS map along with the argumentation.

Adaptive requirements gathering…

As you can imagine, we started working through these questions. Given that the SharePoint was completely new to the team, I was perfectly happy for the web team to jump around to different areas of the map and fill it in. Fairly quickly, the participants identified that a staged approach would be needed for implementation, and we initially would flick between goals and stages until that began to solidify that the details of the implementation matched the goals.

This map evolved over a period of time where we would spend time on-site with the team, performing training and advisory on SharePoint itself. As understanding of SharePoint’s capabilities grew from the use of a demonstration virtual machine, we refactored and re-examined the map as new knowledge, insights and/or understandings came to light. The team took to dialogue mapping like ducks to water, and the web team leader downloaded and installed compendium so that she always had the latest project rationale on her desktop.

This also had advantages to my colleagues who were also involved in the training and advisory phase. Since each of us were trained in IBIS and dialogue mapping, any one of us was able to conduct a session and the new map would be redistributed to all participants. Thus, even if I did not attend a meeting, I was able to very quickly orient myself around any new questions, issues or ideas.

Planting seeds of buy in…

One area that many web teams are weaker on in their knowledge is in infrastructure. In this case, I had a dual role as dialogue mapper and SharePoint consultant because I know how infrastructure guys think. After all, I used to be one myself. Therefore, I wanted to ensure that a lot of infrastructure considerations were captured and made explicit in the map before we took it to the other teams. I ensured that farm topology options were captured, backup and recovery implications, virtualisation and the like were covered. Additionally, many questions were captured but not answered, such as network topology, active directory configuration, large database management, SLA and the like. A snippet of this is below.

One thing that we were all aware of was to ensure that records management considerations were duly covered. By having a SharePoint environment to use and learn from, the team was able to quickly become much more informed about SharePoint’s view of the world, especially in relation to the orientation of metadata, sites and site collections. We confirmed that the goals of the project was an intranet and the sort of document management that would be required would be skewed very much towards team collaboration. The web team was aware that a records management system existed and also some members had some previous experience working with these systems. We ended up creating a very detailed map outlining the strategy for integration with records management, the options for integrating the current records system with SharePoint and most importantly, the golden rules around integration that ensured that the records management system was still the authoritative location for records. Later, Microsoft and the records management vendor visited the site and presented the latest information on the integration for the product and SharePoint, and the salient points were added to the map. Below is a snippet of the map discussing this topic (deliberately obscured for privacy, but you can get a good feel for the breadth of the discussion).

The acid test…

Fast forward another couple of weeks, and the team now has a pretty good understanding of SharePoint and a very well factored map. By this time, others in the department had been called in at various times and added their rationale to the map, answering some of the open questions. Next stop was the ultimate test. A meeting was called, where all of the opposing forces were going to be in the one room at the same time. A dozen people in all, key decision makers who didn’t always enjoy a cosy relationship, crammed into a hot, tiny room with a portable projector.

The web team manager introduced the project via the charter, and we all worked our way through the map. We discussed the goals of the project, how they related back to the strategic Information Management Plan, how we were structuring the phases to support those goals, what was in/out of phase 1 and why, and of course, the considerations that we had made in relation to the other IT Teams. After around 90 minutes, we were done and the group proceeded to give feedback.

The records management team was clearly relieved. In producing the map, we had demonstrated a good awareness of records management considerations and we made it clear and explicit in the map that SharePoint was *not* going to replace or devalue what they already had in place. They loved the fact that we had captured rationale that discussed the pros and cons of the various methods and techniques we could use for integration between their tool and SharePoint as they did not know about this. The infrastructure team was also happy for the same reason. We had captured many of the questions that they would have asked themselves of the web team. We had managed to pass our “one shot” test and were not sin-binned for being naive to the nuances of IT infrastructure.

Key success factors and conclusion

All in all, in that one two hour meeting, everybody was on-side and excited about the project. It was fed back to us that achieving such buy-in within one meeting across these different IT departments was previously unheard of in this organisation.

The key success factors boiled down to 3 major factors:

1. The participants in the Dialogue Mapping process were extremely enthusiastic with the process. We did not sell Dialogue Mapping at all with this engagement – we just used it from the very first workshop. By the end of that first workshop, the participants were very impressed with the richness of what had been captured and it became the standard way we conducted workshops and requirements meetings.

2. The visibility and clarity of the rationale meant that any major concerns of the other teams were mitigated by the fact that the questions they were interested in were either addressed or, at the very least, captured and visible on the map. For many parts of the map, the web team made no pretence to know all of the answers. However, by raising those questions in the map, it gave the other teams much more assurance that the web team were not running off and doing their own thing with a lack of consultation.

3. As a mapper, knowing a fair amount about SharePoint meant that fast-tracking of learning was taking place, both at the map level and at the product capability level. Providing the team with a demo virtual machine allowed members to learn about the product, and then applying that learning back to their understanding of the problem in the map space. This was a great way for them to iterate and converge on the solution much more quickly than fumbling around with the product alone. As a SharePoint practitioner, I was able to foresee problem areas and then utilise the rationale in the map to help steer the various participants into determining the optimum solution for their circumstances.

All in all, this was a great example of the power of Dialogue Mapping in speeding up the normally laborious process of stakeholder consultation and developing a shared sense of what was trying to be achieved. The one thing I would say about this method however, was that being a subject matter expert, as well as the dialogue mapper, meant that I was able to exercise a fair degree of control over the flow of the map. This is because I was both a participant as well as the mapper, both capturing as well as answering questions, raising concerns and flagging issues that may have been missed otherwise. For any aspiring dialogue mappers out there, this is actually a good way to start because you can concentrate on creating well formed IBIS, and not have to worry about whether you are articulating a participant’s dialogue correctly. Almost by definition in this case, you know exactly what the participant is talking about and getting the context onto the map in IBIS notation is not a huge mental challenge.

But there is more…

If I concluded this series now, I would be misleading you. The form of Dialogue Mapping that I undertook here was not what I would call pure Dialogue Mapping. In my explanation of the above process, I was a participant, strategist, mentor as well as mapper. My knowledge of the problem space was very detailed and I used Dialogue Mapping as a tool to help steer the group to a position that enabled them to improve their chances of a great outcome.

In part 3, I will detail more about the craft of pure Dialogue Mapping. In this case, you are not in the room because of any particular expertise and you often do not know any of the stakeholders either. Your critical success factor is to produce a great map and thus, make a positive difference for a group in tackling a really wicked problem. As you will soon see, that changes things quite a bit…

Until then, thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

                      

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I’m very tempted to start this post like a dodgy wealth-guru infomercial. You know the ones with lots of imagery of people living the dream of financial freedom. I am thinking a montage of a resort, a large yacht anchored in a topical bay, carving up the water with a jet-ski and then a shot of me standing next to my Ferrari, champagne in hand, with Megan Fox on my arm. My message would be that for a “small” fee of $10,000, you too could learn the secrets to your financial freedom in an intimate, exclusive but “intensive” weekend workshop. Just you and the 15,000 other people that pack into the convention hall

Alas, we both know that this is never going to happen but this post may have a little of that feeling to it. I have titled it “The secret to understanding governance”, because I think there is a way to understand governance that will help you, your colleagues and your team members significantly. Like all good “wealth guru” infomercials, I’m going to give you some hints and I’m kind of hoping that you will then be interested in attending a workshop to find out the rest.

The one difference between the wealth guru and me, though, is that I will never have Megan Fox hanging off my arm, and I am actually going to tell you something useful in this post.

So, what is this big “secret”, anyway?

Definitions definitions definitions

One thing that we all tend to get suckered into doing at times is feeling the urge to define “stuff”. Academics do it all the time. I’ve read countless papers where the authors start out with a ten page examination of all the past definitions of their given topic, before proceeding to tell you why those definitions are inadequate in some way, followed by their own revised definitions. They spend the rest of their essays justifying why their definitions are more correct than their predecessors.

Defining stuff is a time consuming and tiring exercise. Since we live in a world of constant change there will always be new influences which shape and frame perceptions. Therefore, the definition that you spent so much effort on coming up with is redefined by the next academic or blogger who follows the path that you took. Sometimes a whole new word is invented, or an existing word is suddenly used in a new context and the whole cycle starts all over again.

I once explained the philosophical and process aspects of Agile/Scrum to a seriously experienced project manager. This was a fellow who was the PM when skyscrapers were erected. He listened carefully to my explanation, sat back and said “I’ve been doing that for 30 years. There’s nothing new there”. I also found a similar observation in “The Small Business Guerrilla Guide to Six Sigma” by Jay Arthur.

Over the years, I’ve had a chance to learn and study just about every “brand name” systematic improvement methodology. Guess what…they are all pretty much the same. To appear different, consultants have changed:
- the name to Six Sigma (from Total Quality Management)
- the acronyms to confuse the unwary (PDCA to DMAIC)
- the number of tools required for success
- the number of steps in the process (5 to 14 steps)
but…
- the key tools are the same
- the process for using the tools is the same
- and the results are identical assuming you can figure out how to use the wide range of tools and processes

In my opinion, defining things to the nth degree is a zero sum game. Often you confuse the issue more than you clarify it because in your attempts to explain something, you incorporate new words that you then have to explain.

Some ROI Wisdom

Several years ago I was attending a job interview for a promotion and the topic of return on investment came up. I had made the point that most things could be quantified and one of the interviewers fired back “Well tell me how you measure quality?”

That was a curveball that I wasn’t expecting, and I didn’t have an answer (and never got the job either).

Some time later, I read a terrific book by Douglas Hubbard on measurement and return on investment called “How To Measure Anything”. It armed me with some new kung-fu skills and also gave me the perfect comeback answer that I sorely needed during that interview. The question “How do you measure quality?” actually makes very little sense to ask. The reason is quite simple. “Quality is not what you measure. It is the effect it has on something that you measure”.

It is very easy to illustrate the logic behind this important point. Undertaking a quality initiative costs time, money and resources. You are only spending that money and investing those resources because you believe that undertaking this quality initiative will make a positive difference in some way. Otherwise, why bother? If you do not believe that it will make a positive difference, why throw money away?

So, if asked “How do you measure quality?”, you can answer by asking questions back, along the lines of:

• “What does improved quality look like to you?”
• “What is the effect of quality?”
• “How do you know your quality initiative is working?”

The answers to these questions tend to start with “increased this” or “decreased that”. It now should be abundantly clear why asking “How do you measure quality?” actually makes no sense. In fact it is completely the wrong question to ask. Instead, by re-framing the question slightly, you suddenly have answers that can be quantified using the techniques that I detailed in my “Learn to speak to your CFO” series and provided in my free SharePoint ROI modelling spreadsheet.

This same logic applies to other words that are better understood by examining their effect, rather than trying to (re)define them. Examples:

• Security
• Flexibility
• Collaboration
• Resilience
• Wellbeing

All of these share the same characteristic as “governance” in that they are easily understood by the effect they have, but harder to define in a universal way.

The secret to understanding governance

The really silly thing about all this is that I did a talk on SharePoint ROI at the Best Practice Conference in Feb 09. In that talk, I explained the above chain of logic and made the point that the way to find measurable success factors with anything that seems “unquantifiable” is to ask the “what will it look like if we do this?” type question. I used this logic to come up with measurable key performance indicators that enabled me to simulate the future financial return (internal rate of return and net present value) of a large SharePoint investment for a mid sized organisation (slide deck and spreadsheet can be downloaded here).

But despite writing several articles and speaking on this topic, the ROI stuff was one of several clouds of “stuff” that was floating around my brain. SharePoint governance was also floating in one of those clouds too, as well as broader governance in a planning and sustainability context. It took a casual comment from Bjørn Furuknap that suddenly gave me one of those wonderful bolts of inspiration and clarify, where these disparate clouds of thought suddenly coalesced and I made a significant breakthrough in my understanding.

Define “governance” in any way you want. I really don’t care – so long as you understand the difference it makes *for you* and you ask the same question of your other stakeholders and participants. Put aside the need to define governance for a while, and instead view “governance” as a means to attain a desirable future state. Agree with each-other on what that state is going to look like. Now tell me the differences between where you are now and that desirable future state.

By asking the question this way, you not only stimulate much more meaningful debate, you will have a much better understanding of everybody else’s frame of reference and the emphasis that they place on various aspects of that difference. The “definition” of governance that you are trying to find will start to suggest itself through those differences between the current and desired state. At the end of the day, that is what really matters.

Instead of reading a methodology like COBiT or ITIL, or following what people like me, Joel, Robert Bogue, Andrew Woodward, Dux Sy and Ruven Gotz say, look at your own needs as an individual, a team and then an organisation. Determine where you want to be, include IT and non IT views and then start to think about what you need to do to get to your desired state.

Congratulations, you’re now officially “governing”. Wasn’t that hard, was it?

Best practices versus worst practices

This same “secret” to understanding governance also provides the answer to why experts disagree on what is a “best practice”. I sometimes will read a “best practice” and think to myself “No way, that would never work”. Yet, although it doesn’t work for me, I rarely come away thinking the person making the recommendation is actually wrong. When you understand that the “best practice” made a positive difference, and it moved the organisation further along the road from the undesired present state toward the desired future state, then it is perfectly clear why one man’s best practice is another man’s worst practice. No matter what you did, you moved forward – and that is a good thing.

Furthermore, if you agree with the notion that the “best” solution to a problem is the one that has the most shared commitment among participants to seeing it through, then I argue that a perceived “worst practice” with deep commitment and buy-in among stakeholders will deliver a better solution than a “best practice” with poor buy-in and commitment among stakeholders.

Want to argue that point with me? (I’ve got more ammo than this!) Then you can spend 3 days doing that if you want!

…for a small fee

My intent with this post was to try and lift some of the fog and confusion that surrounds this nebulous thing called governance by suggesting that defining it to the nth degree is not the way forward. “Best and worst” practices? Both are commonly context and culture dependant. Instead, your (multidisciplinary) team needs to agree on and understand your desired future state and where you are now. By starting with the end in mind you will be able to collectively determine what processes, tools and methods to use to get to that place.

The philosophical approaches that I have described in this article are just the tip of the iceberg in relation to the work that I have been doing with Andrew Woodward, Dux Sy and Ruven Gotz for the planned “Governance Mentoring Workshop”, to run for 3 days prior to the August Best Practices Conference. This workshop will be unlike any other SharePoint governance training that is currently in existence and much of the material is completely original and not borrowed from any of the traditional SharePoint governance material that exists today.

Finally, to go back to infomercial mode…

This offer is for a limited time only. Act now! If you’re not completely satisfied, we offer a full “return to base” warranty

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This offer is strictly limited!

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Pick up the phone and take the first step toward the new life that is waiting for you!

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Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

                      

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I listened to Steve Smith talk about user engagement on the SharePoint Pod Show today and found myself nodding in strong agreement with many points that he made. So while in that mood of stakeholder engagement and how to achieve it, twitter made me aware of a really terrific Debategraph map on the topic of “Core Principles of Public Engagements” and think it is mandatory learning material for any SharePoint architect/collaboration consultant/business analyst/business improvement specialists/<insert title here>.

The map above, came from a collaborative effort called the “Public Engagement Principals Project”. This is a recent project (February 2009) and the aim was to “create clarity in our field about what we consider to be the fundamental components of quality public engagement”. The outcome of this project are seven recommendations that reflect the common beliefs and understandings of those working in the fields of public engagement, conflict resolution, and collaboration.

1. Careful Planning and Preparation
Through adequate and inclusive planning, ensure that the design, organization, and convening of the process serve both a clearly defined purpose and the needs of the participants.

2. Inclusion and Demographic Diversity
Equitably incorporate diverse people, voices, ideas, and information to lay the groundwork for quality outcomes and democratic legitimacy.

3. Collaboration and Shared Purpose
Support and encourage participants, government and community institutions, and others to work together to advance the common good.

4. Openness and Learning
Help all involved listen to each other, explore new ideas unconstrained by predetermined outcomes, learn and apply information in ways that generate new options, and rigorously evaluate public engagement activities for effectiveness.

5. Transparency and Trust
Be clear and open about the process, and provide a public record of the organizers, sponsors, outcomes, and range of views and ideas expressed.

6. Impact and Action
Ensure each participatory effort has real potential to make a difference, and that participants are aware of that potential.

7. Sustained Engagement and Participatory Culture
Promote a culture of participation with programs and institutions that support ongoing quality public engagement.

Despite the fact this map is all about public engagement, this material is absolutely the best advice you could ever get for dealing with user engagement in your SharePoint endeavours. If you have any interest whatsoever in the mystical arts of getting true understanding and buy-in among your organisational stakeholder group, then this map (and its underlying documents), is for you.

Also, be sure to use the Debategraph toolbar to explore the detailed information in the root node. There is a lot of supplementary information in this map that you can easily access by clicking on the “Show detailed text and comments” icon (highlighted below).

If you are using the Seven Sigma Web Part for Debategraph, the Map ID is 16220 and you can incorporate this map into your broader governance site. I’ll be linking this map into my SharePoint governance map later as I think it complements, and expands upon the information contained there.

I think these seven principles make a terrific starting point for developing your own guiding principles around user-engagement as part of your governance efforts.

Finally, if you want more detailed information about how this map came to be, then consult the links below

• PDF Version – A downloadable version of the Core Principles document.
• List of Endorsers – Complete list of both organizational and individual endorsers.
• Expanded Core Principles Document – View the text of the complete document online.
• PEP Forum – This forum is where much of the conversation about this document took place.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

                      

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Hi

I have been very busy on a number of fronts – which is why the blog hasn’t had much attention lately. I’ll be back soon enough though – once I get a few big jobs done.

For those of you that are not aware, there is a podcast interview that I did with Brett Lonsdale at Sharepoint Pod Show where he allowed me to blab on and on and on and on Poor Brett – he didn’t know what he was getting himself into at all!

So if you think my posts are boring and wordy, wait till you hear me talk!

Paul

                      

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Hi all

If you were going to slot me into a little stereotype box, then you would slot me into the “IT pro” side of the fence. My coding is okay, but my real vein of expertise lay in infrastructure and over my career, I developed what I think is a reasonable troubleshooting instinct.

I’ve also worked with developers for the whole of my career and have the scars to prove it. The thing about developers is that they have this in-built reflex that until yesterday I did not have a word for. Then it came to me.

All developers have a little Russell Crowe inside of them!

Why do I think this? Am I suggesting that developers are handsome, rugged types who melt your heart with their piercing eyes?  Oh, please. Allow me to explain with a simple mythical conversation with Mr Crowe. Let’s pretend you are a movie director.

You: “Hey Russell, we need to do another take, your dialogue wasn’t quite right.”

Russell: “Yes it was.”

You: “No seriously, I think if you had a look you’ll find that you missed a word or two.”

Russell: “Completely impossible. You are obviously an amateur and have no idea about acting.”

You: “I’ve directed twenty films and…”

BAM!!!  (Flying telephone hits you in the head at high speed, knocking you unconscious.)

Russell: (2 days later). Okay, so there was a minor issue with my dialogue, but the script was bad to begin with”

This exchange is somewhat representative of how programmers can occasionally be when it comes to troubleshooting. I remember one case where I was the “Cisco guy” who had problems with a developer who was so utterly fixated on “the network” being the cause of problems with his media streaming application. This created the classic “dev vs infrastructure guy” showdown, which we all know is usually won by the person whose home turf the battle is fought on. Therefore, the developer blaming “the network” and then going up against the “Cisco guy” is like Microsoft trying to win search market share off Google. The battle is so one sided it’s almost cruel to participate – but you feel it is your duty to put the little upstarts in their place anyway.

I have won the majority of such battles, not because I am any good, but because the developers have thrown the metaphorical phone at me before I’ve finished asking them if they would like a coffee. As a result of their inner Russell Crowe hurling the phone so quickly, their aim is way off, and the phone usually misses me, bounces off the wall and takes out their boss or some other authoritative figure.

So, they cop some heat and sulk in the corner for awhile, but do developers learn from this? Hell, no! The reason why this is so, is because little Russell doesn’t like to lose, and when he re-emerges, he causes temporary amnesia of all previous battles. Of course, his opponent remembers all, and the next battle is even more cruel that the previous one and the outcome is assured.

So, yesterday, my friend and colleague did his first “Russell Crowe” for some time. He hit a problem, and misinterpreted the cause and went down a path that led him to a very tunnel-vision view of what was wrong and what the solution was. He described the problem he was having to me and it didn’t feel “right”, but he was pretty insistent he was on the right path. So, I asked Twitter and got back a couple of suggestions and as soon as I put one to him… BAM!! Russell Crowe appeared and threw a phone at me.

“Well, they are obviously amateurs and haven’t a clue about the SharePoint SDK” was the gist of the response.

One of the respondents was Bjorn Furuknap, who I can assure you is *not* an amateur .

Anyway a few minutes later we found a different way to troubleshoot which pretty quickly pinpointed the problem. My colleague was very contrite and good natured about it as I teased him mercilessly. I later mentioned to Bjorn that I had just dodged a metaphorical flying phone and he said this wonderful quote which I think sums it up.

“Of course. He’s a developer. We’re all like that. It is always some else’s fault!”

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

                      

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