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

Hi all

I am finding it increasingly difficult to find the time to post at the moment. Too many projects, too many initiatives and too many evil plans coming to fruition. It’s like every seed I planted last year suddenly sprouted this year and I can barely keep up. Whilst this is a good thing for a growing business, it is not a good thing when it comes to writing blog posts.

In April I’ll be jumping on a very long flight to London, to attend and speak at the SharePoint Evolutions conference, held at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre.

This conference represents the evolution of the Best Practice conferences held over the last three years or so. It is one of the most unique and important SharePoint conferences of the year. SharePoint 2010 will be a key focus, yet unlike say a Tech-Ed, many of the topics have a heavy focus on the strategic side of the SharePoint challenge, in areas like Information Architecture, User Engagement and Planning and Deployment. There are five tracks in all, and over seventy speakers from all over the world.

• For the techie geeks who like to hang in datacenters and like to get paged late at night to fix things that have died, the IT Pro track (ITP) will push their buttons. ITP sessions will focus on topics such as Document Management, Database Sizing, SharePoint and SQL optimization or server farm deployments scenarios.
• For the developers and designers of the world, the DEV track is for you. DEV sessions will focus on topics in the areas of customization, development, and deployment best practices.
• For all of the cool people, we have the information worker track where I speak (IW). In fact the IW track is so damn cool that there are two IW tracks! Sessions here will focus around business strategy and adoption, information architecture, training your organization or developing a culture of collaboration.
• For the tech geeks who can code, who are therefore more elite than regular tech geeks and devs (looking at you Spence), there is a deep dive track to make you happy called level 400. In this track there will be IT Pro and Developer sessions that will be deep diving into the product and code. There will be very few slides, lots of source code and demonstrations.
• Finally, there is a community track. This track has sessions for all verticals and will include speakers from all types of companies who have implemented SharePoint and what they learnt by doing so. All speakers are actively engaged in the SharePoint community and user group and have a wealth of knowledge to share.

This conference is organised by Steve Smith of Combined Knowledge, who is renowned for putting together something special for all participants. The speaker list is pretty much a who’s-who of the SharePoint world, and I am very much looking forward to catching up with (Paul takes deep breath) Andrew Woodward, Ben Curry, Brett Lonsdale, Chandima Kulathilake, Dux Sy, Joel Oleson, Laura Rogers, Michel Noel, Mike Watson and Zlatan Dzinic to name a few.

Bob Fox will also be there, so we finally have that beer that apparently I am supposed to buy – according to Bob anyway .

So if you are going to attend a SharePoint conference this year, then my strong suggestion is to make it this one.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

No Tags

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

No Tags

Note: For those of you who do not wish to read my usual verbose writing, then skip to the last section where there is a free web part to download and try out.

Unless you are a complete SharePoint nerd and world events don’t interest you while you spend your hours in a darkened room playing with the SP2010 beta, you would no doubt be aware that one of the most significant collaborative events in the world is currently taking place.

The United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen this month is one of the most important world gatherings of our time. You might wonder why, as a SharePoint centric blog, I am writing about this. The simple answer is that this conference in which the world will come together to negotiate and agree on one of the toughest wicked problems of our time. How to tackle international climate change in a coordinated global way. As I write this, things do not seem to be going so well .

Climate change cuts to the heart of the wellbeing expected by every one of us. Whether you live in an affluent country or a developing nation, the stakes are high and the issues at hand are incredibly complex and tightly intertwined. It might all seem far away and out of sight/out of mind, but it is clear that we will all be affected by the outcomes for better and worse. The spectre of the diminishing window of opportunity to deal with this issue means that an unprecedented scale of international cooperation will be required to produce an outcome that can satisfy all stakeholders in an environmentally, economically and social bottom line.

Can it be done? For readers who are practitioners of SharePoint solutions, you should have an appreciation of the difficulty that a supposedly “collaborative tool” actually is to improve collaboration. Therefore, I want you to imagine your most difficult, dysfunctional project that you have ever encountered and just try and now multiply it by a million, gazzilion times. If there are ever lessons to be learned about effective collaboration among a large, diverse group on a hugely difficult issue, then surely it is this issue and this event.

Our contribution

My colleagues and I became interested in sense-making and collaboration on wicked problems some time back, and through the craft of Dialogue Mapping, we have had the opportunity to help diverse groups successfully work through some very challenging local issues. I need to make it clear that much of what we do in this area is far beyond SharePoint in terms of project difficulty, and in fact we often deal with non IT projects and problems that have significant social complexity.

Working with people like city planners, organisational psychologists, environmental scientists and community leaders to name a few, has rubbed off on myself and my colleagues. Through the sense-making process that we practice with these groups, we have started to see a glimpse of the world through their eyes. For me in particular, it has challenged my values, social conscience and changed the entire trajectory of where I thought my career would go. I feel that the experience has made me a much better practitioner of collaborative tools like SharePoint and I am a textbook case of the the notion that the key to improving in your own discipline, is to learn from people outside of it.

We have now become part of a global sense-making community, much like the global SharePoint community in a way. A group of diverse people that come together via common interest. To that end, my colleague at Seven Sigma, Chris Tomich has embarked on a wonderful initiative that I hope you may find of interest. He has enlisted the help of several world renowned sense-makers, such as Jeff Conklin of Cognexus and David Price of Debategraph, and created a site, http://www.copenhagensummitmap.org/, where we will attempt to create a global issue map of the various sessions and talks at the Copenhagen summit. The aim of this exercise is to try and help interested people cut through the fog of issues and understand the points of view of the participants. We are utilising IBIS, the grammar behind dialogue mapping, and the DebateGraph tool for the shared display.

How you can help

If you feel that issue mapping is for you, then I encourage you to sign up to Debategraph and help contribute to the Copenhagen debate by mapping the dialogue of the online sessions (which you can view from the site).

Otherwise, Chris has written a simple, free web part, specifically for Copenhagen which can be downloaded “Mapping tools” section of the Copenhagen site. The idea is that if you or your organisation wish to keep up with the latest information from the conference, then installing this web part onto your site, will allow all of your staff to see the Copenhagen debate unfold live via your SharePoint portal. Given that SharePoint is particularly powerful at surfacing data for business intelligence, think of this web part as a means to display global intelligence (or lack thereof, depending on your political view ).

Installing is the usual process for a SharePoint solution file. Add the solution to central admin, deploy it to your web application of choice and then activate the site collection scoped feature called “Seven Sigma Debategraph Components”. The web part will be then available to add to a page layout or web part page.

The properties of this web part allow you some fine grained control over how the Debategraph map renders inside SharePoint. The default is to show the Debategraph stream view, which is a twitter style view of the recent updates as shown in the example below.

Stream view is not the only view available. Detail view is also very useful for rationale that has supplementary information, as shown in the example below.

By the way, you can use this web part to display any Debategraph debate – not just Copenhagen. The Debategraph map to display is also controlled via the web part properties.

For information on how to change the default map, then check out this webcast I recorded for the previous version here.

I hope that some of you find this web part of use and look forward to any feedback.

Kind regards

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

No Tags

Okay I’ll admit it, I used to really suck as a time and effort estimator. I happen to have a business partner who is much better at it than me (hey Peter), and every time I sought a second opinion from him on my estimates, he would almost always make a much less optimistic assessment then me. Of course, Peter was almost always right too, dammit.

So, why was Peter much more accurate with his estimates?

The answer to this question, all one has to do is think back to their teenage years, where they went through that awkward stage where you look back and cringe at the posters that were on your wall and your choice of fashion. For many, this period demonstrates some utterly appalling choices of taste. Mine are particularly cringe-worthy, given that these days I am a bit of a metalhead. My favourite song at the time was Respectable by Mel and Kim. I thought that Karate Kid II was the best film of all time (and that the girl in it was hot). Mind you, my wife has an even more shameful secret. She had a crush on Jean Claude Van Damme! Mwahahahah

These are examples of a phenomenon I like to call “Teenybopper bias”

Now, there is a point in telling you about my wife’s secret shame and it isn’t to see her reaction when she reads this (okay, well maybe a teenie bit). These examples of “what the hell was I thinking” are a form of cognitive bias that took place at the time the opinion was formed. In terms of teenybopper bias, the root of the bias is likely the same hormones that caused your face to break out with acne and hair to grow in funny places. Another very common cognitive bias that afflicts people whether young or old is good old “beer goggle” bias illustrated below.

There are many, many forms of cognitive bias documented, such as optimism bias, anchoring, hindsight bias and the recency effect to name a few. Now let’s take the final image above and pretend we asked someone at the pub for an estimate on a project at 8pm, 10pm and 1am. I’d be willing to bet that the estimate gets more optimistic on a par with how optimistic the perception of the people in the image above become.

Overcoming cognitive bias

Kailash writes about the risk that cognitive bias can play in project failure, particularly in the perception of risks.

overcoming biases requires an understanding of the thought processes through which humans make decisions in the face of uncertainty.  Of particular interest is  the role of  intuition and rational thought in forming judgements, and the common mechanisms that underlie judgement-related cognitive biases.   A knowledge and awareness of these mechanisms  might help project managers in consciously countering the operation of cognitive biases in their own decision making. 

The essential difference between Peter and myself in our estimating, is that Peter happens to have a much more finely tuned radar to optimism bias in particular. Douglas Hubbard of Applied Information Economics fame, writes about the effect of cognitive bias extensively in his two books and offers a simple, yet highly useful method to quickly improve the quality of estimates which I will explain with an example below.

The great thing about learning about your cognitive biases and the methods for mitigating them, is that you can use it in the pub too. While I don’t recommend this method for picking up members of the opposite sex, it’s a pretty cool icebreaker.

Thus, I will demonstrate how to improve your estimating accuracy by a mythical pub conversation. Imagine you are onto your third beer…

• Me: “How many SharePoint developers worldwide own a yellow car?
• Them: “What the…I haven’t the faintest idea!”
• Me: “Well, I can understand that, so let’s do an estimate. Give me a range that the answer could fall in, that you are 90% confident with.”
• Them: "I still can’t give you an estimate, I can’t possibly know something like that.”
• Me: “Well, could there be a million SharePoint developers who like yellow cars?”
• "Them: “Don’t be ridiculous, there would be nowhere near a million SharePoint developers – period."
• Me: “So you do have an upper bound then, less than a million. Remember this is not about the exact answer, I want a range that you would be 90% confident with.”
• Them: “Okay I get it. I think it is somewhere between three hundred and two thousand.

Note that at this point, we have already made the initial breakthrough. At first the person found it impossible to make an estimate, yet when I related it to something they did have a fair idea of (the thought of a million people), they made some mental associations and realised they did have some idea of limits after all. Thus, by presenting a better frame of reference that they could use to approach the problem, they were able to move from “I have no idea” to a wide range of possible values.

The width of the range reflects the uncertainty that someone has about the answer. The more the uncertainty, the wider the range. Some project mangers hate being given a ranged value because it really mucks up their task or project work breakdowns. As a result, they always want the “ball park” or something that is a single value. I completely understand why this happens, but what these people forget is that an estimation is uncertain by definition. The obvious way to express uncertainty is with a range of values! So asking someone for an estimation and then complaining that it is not accurate enough actually makes no sense. A manager might not like the “width” of the range, but you can’t force someone to reduce their uncertainty just because it doesn’t fit the plan. Unless you provide them with the means to reduce this uncertainty, you cannot and should not try and artificially reduce this range through pressure and coercion.

But despite my observation of the flawed logic of dealing with uncertainty in estimating, a ranged estimate alone is not enough yet. We still have not accounted for the sorts of cognitive bias that I described earlier in the article. So without further adieu, I present a simplified version of Hubbards ‘calibration’ techniques that account for bias. Let’s continue the bar conversation.

• Me: Okay, so you are 90% sure that here are between 300 and 2000 SharePoint developers in the world with a yellow car?
• Them: Yes
• Me: So, let’s make this like the game show “deal or no deal”. If you are right and the answer is within your range, you will win $10000. BUT you have an alternative…
• Them: Ok…
• Me: What if I were to present you with a bag containing 9 red marbles and 1 black marble and offer you $10000 if you pull out a red marble. Pull the one black marble, and you miss out on the money. Do you want to stick to your estimate or do you want to draw a marble?

I’d like readers to think about this before continuing with this article. Make a ranged estimate of the number of SharePoint developers worldwide who drive a yellow car, and then decide whether you want to stick to your estimate or take your chances with the marbles.

(Cue game show music where you have 10 seconds to decide with a little ping sound at the end.)

The suspense is now killing you I am sure. Want to know the correct answer?

Find out after this short commercial break (game show speak for wait till part 2 of this series )

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

No Tags

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

No Tags

Hi

I attended and spoke at the Perth Business Analyst World Conference this week and really enjoyed it. This was a bit of a departure from the SharePoint events that I normally frequent, and I really didn’t know what to expect. Certainly, not having to fly 30+ hours just to speak is a big plus The recommendation to the organisers to consider me, came about via Craig Brown, who has a very popular project management blog that I follow. Thanks so much Craig, I owe you a beer when I am in Melbourne next.

The conference report…

My talk was actually *not* about SharePoint and instead I was able to focus on more of my material on wicked problems, the shared understanding/shared commitment principle and then, the sense-making tools and techniques that I use to help bring this about. I was also able to demo the fruits of a very exciting, non IT project that I have been working on for a long time (more on that in a future post).

Despite my “This ain’t my normal crowd” trepidations, the feedback was great and the best thing to hear from participants, was that for many, it was stuff they have never heard before. That, for me, was really satisfying because I like the notion of presenting new ideas that actually have some decent practical examples to back them up. (This is something Andrew Woodward and I have in common. We love academic rigor for what we use, but it has to have been used in the real world with tangible success). Although I know that some people will disagree with the methods that myself and my colleagues use, I was able to demonstrate what I think is some pretty compelling case studies that support them.

What was interesting though, was that the examples and case studies were able to support what a lot of the other presenters had to say as well.

Ann Smith of Black Circle for example, had a great talk that was essentially about human cognition; essentially the wiring in our brains that serve to explain why big, fat documents are often not good ways to convey information. (Being a practicing dialogue mapper, no arguments from me there!) I am a nerd for this sort of stuff, having written previously on behavioural styles, learning styles and organisational culture, and Anne offered some new, interesting things that I have previously not considered or covered – more blog fodder for CleverWorkarounds, methinks.

Another highlight,the Western Power Business Transformation project, presented by Lorraine Pestell was also fascinating (I have a weakness for voice of the customer type sessions and this was no exception). Many of the strategic challenges that they are facing, such as sustainability and the changing business/regulatory environment, is very similar to the work I am doing elsewhere and it was great to see how Lorraine and her team were approaching the challenge and has given me some ideas and approaches to take back with me to my clients and projects.

The BA identity crisis

But back to the question suggested by the title of this post. There were some panel and round-table sessions about the topics of what actually *is* a BA, how you validate or recognise BA excellence, and the perennial BA versus PM turf-war debate.

Up until this time, I had actually never considered myself a BA because I had never actually given it any thought! As a self employed consultant, the only thing that matters is doing a good enough job to keep people wanting you to come back. So to that end, I didn’t worry so much about what I was called, provided that my clients were happy and the invoice was paid. But even if I wasn’t a consultant, I think that role titles often do not reflect reality and they also have a pigeonholing effect, depending on the attitudes and perceptions of what others think that role entails. Many position titles were discussed, “Solutions Architect”, “Business Architect”, “Change Manager” and some that were so pretentious that they bordered on wanky. More fancy words with no more clarity. No wonder many BA’s are struggling a bit for a sense of identity.

What I noticed when talking to the conference participants was that some attendees spoke from a lens where they seemed to feel that it was incumbent on them to provide a “translator” role between IT and “the business”. After all, nerds and CFO’s can’t communicate right? Enter the BA to ask questions and solve problems.

I have no major objection to that notion at some levels, but it is that *precise* mindset that makes me think “Well, I am definitely not a BA.”

Why? It was the notion that this “translation” was based on being the go-between from IT and the business. Thus, taking what one party says, transforming it and then passing it to the other party. As a result, BA’s are acting as a listener and interpreter, yet relaying second hand messages (messages that may be very different originally) between parties.

I personally balk at this. In fact, it really grates on me. By that definition, I don’t think I am a BA at all.

Interestingly, other topics of conversations were around “Well, how does a BA fit into Agile?”, “Is there a place for the BA in an Agile world”, and the like. What was interesting, and somewhat concerning, about these conversations was that those BAs who tended to think of themselves in terms of this “translation” role, really did not have a great grasp on the underlying principles of what we now call “Agile”.

Although Agile means a lot of different things and there are different sub-methods applied, these BAs got all focussed on the processes of Agile. They overlooked the fact that the process is actually the means to an end and it is the end-game that they have overlooked. Agile, (okay well Scrum anyway) attempts to use process and rigour (yes, rigour!) to make a project as conducive to shared understanding as possible. Probably the best thing that Agile does, above all else, is put diverse people in the same room. That alone will make bigger understanding breakthroughs than anything else!

Business Analyst KPI – shared understanding?

So, why am I not a BA?

My methods for translating are fundamentally inclusive. In other words, I do not “translate” anything, “take” it to another party and “relay” through my own words (and lens). I feel that despite all best intentions and whatever diagramming or modelling tool that you use, when you do this, you will always still find that you have your own cognitive biases that will not necessarily deliver the shared understanding that you think you are delivering. Instead, what I do is provide a rich container for a group to explore an issue together. In the same way that Agile tends to like all project members and stakeholders to be in the same room, Dialogue Mapping puts everyone in the same room and provides a suitable container for handling dialogue in a much better manner than traditional meetings and workshops.

If you agree with my previous assertions that a lot of the visible causes of project failure (scope creep, vague requirements, etc) comes from a lack of shared understanding among participants, and that BAs identify themselves as the bridge between IT and “the business” (which by the way is an insultingly gross simplification), then isn’t the ultimate KPI for the BA is to create and maintain that shared understanding? If not, yours is just another opinion that is counted no more or less than anybody else’s. Are you signal or noise?

So, in my humble opinion, the role of the BA is not to be the go-between from disparate stakeholders. Instead, it is your ability to create the sort of conducive holding environment that enables project participants to achieving shared understanding. How you do that is completely up to you of course, and if you have managed to progress a group from an agreed undesirable present state to a desirable future state, then your methods are totally validated.

Get over titles…

Now, if you call yourself a BA and think I am picking on you because you feel that you are the translator, don’t feel bad because plenty of PMs are guilty in their way too. In some ways, I feel that business analysts only exist as a career because enough people with the “Project Manager” title thought that time and budget alone were the only factors in project success. Some PMs who disagreed with this, felt that solving the problem was also critical, gravitated to the discipline of what we now label as “Business Analyst”. Some application developers that felt there was more to life than cutting code and made a similar gravitation. Put a bunch of like-minded people together and soon enough we have a “cool kids” club and lo’ and behold, we have a new discipline with a new set of titles.

(“Information architect” is a more recent example of this phenomenon than “Business Analyst”).

But, let me tell you something else about this title misconception. For a BA to label all PMs as interested only in time and budget is an insult to those PMs who actually understand that achieving and maintaining shared understanding is the end-game. The truly great project managers who I have had the pleasure of working with were actually leaders, not managers. They have all of the same characteristics of what makes a truly good business analyst: Critical thinking, soft-skills and most of all, a great radar for determining when stakeholders are not aligned and doing what is necessary to rectify the situation. They do not always dive into process and structure because their particular body of knowledge told them to. Instead, they have coffees, drink beer, conduct lunch-time workshops with free food and beverages, mediate, essentially whatever is needed to oil the cogs of dialogue that prevents something small becoming something nasty later.

By the way, I have met some angel application developers like this too, as well as infrastructure people.

If you want proof of a truly great project manager, then Kailash Awati’s wonderful site should be mandatory reading for both the BA and PM disciplines (and scrum masters too for that matter!). Kailash writes what essentially is a project management blog, but he has a deeper understanding of the sorts of soft factors that would put many BAs and some facilitators to shame.

Conclusion

In my talk at the conference, I emphasised that the ultimate success factor in any project is bringing about shared commitment through shared understanding among the participants. I believe that achieving these goals is the ultimate KPI for a BA, or anybody else who feels that they are there to help solve a problem, not deliver a crap solution that happens to be on time and on budget.

Thus, any method that helps a group achieve this is a good method because it has made a positive difference in advancing a group from understood present state to an understood desirable future state.

So, perhaps I am, after all, a BA?

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

No Tags

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

No Tags

Hi all

Just a quick note to let you know that I will be speaking at the Perth leg of the BusinessAnalystWorld conference this week. My topic is called “IBIS: The one best practice for managing wicked problems" and I will be talking about the characteristics of wicked problems and how IBIS and Issue Mapping can help to manage them. I will also cover off some other sense-making tools in this talk like debategraph.

The BA World conference is the only one of its kind in Australia and will cover all sorts of interesting topics such as requirements elicitation, change management, business process modelling, Agile, stakeholder management and BABOK. The theme for the event is “Work Smarter. Plan Harder” and will allow BA leaders to ensure that projects are clearly defined and flawlessly executed, enabling them to make the right decisions at every level in the organisation and increase project success.

I am really looking forward to participating and it will be interesting to see what sort of feedback I get from a non SharePoint audience. As you may have gathered, this is not a SharePoint event and although I will still be talking about SharePoint as a collaborative platform to support working smarter, the main focus is on the power of IBIS and issue Mapping to help elicit real and tacit requirements and fast-track the path to shared understanding.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

No Tags

Hiya

For those who do not regularly read CleverworkArounds, I have a bit of a split career-personality where half my working life is spent as a SharePoint practitioner and the other half as a sort of facilitator, based around the craft of dialogue mapping. This series of articles will delve a little deeper into dialogue mapping and how I have used it.

I previously introduced the topic of IBIS and Issue Mapping to a SharePoint audience in the “One best practice” series of posts. That series of posts focussed on the issue mapping side of things because it dissected a debate that had already taken place (Joel’s ‘Just say “no” to site definitions’). While this is an effective demonstration of the way that IBIS can break down a seemingly complex argument into more easily digested chunks, I never really wrote about the craft of dialogue mapping, which is a much more difficult, mentally exhausting, yet ultimately fulfilling practice.

Now I have to tell you, as an IT consultant who has managed to not get *too* messed-up over the last 20 years, I don’t get too intimidated with IT these days. But first time dialogue mapping for a group of stakeholders on a non IT project, where I had no buy in to that project, and my sole purpose was to craft a good issue map to help them work through their complex issue, I was so nervous that I couldn’t sleep the night before.

So first up, let’s clear up the terms I using so that we are all on the same page.

• IBIS: The grammar that is used to create an issue map. When I talk about issues, ideas, pros and cons, I am describing the elements of IBIS grammar. You can read about this elsewhere on my blog, my mentor, Jeff Conklin or the amazing work by Kailash Awati.
• Issue mapping: The craft of creating an map based on IBIS notation. Some examples are in this article.
• Dialogue Mapping: The facilitation process where a facilitator works with a group to create an issue map and translate discussion into Issue Maps.

Why dialogue mapping?

If you have ever uttered the cliché “They don’t know what they want”, then you have your answer. Many problems are rather difficult to define and pin down because, even to define them, requires you to think about possible solutions to the problem. Based on our experience, values (and DNA), we will form our own interpretations of the problem space and then spend considerable time “fumbling around” when working with the rest of the group to clearly articulate our understanding to others, only to find that our understanding is not universal. Disagreements, therefore, are inevitable and are amplified by the sheer number of stakeholders, the fluidity of the problem space and the constraints around the problem, such as a time deadline. This has a way of making life unpleasant and stressful; a situation nobody particularly enjoys.

People deal with this in different ways. For many, the natural reflex to this situation is avoidance – to try and return to the “business-as-usual” or status quo that existed before. True believers may don the boxing gloves and spar for a few rounds with other true believers. Some may become the ninja, invisible and striking silently. Either way, this sort of chaos that represents organisational pain is fairly familiar to most.

Now, there are many methods that you can use to remedy this situation. But for me, there are some key ingredients required for the really effective methods.

1. The method should not take you too far away from the problem space. So, for example, you are trying to grapple with a difficult organisational problem. You decide to adopt a methodology. Now you are focussing on learning the methodology, obsessing if you are doing it ‘right’ and then still trying to gain a shared understanding of the problem space.
2. The method should be simple enough that people do not have to be trained just to participate.
3. The method needs to be inclusive, and all voices (not just the metaphorical boxers) need to be heard
4. The method should be easy to adapt and grow as understanding of the problem changes over time.
5. Most importantly of all, the method needs to allow a group to start from what they know now. Half the battle with organisational chaos is the continual “going in circles” pain from feeling that all of the questions need to be answered now and if not, we are doing something wrong.

One of my clients recently summed it up well when he said to me “In dealing with complexity we persist in creating complex methods and wonder why its still complex.” – I found that very profound, but it might have been the beer I was drinking at the time.

Anyway, I digress. Below is an IBIS based issue map discussing Frodo’s dilemma. Note that I didn’t need to tell you how to read the map. it is inherently readable due to the symbolism in the nodes. This is the sort of output to expect from a dialogue mapping session in Middle Earth.

So, how would such a map be produced from a meeting or workshop?

Ideally the room would be set up as per the illustration below. This image below is from the Cognexus site, the home of Dialogue Mapping. Note how one person is sitting at a laptop, with a projected map behind them, facing the rest of the group. The rest of the group is interacting with the mapper and map, discussing arguments, asking for additions or modifications and building out a chain of logic around the problem space.

The facilitator is the key here. This person knows the IBIS grammar and is taking the group deliberations and translating it to the issue map in real-time. Using software and a projector, as opposed to flip charts, restructuring or refactoring the map live and on the fly is quick and painless. By using the IBIS grammar, the map is inherently readable and very clear, compared to a normal meeting where there is no tool to provide the sort of “holding environment” to allow people to keep collective focus and explore the different perspectives on the problem space.

This notion of the holding environment also is critically important. If you are lucky enough to work in a job you love, with a team you love, for a visionary CEO who you admire and respect, then that CEO has created the ultimate holding environment and you should consider yourself very lucky (and your CEO is worth all that money they earn). For the other 99.9% of us, we have to make do with what we have. The point here is that any tool or method you use needs to augment the understanding process, not complicate it. If it is over-complicated it will not improve understanding and the group will fall back to business-as-usual and participants will likely wind up resenting the method.

Consider dialogue mapping as a holding environment versus traditional meeting decorum. Inevitably, a group will start out with one question, and fairly quickly realise there are underlying or deeper questions that also need to be answered. In a regular meeting governed by a strict agenda and roles (as is recommended by many books and facilitators), problem exploration will be stifled. All too often, changes in understanding of the problem is seen as an unwanted tangent that derails the agenda of the meeting. In other words, the system works against the problem exploration space and that sort of meeting decorum is a poor option for this sort of exploration. Why did we invent such systems to keep meetings on track? Because meetings alone are a crappy container for problem exploration! However with the IBIS grammar and the shared space of the dialogue map, underlying questions can be captured and explored with an organised, evolving point of reference.

The shared space also has a positive effect on the decorum of exploring prickly issues. The group’s attention is now fixed on an evolving map on the wall. A skilled dialogue mapper can utilise IBIS grammar to take a lot of the heat out of argumentation and the process becomes more about building a chain of logic, than cheap point scoring. Typical meeting tactics like pulling rank or personal attacks thinly veiled as “questions” are easily dealt with by the dialogue mapper and never make it to the map in the form intended. The desire to pull back to business is usual is mitigated by the neutrality of the IBIS language and the improved quality of deliberation.

Perhaps the most important benefit of all, is the capture of rationale, or organisational memory. For me, this is precisely where my SharePoint world intersects with this craft because IBIS maps have for me been one of the best artefacts I have seen for the capture of implicit or tacit knowledge. These maps ultimately are an extremely rich exploration of a given problem and demonstrate very effectively, the circumstances and understanding of a problem at that point in time. With issue maps, gone are the days of looking at a process, policy or report years later and wondering “what the hell were they thinking?”.

So finally for part 1, let’s sum up by examining dialogue mapping in relation to my earlier criteria for the really effective methods of collaborating on difficult problems.

The method should not take you too far away from the problem space. So, for example, you are trying to grapple with a difficult organisational problem, so you decide to adopt a methodology. Now you are focussing on learning the methodology, obsessing if you are doing it ‘right’ and then still trying to gain a shared understanding of the problem space.

With Dialogue Mapping, only the mapper needs any training. All other participants do not need any previous IBIS or Issue Mapping experience. Participants do not need to wonder if they are doing it right, because just by articulating their opinion on issues, ideas and arguments, they are doing it right.

The method should be simple enough that people do not have to be trained just to participate.

Cut and paste my last answer. Aside from the mapper, all other participants do not need any previous IBIS or Issue Mapping experience. 

The method needs to be inclusive, and all voices (not just the metaphorical boxers) need to be heard

Two things that positively kill meetings is death by repetition and grenade lobbing. Death by repetition is when we tend to find a way to suggest our solution, no matter what question is asked. This behaviour has the opposite effect than intended on other participants. But once an idea is captured, it idea is visible along with all of the other ideas. If the repetition continues, all the dialogue mapper needs to do is ask the person if they have anything more to add to the map for that idea. This is surprisingly effective as the disruptive behaviour becomes very obvious to the serial repeater.

Grenade lobbing happens when someone challenges the whole context of the conversation in some way. When this is a dialogue mapped meeting or workshop, the map comes into its own. The dialogue mapper will capture the challenge as an issue and restructure the map to accommodate this issue. The previous disruptive power of the grenade lob is significantly mitigated and the map now has richer argumentation.

The method should be easy to adapt and grow as understanding of the problem changes over time.

IBIS is founded on the principle that problems and solutions are intertwined closely and that exploration of one will change the other in a cyclical fashion. As discussed, refactoring maps over time is critical to managing a problem that is a moving target. But also being able to save the state of understanding at a given point in time, and then being able to examine the evolution of that understanding and rationale (tacit knowledge) over time is capturing a snapshot of organisational memory. Even better, put that snapshot into SharePoint, classify it with metadata and now your collaborative portal includes findable, organised tacit knowledge!

Most importantly of all, the method needs to allow a group to start from what they know now.

The exploration of what we know now actually can offer a lot of clarity and insights when integrated into a coherent map. Instead of a long, laborious meeting where various people have lost the thread of the conversation, we have a point of reference on the wall. Furthermore, in breaking down the arguments into simple to follow IBIS structure, participants are better equipped to make the sort of connections between chains of logic to better understand the frame of reference of the other participants. The map is an output of this collective effort, which is visible and available for others to explore. Rather than starting out by trying to peel the onion of problems understanding in ever widening scope, we simply start. We put up a question on the map and attempt to answer it.

Conclusion

Hopefully, I have managed to convey a little of what the dialogue mapping experience looks like. In part 2, I will expand upon this topic and discuss my baptism of fire experience with dialogue mapping, the factors that have helped me improve my skills in it, as well as working with the master in action – Jeff Conklin

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

No Tags