What’s your superpower?

At JAFAC a few weeks ago one of the speakers Bron Thompson talked about using your superpower as your point of difference. Of course that meant I then had to identify what my superpower was.

Google helped with a few questions:

• What do you find natural /easy to ?
• What fills you with passion?
• What helps the time fly?
• What makes you different /werid?
• What would you do if money didn’t matter?

I can’t say that these questions really spelled it out, there was still a bit of soul searching required. I thought about what I described myself as. I always describe myself as a connector.

Others have also called me the glue and then last week I was asked to facilitate a kick off because I’m really good at bringing people along on the journey and involving them.

I have my superpower.

I create connections and inspire people to work together to achieve their goals.

What’s your superpower and how do you use it in your day to day life.

Building an agile team

Book Review – you can learn to remember by Dominic O’Brien

This book is about changing your thinking so that you can remember more.

My key takeaways were around the exercises to try including:

1. time travel – go back in time using a picture then push out to recall as much as you can around the picture.
2. draw the picture – look at an object for 5 mins, then turn away and draw it, then compare.
3. image of what to remember
4. Rule of 5 – repeat key points after an hour, a day later, a week later, 2 weeks later, a month later
5. peg board – group like items into a set of up to 10 and arrange them on a peg board format and assign each item a location.
6. journey system – preplanned mental route.
7. using emotion and all the senses. – Visualise through emtion.
8. Story telling – to remember a list of works add locations to link the words.

The book also suggested a way of summarizing books – each book should answer 3-5 questions you have.  summarize each of these and draw a mind map from a central image.

Summary – Attaching images to what we need to remember to specific places, such as the rooms of a house or the chairs around a table allows us to impose a logical structure on a group of items that may otherwise be unrelated.

Systems thinking thoughts

I didn’t get too many notes from the systems thinking book I recently reviewed except for the following.

Systems thinking is about Looking at the big picture and especially looking at the relationships between the components.  It’s about Understanding the underlying structure and the forces and relationships that shape the behaviours of the system.

To do this we need to Ask what if questions.  What if we changed this?, what if this happened?, what if this stopped? etc.

Relationships are everywhere and we need to be aware of them to understand their impact to changing something. Too often we treat the people in a system as a machine, we forget about the treating them as humans, building and developing the relationships.

I can’t remember where I read it to give credit, but I know a book talked about the Four horseman that end of relationships:

1. Criticism,
2. Contempt, unloved and unvalued.
3. Defensiveness feeling unfairly attacked. Coming up with excuses.
4. Stonewalling , shutting off from the other person.

The more I travel along my agile journey, the more I realize we need to be human centric, we need to care about the people and build them up. Because when our people are happy, supported and developed, they will be at their best and when they are at their best the whole system improves and everyone wins.

JAFAC September 2019

I attended JAFAC in Wellington in September 2019.

Here are my notes from the speakers.

Agile transformation roadblock – Next steps.

I went over some of my notes today and came across the information I had gathered when we first started our agile journey.

The workshop that was run looked at the following.

 

In addition we talked about quality, training, metrics and communications.

Going through this and also going to a mentoring session helped me get back to basics, to ensure I was always going back to the why of moving to agile. We want to delight our customers and deliver the right thing, which means we need to be assessing all that we are doing against those two criteria and determine how we can measure that along the way with lag or leading indicators.