Coaching

Local Change – What and Why

Coaching, Change Harvesting / / 4 minutes of reading

The change-harvester uses these five words to describe the properties of successful change: human, local, oriented, taken, and iterative. Let’s talk about “local”. See the previous post “Human Change” here These muses turn in to blogs + podcasts, and you can subscribe to them at geepawhill.org .) When we say we want our changes to be local, we’re talking about neighborhood, some rough concept of nearness, in multiple dimensions. We want a proposed change to be “within reach”. Remembering humanness, […]

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Human Change – What and Why

Coaching, Change Harvesting / / 6 minutes of reading

Today, let’s talk about the change-harvesters use of the concept-cluster we describe with the adjective "human". We advocate that both the what and the how are best centered around the humans in our systems. The change-harvester looks at changes — in code, in individuals, in teams, in process & flows, in organizations — and sees that ,successfully applied change is human, local, oriented, taken, and iterative, often enough to adopt it as a general approach. So let’s do “human”. The

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My Direction Forward

Coaching, Change Harvesting / / 4 minutes of reading

Here’s a thing that happens: "We tried your advice by not trying your advice except partly where we did what we want but gave it your labels and it didn’t work and therefore you are wrong." Now, if you’ve given that advice for many years, and followed it in your own endeavors, and you, your teams, and many others have succeeded with it, what are you to make of such a statement? Well. Let’s not hedge, the world has too

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If All You Have is a Hammer

CCS, Coaching, Geekery / / 7 minutes of reading

“If all you have is a hammer, all you will see is a nail.” This is a pretty well-known saying, and it’s also an introduction to the ideas of frame, worldview, and culture. (The saying is usually attributed to Abraham Maslow, so often it’s sometimes called Maslow’s Hammer. As far as we can make out, though, he never said it in quite that many words.) But wait, why even talk about this? I mean, what does this have to do

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RAMPS – S is for Safety

Coaching, RAMPS / / 4 minutes of reading
This entry is part [part not set] of 15 in the series RAMPS

Safety — the sense of being valued and accepted, of belonging — is a powerful motivator for many individuals. A lack of safety often seems like a simple switch, instantly shutting down talented and capable people. (This topic of safety is a minefield right now. The absence of a safe place to stand today seems, paradoxically, to shape all our discourse into a "calm-to-rage in sixty seconds". Please to make allowances, and if you can’t, then at least a ticking

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RAMPS – Ways to Affect Purpose

Coaching, RAMPS, Change / / 7 minutes of reading

RAMPS: Affecting Purpose Raising a sense of purpose — service to a "greater" — in someone who’s sensitive to it, involves offering purposes and then connecting to them. I try not to frame these muses as mere critique. This one’s hard for me to pull off. Clumsy ham-handed misleading efforts at motivating people via purpose are the norm, not the exception, and I’ll give it to you straight up: one gets a little pissy about it after a while. 🙂

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RAMPS – Purpose is Service to a Greater

Change, Coaching, Sociotechnical / / 5 minutes of reading
This entry is part [part not set] of 15 in the series RAMPS

RAMPS: P is for Purpose, the sense one is serving a valued "greater". Those who rate this band of the motivational spectrum highly can be go-to workhorses, but only if we keep them connected to their valued greater. If rhythm is largely focused on the distribution of "feels good" through one’s working life, purpose works to carry us through the "feels bad" part of it, by transforming the local discomfort into an instrument for the higher goal. Have you ever

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RAMPS – Ways To Affect Mastery

Change, Coaching, Sociotechnical / / 7 minutes of reading
This entry is part [part not set] of 15 in the series RAMPS

RAMPS: Affecting mastery, the sense an individual has that she is growing in a way she values, means first jiggling our ideas about efficiency & relevance in work, then jumping in to the opportunities that jiggling will reveal. We talked about the widespread pernicious conceptual cluster we call "finish-line efficiency": the idea that software development is basically a race, w/a start, a well-marked track, and a precise finish line some distance away. Overturning this is central to engaging mastery. I’m

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RAMPS – Mastery is Opportunity to Grow

Change, Coaching, Sociotechnical / / 5 minutes of reading
This entry is part [part not set] of 15 in the series RAMPS

RAMPS: M is for Mastery, the sense that my work is actively helping me grow, along some dimension I value. When my motivational spectrum calls for a high degree of mastery, I do my best work when it is just a little over my head. People sometimes confuse the drive for mastery with a drive to know everything. But it’s not the knowing, per se. It’s not catching the skill, it’s chasing the skill. My own spectrum rates mastery the

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RAMPS – Ways to Affect Autonomy

Coaching, Sociotechnical, Change / / 7 minutes of reading
This entry is part [part not set] of 15 in the series RAMPS

Autonomy is the sense of free motion in a team. I adjust the levels of this by expressing important needs as problems, letting go of unimportant needs, and managing risk by a combination of acceptance, next-stepping, and iteration. The more we need creative technical work, the more we have to concern ourselves with providing the humans who do it the adequate autonomy to do it well. Machines can’t give us what we need, and the extent we build machine-like things

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