Bay Area Agile Leadership Network

You are in the right place if you are responsible for bringing a group of people together to collaborate and be productive - ideally in a way that everybody enjoys and is engaged. Your role might come with a job title like Agile Coach, Scrum Master, team lead, release train engineer, portfolio manager, or product owner. And the people you are leading probably did not choose each other. And now it’s crunchy, stressful and you have to work way too hard to get anything done. You dread showing up for work in the morning.

• Maybe there is someone who drives everybody crazy
• The team has polarized into factions around a key decision
• Teams find themselves in competition with each other and are as uncooperative as they can get away with before getting called out
• People triangulate through side conversations about important issues
• People find more and more evidence why they can’t trust each other

You’ve probably tried a few things already: Having 1:1 conversations, making team agreements, bringing awareness to the situation in retrospectives, and getting other managers involved. And things might have improved for a little while only to devolve into the painful status quo again.

We often focus on a few key relationships to bring about a shift. When that works we count our blessings and move on to the next thing. When it does not bring about a lasting shift, we need to expand our gaze. Who else affects the situation? What has happened in the past? What uncomfortable truth needs to be acknowledged?

Here our analytical mind and ideas of causation are quickly at a loss. The things we consciously pay attention to in our everyday life do not add up or show us a clear path forward. Groups have something akin to their own nervous system that influences the experiences of individuals in often unexpected ways. We cannot think our way to understanding it. We need to sense it.

Our bodies provide basic information about who to trust, get closer to or move away from, who to turn to, and other basic relational sensations. In Systemic Constellations we leverage strangers to share as neutral reporters what it is like to be in a relationship in a particular situation. The observations lead to surprising discoveries that reveal new coherent perspectives.

What to expect:

• We will start with introductions and meeting the other participants
• I'll introduce myself and the Systemic Coaching approach
• We'll explore the case study of a real world situation that any one of the participants can bring to the group
• We'll explore the situation in an experiential exercise that provides a roadmap for the person who offered the case study for who to approach, their key concerns and the acknowledgements that create more openness and a path forward.

This is a highly participatory session. Everybody is expected to be present with their video on and access to Google docs from a computer. Dialing in from a tablet or phone will not allow you to participate.

This is a good fit for you if

• You have experience meditating and quieting your mind
• You are into embodiment practices like QiGong, yoga, martial arts, etc. sensing into an expanded world of energy and flow around us
• You are into team sports where non-verbal communication is key to finding flow together
• You have played in a band or musical group
• And you are open to practical experiences that our western scientific models can't explain yet

In his work on high-risk, highly complex fields, Dr. Ron Westrum noted that culture influences how information flows through an organization. In a high-trust, generative culture, information has three characteristics:

1. It provides answers to the questions that the receiver needs answered.
2. It is timely.
3. It is presented in such a way that the receiver can use it effectively.

The connections between Westrum’s generative culture and the development of high-performing technology organizations have been well documented. What is less clear, however, is how to foster this type of culture.

This session presents three heuristics you can use to improve the flow of information in your interpersonal interactions. It explores means for gauging how the dialog is going so that you can make adjustments in the moment and how to reflect on these exchanges to make them better in the future. These tools are packaged in three simple acronyms to help you remember these techniques in the face of stress, anxiety, and surprises.