Stone Circles

Nynke June 5th, 2006

The more agile an organisation becomes,
the more emotionally intelligent the organisation becomes.
A bold statement.

As agile people we are in charge of ourselves and our own work and hold our selves responsible and accountable. We have energy, drive, ambition, excellent communication skills, trust in management is a core value for us, we can negotiate, are agile, we hunt together in in(ter)dependency, and we share code ownership — all desirable traits in all kinds of work, not only IT. These skills are all rooted in emotional intelligence. Team work, pair programming, developing self-responsibility, giving and receiving feedback, ongoing learning from mistakes, be they my own, yours, our teachers’ or our students’ mistakes, all of that requires recognizing a wide range of emotions, and balancing our acts regularly.

And just like in balancing calls for balance, the following is one of my personal checklists for after a consulting event. Feel free to shop for what might work for you (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License).

In this instance I am answering this particular set of questions after having participated in two assessments together with an esteemed other independent colleague.

The first assessement I was asked to facilitate the self-assessement part of a larger assessment of a part of an organization, and to help with the cultural stuff. The other assessments was reviewing three vendor products.

What follows is core, my self assessment after these two gigs, isomorphically in line with customer request. I am protecting my customer in this entry, so some of my answers the questions I ask myself are kinda short. I expanded a few of my answers to highlight the keys I required to ground the transformation I facilitated for myself.

Collaboration

• Did I initiate action when I believed that was called for? — Yes
• Did I share applicable knowledge and skills? — Yes, I shared good questions to ask, strategic insights in business reflections in the architectural domain, and emotional observables that jumped at me.
• Were decisions I made according to team purpose? — Yes, all the way back to information gathered in the first assessment
• Did I help others with their work? — Yes. And vv.
• Did I teach someone more about effective architecting by respectful osmosis? — Yes. My independent colleague can dream up round architectures on the spot for seeing in all directions and knows how to listen for that which is not being said. And I gave the head honcho a little red ridinghood counter spell.
• Did I enjoy other people’s successes? - Tremendously! It was wonderful to watch my colleagues fly. And I hope the whole team gets to enjoy some more flights.
• Did I accept other people’s limitations? - Ow, that’s a hard one. I tend to overestimate capabilities of others. And I did that again, to a certain extent. Over the whole, I accepted my client and customer not being as conscious of awarenesses enough to steer their time, energy, and actions for themselves, and run by political games in their very political environment, and also when seemingly giving only lip service to people being important. I assessed arcs and predicted some likely effects and actions, and brought my independent colleague up to speed on these insight three weeks before they actually played out. Then we both watched the patterns unfold without avoidance of our emotions, and with conguence. We used every emotion to unentangle ourselves and keep professionally clean. It was a wonder filled exercise.
• Did I appreciate the team and its individuals? - Yes, for as much they could allow themselves fluffy bunny stuff and did not avoid it.
• Did I respect individuality? - Yes, even cubic hidden opposition.
• Did I coach? - Yes, I coached my independent colleague and perhaps members of the team (if they choose to by reading my blog articles), in some professional architecture review ways, after having some embodied experiences with their ways. Things like assessment contract negotiations.

Learning

• Did I participate in exchanges and dialogs? - Yes.
• Did I give feedback after systemic observations? - Yes, you can read some of that in Walking Talk and Talking Walk, transparent measurements and curve fitting. The latter two are based on my own experience as well as on the systems diagrams my independent colleague and I made at the first assessment.
• Did I accept feedback? - I would have, had any been given. The involved managers are still to read the reports we made. We had a date set for a little retrospective. It got postponed for the manager was too busy. (see below for convergence).
• Did I learn from mistakes, whomever made them? - Yes.
• Did I reserve judgements in favor of exploration? - Definitely! Several times. And as a result my colleague possibly gets to open more doors for introducing agile development.
• Did I take enough time for reflection? - Initially not enough maybe. My intent was to enter the customer and client context without luggage or expectations, so as to assess current state of the organisation better. These people appear too busy buzzed bodies to me for effective steering. After the second assessment, my colleague and myself slowed them down, for replacing time with focus to include perceiving needs of self, life and other more before acting, and we gave explicit feedback as to that to the head honcho.
• Did I enjoy the whole adventure? - Overall yes, and I now feel ready to move on to A first serious assignment that gets me lost in the alpha quadrant (see more below).

Consulting

• Admitting deficiencies - Next time I can choose to focus more on slowing down the customer and client earlier. And on contract negotiation. One way to help people keep promises is by having them on paper. Managers in cowboy powerplay environments may benefit from such written down agreements for stabilization.
• Did I chart my own future, and allow myself to be led by my inner compass? - Yahoooo. Yes!!! I am happy with all the outcomes. My confidence and trust in my own inner core is growing rapidly for consulting and facilitation. Not for architecture reviews as such. I would be interested in consulting gigs supporting agile organisational development of review practices, and would have to participate in enough of assessments and reviews to have and extract embodied knowledge before designing any customized fitting solution in a context for particular purposes - Bridging by thought not what it seems?
• Did I ask for advice when I needed it? - Yes
• Did I accept help? - Yes
• Did I set high professional standards? - I believe so. I still do … Walking talk and talking walk.
• Did I care about the business? - Yes, enough to see in all directions, instead of what was (”nay”) said. Enough to take the risk of loosing my customer by asking additional questions, and to steadfastly maintain asking those questions that signalled they were reviewing the wrong abstraction dimensions to make grounded professional decisions.
• Did I transform my mistakes and learnings into action-able solutions that have proven themselves to work? - Yes, see my previous blog entries, like powerful presentations.
• Did I monitor my state and balance my act? - Yes, regularly.
• Did I get recognition for my work? - I don’t believe this customer actively includes and values emotional intelligence (yet). So with this customer I didn’t expect any, yet I got some from the head honcho. I am assuming that was authentic. I got a lot of recognition from my esteemed colleague.

Responsibility

• Did I share my opinions, or was I a mouse? - Yes, I did. Actually, that’s where a big part of my growth from this gig seems to come from. I stood my ground when I discerned wrong level of abstraction for best decisionmaking by head honcho’s.
• Was I articulate, and did I stand my ground when I believed that appropriate? - Yes.
• Did I do good work and did I help others do good work? - Yes.
• Did I make myself accountable for results? - Yes. Everybody got what they wanted for as far as that was possible, I think.
• Did I accept constructive criticism? - I would have, had I received any. Hmmm. I’m not sure, but avoidance seems to be happening a lot in this context. Criticism from my agile colleague was easy. We trust each other, so no challenge there. Just focused improvements of what it was we were doing.
• Did I respect boundaries? - Yes.
• Was I agile? - Yes, very.
• Do I know how my job (could) further(s) the (w)hole moving forward? - Yes, and if that happens I get paid for what I know best how to do and enjoy doing: use my emotional intelligence to solve some real problems.
• Did I manage stress effectively? - At the end of the second assessment, I had a graceful degradation for half a day. After 6 days of being flexibly agile and adapting to client vendor availabilities and busy buzzed schedules of our customer. I can forgive myself for that.
• Am I leveraging my success and professionality? - You bet ye! To the utmost. I am sharing my self assessment so others can learn from my mistakes too.

We can help our clients and customers better by explicitly expanding our fluffy bunny skills, and to share not only our code, but also our mistakes and how we learn from those. And by sharing these, we can learn from each other’s mistakes, so that our respective customers can also benefit from that sharing.

My personal transformation: The human relations dimension of facilitating productive work is more important today than it ever was before. The need for emotional intelligence is driven by changing natures of business and corporate structures, which increasingly requires people to be(come) more agile and professional. Making space for others isn’t always the way. And sometimes it is. What doesn’t work is denial and avoidance. Never. The effects always ripple back. And last but not least: I seem to be quite resonant with my business environment and expanding my horizons outside of IT. As a more aware and conscious person in comparison to many others, I can be an embodied reminder of awarenesses that others may prefer not to know about. People in reactive defensive states, and political power players may actually want to “delete me”.

As long as I keep daring to take risks while I consciously know that I may get such reactions to my not only thoughtwise but also emotionally intelligent presence, I am responsible and accountable for my own work, and I am Okay.

agile, checklist, emotional intelligence, fluffy bunny

• people & systems