Yes, we have snow. Like almost everybody else. The neighbors created an ice-skating track by flooding a small field. The ice is not perfect. But … it’s just perfect. People get together. The field of frozen water is just a good excuse to get out and have some fun.

It’s not that if there isn’t an ice-skating track you don’t meet. But this is just such a great opportunity. And a natural one. You don’t have to plan. You just go there. Show up. That’s it. The track is a catalyst for conversations.

Communities have more places like that. Libraries for example:

“For some, the building remains essential: engagement with the library is a ticket to – and a membership card for – a local community. Some say the building needs to be there, but not as “a warehouse of dead books”, but as a place to invent yourself, individually and socially.”

In some weird and twisted way, back in the days when I still smoked cigarettes, the smoking area in my company had a similar function for me: I was the most informed Project Manager around. I knew a lot of people that weren’t in the direct surroundings of my project. It’s not that the individuals weren’t approachable. It’s just that I am not the kind of guy that is randomly stopping people in the hallway to ask what they do.

Organizations have these natural places where people bump into each other.

Coffee corner. Lunch room. Places where you experience that you are part of a certain group, just by having the same rhythm. “Hey, we drink coffee in the same pace!”

Architects can actually design these places.

The best we can do is recognize the opportunities. Or make use of social objects:

“For a while I  had  a bowling bag to carry my papers and other work related stuff. I bought it, because everybody else was carrying the same black Samsonite briefcase. The bag was blue with white letters and oddly shaped. Colleagues and clients would say something about it. Complementing me on my fine exquisite taste. Making fun of my stupid bag.

The bowling bag created engagement. A conversation starter. Something to trigger a spontaneous moment of interaction. And never in a negative mood. The plastic bag from the supermarket I carried around for months after that triggered some different comments though.”

Image by Frau Shrink.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - An Ice Skating Track And Opportunities To Start Conversations. is a post from: Project Shrink.

“Once a photograph of the earth, taken from the outside is available, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.” – Sir Fred Hoyle in 1948.

What do you draw when you are visualizing a project on a whiteboard?

I draw an arrow from left to right that represents a timeline. Not always. But many times.

The way you visualize, determines your focus.

I’ve been playing with the simple but powerful concept of a Project Story Circle.

The project is represented by a circular arrow and is divided in half with a horizontal line.

The idea behind it is the following:

• An organization has the need for something. A challenge has to be conquered. A group of people starts a journey and brings back their result to the organization.
• The upper half of the circle represents time spent outside the project. Preparing for the voyage. And getting the results back to the place where it is needed.
• The bottom half makes up for project time.
• This will focus attention on the transitions organization-project and project-organization.
• This will focus attention on the idea that you undertake the project long before the actual project starts and that it only ends when you have gone full circle; when the actual benefits are realized.

You can use this shape when discussing projects.

• Where do people join the journey? (indicate on the circle)
• In which parts are they active? (indicate on the circle)
• Where do they expect problems? (indicate on the circle)

This basic shape is inspired by The Hero’s Journey, the universal structure of myths. What makes this narrative structure so interesting is not that many movies are based upon it. It’s more the reason why so many stories are following this flow. There is a certain appeal to it, we all recognize parts of how we experience our own life story.

One essential part of the Hero’s Journey is the transformation the hero is going through. In the storyline there is a defining moment when the hero is experiencing a major set back where he is hitting a brick wall. And this wall will be the turning point. During the bottom half of the circle you can also bring in the concept of the red convertible:

“I think a project can have a “red convertible” moment. It’s that breakdown, or more that revelation, in which you remember why you were doing something in the first place. … This transition is the “red convertible”.”

Talking about transitions is important. Transitions reveal patterns. And antipatterns. It’s the moment when contrast is at its peak. When everything remains the same, we don’t notice our rhythms and boundaries that much. When all of a sudden everything is changing, we start to notice what felt natural before.

I think the Project Story Circle can assist you in discussing those transitions.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - The Project Story Circle. Talking About Transitions. is a post from: Project Shrink.

When I enter a room to facilitate a two hour workshop, eyebrows are raised. I look like my old aunt that packed for a weekend to visit relatives. Two large suitcases full of clothing. Just in case. You never know what the weather might turn out to be. Or if we decide to go to a fancy restaurant.

So. I enter a room looking like my old aunt, only because we both carry way too much luggage for such a short period of time. I carry two plastic bags with post-it notes, index cards, colored paper of different thickness, permanent markers, white board markers, color markers, and tape.

Yes. I know. It’s ridiculous.

In the beginning I run through all kinds of techniques in a fast pace.

“Please put on post-it notes …”
“You can write on the index card …”
“Draw a picture of …”

I observe which one is catching on. If one sticks, I keep that one.

I don’t know if this is the “proper way” to do things. But it’s the same strategy I talked about when revealing a culture.

You throw stuff to the wall and see what sticks.

I think we use the same strategy to facilitate the process of turning “what we know” into a representation of “what must be”. You know. Sensemaking.

In projects we have learned that to make it all work we need to have a couple of essential conversations. Between our team members, our stakeholders and ourselves.

Discussing things like:

• What does “done” look like?
• How do we get there?
• How do we know how far we are?
• Who cares?
• Why are you on the project?
• Why does the project take place?

Ideally these conversations “just happen”. People hear they are part of a project, they get together and turn collectively everything they know about the topic into a picture for how things must be.

Sometimes these things don’t “just happen”. They need a catalyst to get the conversation started.

What we actually are looking for are pebbles that when dropped cause larger ripples.

What we are looking for are small things that trigger a conversation and keep it going. Without having the need to keep throwing bricks in the water every morning.

We have to try different things. Different pebbles. We have to. Not everyone is responding in a similar way to the same catalyst. There is a huge diversity in human interaction.

So. We take our bag of tools: visualizations, social objects and dressing up environments, narrative structures, questions, exploration/reframing and Shrinkonian exercises.

We throw them to a wall. And see which one sticks.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Dropping Pebbles. Facilitating Sensemaking. is a post from: Project Shrink.

When Columbus set out to discover America, he didn’t have a map that had America on it. That was the whole point of discovering it. Centuries ago people were sailing the world with incomplete maps.

Some knew that the earth was a sphere. A globe. A ball. A round thing. Some maps were created representing the world as a sphere, without having all the information available.

This is important for people working together in uncertain and ambiguous situations.

The coin dropped when I read this story by Cynthia Kurtz where she talks about reading the book “Maps: Finding Our Place in the World” (affiliate link) with her son:

“What amazes me about these early globes is that people built a coherent representation of the world as a sphere even though they were missing part of it. They sewed together the edges of what they knew to be so as to make it into the shape they knew it had to take. This is a perfect analogue to sensemaking: we take what we know and form it into something that represents what must be.”

Aha. Sensemaking.

According to Wikipedia sensemaking is “… a collaborative process of creating shared awareness and understanding out of different individuals’ perspectives and varied interests.”

Although, the way Cythia Kurtz wrote it, sticks longer in my brain: “we take what we know and form it into something that represents what must be.”

Someone recently told me that the topic of sensemaking is a hot item. Especially due to the books by Karl Weick (affiliate link), who covers this topic at the organizational level. It is his work that is “… providing insight into factors that surface as organizations address either uncertain or ambiguous situations.”

Properties of Sensemaking.

Weick describes seven properties of sensemaking. And when I read them, I recognized every topic I have been discussing on this blog. So. Sorry for confusing you all these years. But know you know. I am talking about sensemaking. How we turn what we know into a representation of what must be to handle uncertain or ambiguous situations.

Here are Weick’s seven properties:

1. Identity and identification is central – who people think they are in their context shapes what they enact and how they interpret events (…).
2. Retrospection provides the opportunity for sensemaking: the point of retrospection in time affects what people notice (…), thus attention and interruptions to that attention are highly relevant to the process (…).
3. People enact the environments they face in dialogues and narratives (…). As people speak, and build narrative accounts, it helps them understand what they think, organize their experiences and control and predict events (…).
4. Sensemaking is a social activity in that plausible stories are preserved, retained or shared (…).
5. Sensemaking is ongoing, so individuals simultaneously shape and react to the environments they face. As they project themselves onto this environment and observe the consequences they learn about their identities and the accuracy of their accounts of the world (…).
6. People extract cues from the context to help them decide on what information is relevant and what explanations are acceptable (…) Extracted cues provide points of reference for linking ideas to broader networks of meaning and are ‘simple, familiar structures that are seeds from which people develop a larger sense of what may be occurring.”
7. People favour plausibility over accuracy in accounts of events and contexts (…)

(source Wikipedia. Removed references for brevity.)

This links directly to the role of identity in projects, the importance of narratives, the use of social cues (flags!) and the need for context.

That makes perfectly good sense. To me.

Yes. Couldn’t resist.

That was a wordplay on “sensemaking“.

Yes.

Now I know why I am a map maker.

Image from Wikimedia.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Sensemaking: Turning What We Know Into What Must Be. is a post from: Project Shrink.

Twelve years ago some of my colleagues celebrated New Years Eve in the office. The world of IT was braising itself for The Millennium Bug.

I was partying like it was 1999. Actually it was. I spent half of the first hour of 2000 stuck in an elevator. Not because of a software bug, but because 8 friends and me were in an elevator that had a capacity of four.

When we switched from 1999 to 2000 we really expected a change. There was going to be a difference. There was a reason we had to do things before January 1st. You know. The big “division by zero” scare. When computers would use 00 as the year, it would have a devastating effect. This deadline wasn’t just an arbitrary line in the sand. It was real.

At least, we thought it was.

“Oh. Grandpa. Please tell more about the old days of the previous century.” Yeah. Yeah. I’ll shut up for now.

In Projectistan (land of the projects, home of the deadline – a term coined by Jon Whitty) January 1st is a magical date. It’s not that something is really happening between the last day of December and the first day of January. Things are the same. Heck. Most people aren’t even in the office. It’s artificial time. Someone drew a line in the sand. For accounting purposes.

But somehow it has effected the natural rhythms of the inhabitants of Projectistan. The excitement of new beginnings. Big Adventures are coming! Epic Journeys are at the horizon!

Regardless of the actual starting date of the work, new years day marks an exit and an entry.

Perhaps more so in our mind and bodies than on our to-do lists.

As projects are about time and rhythms, it makes sense to me to be more conscious about our relationships with them. Conscious about entry and exit. Conscious about moving from one thing to another. Conscious about transitions.

Havi Brooks has a nice exercise to enhance your awareness about markers in time. Providing them names. The idea is that you use moons (full moons or new moons) as markers of natural time. To become aware of our more natural rhythms instead of artificial time.

But, as hamsters in our treadmills running from one reporting period to another, we might start out with calender months. And provide it with names of episodes from our Big Adventure.

That will be weird enough.

This could go like this:
January: Embarking The Beagle.
This blog is my Beagle in the journey to discover how temporary tribes operate. And this month I’m getting ready. Again

Or you might like these:
The Prologue.
Courtship.
“I Ate So Much, It’s Time For Action.”

If you had to provide a name for the coming episode in your work or personal life, what would it be?

Oh yeah. Happy New Year!

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Embarking The Beagle. Hello 2012. is a post from: Project Shrink.