I found myself in two more great sessions today at the Amplify Your Effectiveness (AYE) conference in Phoenix, AZ. It just amazes me how much knowledge I have witnessed within two days here. The following information is important information and results of my experience today.

Reflect and Adapt presented by Elisabeth Hendrickson

This session started off a bit slow because there was a limited group of attendees for an amazing simulation. It incorporated product management, developers, testers, interoffice mail, and computers into an amazing simulation which felt like real world scenarios within software development organizations I had been part of or witnessed. I could not believe how writing instruction sets, test cases, and confusing requirements on index cards could feel so much like real life.

Two of the participants had actually run or been through the simulation before. One of the most incredible realizations to me and others in the room was that the product manager tried to stall the customer when they asked for a demo and he knew the product was still buggy. This may or may not have been what this person would have done in a real life scenario but many of the considerations were those that I have heard from product managers I have worked with and coached in the past. I was a tester and it was amazing to me that I really got into the role. When I ran test cases against the running system and they continued to have the same or new bugs I started to think “what is the developer doing?”. As a developer this was frightening to me and it was a natural reaction to the way we started doing our work which excluded face-to-face communication. Elisabeth did a great job of working with the group and the entire group discussed topics which related to situations arising during the simulation. As we reflected on our work so far we would modify our working agreement which caused interesting changes into the environment resulting in improvement over time.

Resistance as a Resource presented by Dale Emery

Dale Emery had a great laid back style as he presented resistance as a resource through activities and discussion. This session had incredibly simple but powerful activities which helped people understand what constitutes resistance. Dale mentioned quite early that he did not know much about resistance but has found that he does know something about fielding responses. This statement may seem cryptic and I believe that you may have to be in one of Dale’s sessions to actually understand it.

Two things really stood out for me in this session:

  • If you are not willing to change yourself when encountering resistance then it may not be helpful to confront the resistance yourself at that time
  • When encountering resistance, if we are rigid we may become easy to knock over but if we center ourselves before confronting the resistance we can work through differences

The second item may be confusing so I will do my best to explain. When we center ourselves we are establishing our ability to move with the resistance to find a point of view which both parties can move forward from. One way to do this is by asking yourself “what do I want to get out of this?”. This can help you center yourself by understanding the intent of your suggestion. Once you are centered or congruent you can work with other people who are resistance to the changes you are proposing to them by using techniques such as reflective listening followed by curiosity about finding more information about the situation which may be helpful information on how to move forward from each other’s positions.

During an exercise where I posed a change I wanted to make in an organization another person I was amazed at the responses we found as a pair. Upon being questioned by the other person about the feasibility of my plan I began to ask if they were not able to meet my needs. They found it difficult to move forward with me and at one point I found myself in a position of bullying power which was uncomfortable. We both spoke more in depth about the situation and each of us learned quite a bit from this short role playing exercise.