Category: Coaching

7 Rules for Positive, Productive Change – a book review

May 17, 2020 / / 0 Comments

At Agile Testing Days 2019 during the keynote “I can’t do this… alone! A Tale of Two Learning Partners” by Lisi Hocke and Toyer Mamoojee I got inspired by their story about learning pacts. During the keynote Nicole Errante and I started a learning pact too. In our first call we created a plan. One of the books I added to our pact was “7 Rules for Positive, Productive Change – Micro Shifts, Macro Results” by Esther Derby. In this blog post Nicole and I share a summary and our learnings from the book. 

Huib: The book is about change and from the first page on it resonated with me. Esther opens with: “People hire me because they want different outcomes and different relationships in their workplaces. My work almost always involves change at some level…” and that is exactly what I do and have been doing for many years now. While reading and discussing the book with Nicole I recognized so many things from my own experience. The introduction talks about change as a social process! Work and life in general is heavily influenced by social processes and everything we do has major social aspects to it. An aspect that unfortunately often is underexposed especially when people want to be in control. Best practices do not work in complex situations in which we find ourselves in IT often, we know that from the work of Dave Snowden and the cynefin framework. This is why I got so inspired by Context-driven testing years ago. Finally I found people who were taking the human aspects in testing and IT seriously. Not trying to approach (testing) problems with mechanistic thinking, not seeing IT as technology centered, not striving for certainty but being okay with uncertainty and a community where human interaction and feelings played a prominent role in solving problems. This book takes the same approach with change. Change is a social thing. Esther’s book hands you the interventions she calls rules to improve and help change to happen. The rules are heuristics or guidelines that will help change to happen. 

Nicole: Change in life, whether work or personal, is inevitable. The philosopher John Locke said “Things of this world are in so constant a flux, that nothing remains long in the same state.” But we, as humans, tend to be resistant to change; we like stability, routines, and the known. However, maybe we would be less resistant to change if it was implemented in a way that considered this human side of it. That’s one of the things I love about Esther’s book – it constantly keeps people in the focus of the change process. The success of the change is not just about the process but about the people in it. I have been lucky enough to work at the same company for the past 13 years but that means my experience is a bit more narrow than Huib’s when it comes to experiencing change in the workplace. However, a few years ago our company wanted to make the move from a very waterfall-based software development process to one that was more agile. I think most people at my company would agree that the change was more painful and took more time than anyone expected. It is through the lens of that change that I read this book – what could we have done to make the change process better? And what lessons can we learn for future changes?

Summary: The introduction ends with Lessons Learned from a project Esther did. Many of those I recognized and made me want to read the book even more. The lessons are: 

  • Skill and will aren’t always the problem
  • Training is useful and necessary, but it’s not sufficient
  • Standardizing nonstandard work may make matters worse
  • Long feedback loops delay learning and improvement
  • Observed patterns result from many underlying influences

The first chapter deals with change by attraction. If you try to force change upon people, they will react with resistance. Mandating change makes people feel a loss of control and they have no personal buy-in to the change. Esther says “At best, coercion, rewards, and positional authority result in compliance, not engagement…” You don’t want people just going through the motions, you want them actively involved and eager to give things a try. In order for change to happen, things need to be learned and other things need to be unlearned. There is no best practice that works in every situation in knowledge work, quite the opposite: we need to experiment to find out what works and what doesn’t. It is a matter of responding to people, adapting to their needs and attracting and engaging people instead of pushing and persuading. 

  1. Strive for Congruence

Congruence is an alignment of a person’s interior and exterior worlds, balancing the needs and capabilities of self, others, and context. Ignoring other people’s needs and capabilities is probably the most common cause of incongruence. When this incongruence happens, you are in a stress state. When people are stressed, it is hard to think, learn, or engage. You cannot have successful change when learning and engagement are suppressed. Congruence is essential for change by attraction. Congruence contributes to safety, which is essential for people to solve problems, to learn and to speak up about mistakes and things they don’t know. Being empathetic will help you understand where someone else is coming from and what they have to lose by changing, thus avoiding ignoring the context of others in the process of change. Empathy helps people feel safe and understood. Empathy and congruence go hand-in-hand and are essential for making long term changes. At the end of chapter 2, Esther lists a couple of questions you can use to be more congruent.

  1. Honor the past, present and people

When implementing change, it is important to show respect to existing belief systems, the experiences and knowledge people have, and the effort people have made to keep things going with the system currently in place. Build trust and relationships before coaching others. People seldom think that they themselves are wrong. They also may want to improve but most do not want to hear from an outsider that they are doing it wrong. So we have to choose our language with care. Remember that while you have ideas of how things can be better, the people you want to change know things that you don’t know that will be important in this process. By acknowledging and exploring the negative space of change, we prevent unpleasant surprises along the way. Again Esther has a great list of questions to discover what lives in this negative space. People don’t resist change, they respond to its implementation. You can learn from reasons behind the responses to help adapt the change. Use Transformational Communication (inquiry, dialogue, conversation, understanding) instead of Convincing and Persuading (advocacy, debate, argument, defending) to gain openness, trust, and shared understanding. Finally, don’t take for granted what works by only focussing on the problem. Build upon what already works.

  1. Assess what is

Every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does (W. Edwards Deming). Change starts from where you are now and paying attention to the context increases the change problems will get solved. How did the existing conditions in the organization produce the current patterns and results? This chapter introduces 3 techniques intended to look beyond symptoms and find influencing factors: 

  1. Containers, differences, and exchanges (CDE), it describes the three conditions that determine the speed, direction, and path of a system as it self-organizes. This will help discover both the formal structures and invisible structures that factor into the behavior of the organizational system.
  2. SEEM Model: Steering, Enabling-and-Enhancing, Making. This model shows the different perspectives of people in the organization on the basic set of concerns each company has: how to achieve clarity so people know what to do, what conditions are needed for people to do good work, and what productive constraints will streamline decision making and guide actions and interactions.
  3. Circle of Influences: to see how the factors influenced one another and where to find virtuous and vicious loops. This method helps to find the many influencing factors that result in problems, instead of focussing too much on the problems itself. Find factors that have influence on several others as possible places to run experiments on.
  1. Attend to networks

An organisation has a formal and an informal side. Informal social networks within the organisation have great influence and cannot be ignored, although they are not visible on the org chart. The most important social networks for change are those that people turn to and trust for advice. That is why Esther suggests to map the networks within the organisation to be able to use them productively and not to break them inadvertently. You can also enhance existing networks by reducing the number of hops between people that are not directly connected to reduce bottlenecks. Networks can also carry rumors. Esther suggests to capture them to find out what people worry about using a rumor control board. Finally, if people do not want to change something, just do it with other people that do (change by attraction). The resisters will probably follow when they see that other people are doing it. This is the fear of missing out in action.

  1. Experiment

Solving big complex problems is not easy because many factors are involved and they cannot be solved independently. Trying to solve them in big changes will cause big disruptions and that’s risky. Small experiments foster learning and will engage the people you work with. Experiments are FINE (Fast feedback, Inexpensive, require No permission and are Easy). Landing zones make big changes small by defining intermediate states to which the organisation can evolve. After reaching the landing zone, you can reassess whether your bigger goal is still relevant and course correct as you need. Safe to fail probes are good examples of experiments. Find something that you can try without asking for budget or permission. Don’t worry about failing – keeping the experiment small means any risk should be contained and you can learn from what went wrong. Esther lists a great set of questions to assist in shaping the experiments and another set to test assumptions. Reflecting on what works in the experiments involves double-loop learning. 

  1. Guide and allow for variation

Knowledge work and complex organizations need to allow for variation and emergence to perform effectively. Unnecessary standardization will lead to inefficiency and suboptimal behavior. Coherence is more desirable than consistency and that is why Esther suggests using boundary stories: to help people focus on gaining a similar outcome. Boundary stories give people a guideline on reaching the outcome you want (and avoiding those you don’t) while allowing people to mindfully decide how to get there based on their unique situation. Also change will be evolutionary: small evolutionary steps towards the end goal. Landing zones are useful, so is a horizon map: a thinking tool where you start with the desired outcome and work from right to left filling in conditions and constraints needed for the change to take place. Since change is social, it requires changing habits of thought and cognitive frameworks. Change will happen if we manage to influence metaphors and narratives within the organisation. Explain the outcomes you want and why, then add some boundary stories as a guide to how to get there. This will allow people to refine the change based on their knowledge and experience, thus owning the change rather than being forced into it.

  1. Use your self

People bring their personalities, characteristics, belief systems, and life experiences to work and this influences what they do and how they do it. This includes you, the person involved in bringing the change. Change is a social process which needs personal connection with the people involved. This works best using empathy, curiosity, patience, and observation. These skills can and must be practiced. A nice list of questions to help prompt empathy is given. Esther also supplies nice overviews with types of questions and how to focus questions to be curious and patient. These questions help to avoid why questions, which often make people defensive. The question and how you ask it, determines the answer you get. Making sense of your observations requires bias awareness and testing your observations. Be generous when trying to interpret the motivation behind what people do and the results they achieve.

Learnings Huib

It was fun to work with Nicole and read the book together talking about two chapters each time we met. Sharing our stories and experiences with change and discussing situations at work helped to understand what the book is about and to get ideas where we could try the things we were reading. The parts on empathy, curiosity and patience really resonated to me. Like I described in my blogpost “Mastering my mindset” I become more and more aware that growth, learning, improving and change needs empathy. I am working on that. This book gave me more tools and inspiration to get there. I already used several questions from the lists in the book and I enjoy using them. The landing zones are a great way to create small steps of change. I’m now working on a horizon map with a scrum master to get insight into what is going on in his team. I cannot wait to work with the team on the map.

Learnings Nicole

I agree with Huib that the method we used to read the book a couple chapters at a time and then discussing really was a fun way to read a book.It really helped reinforce the learnings of each chapter as well. Being able to share what we thought and our experiences helped not only make things clearer but also gave insight on where to apply it to our work. When our organization went through the big agile change, the main reason I thought it went rough was that people didn’t understand the reason behind the change. While that is true, Esther’s book also helped me realize there were other factors involved as well. The change we bit off was too big: we should have started where we were at and done smaller experiments to learn and adjust along the way. People’s knowledge, experience, and feelings should have also been considered in order to get them actively involved in the change. I look forward to being able to apply the lessons in this book to future changes in our organization. I also want to incorporate some of the questions from the book to help work through the day-to-day challenges that we face in our team.

Finally

The book is easy to read and has some great stories in there to illustrate the rules and lessons. It has many valuable and ready to use lists of questions and methods that will help in experimenting with change. Every chapter ends with a great set of takeaways which summarizes what you just read in different wording. We absolutely recommend this book to anybody dealing with change in their work.

The art of reflection

July 22, 2019 / / 2 Comments

“Once is coincidence
Twice is striking
Three times is pattern”

October 19-21 2018 DEWT held their 8th annual peer conference with “Developing expertise in software testing” as theme. I had the honour to open the conference with my experience report called “Mentoring and coaching to develop skills”. In the open season after my experience report and during the rest of the peer conference we talked about reflection on several occasions. I think one of the most important skills in learning is reflection.

My vision on learning
Learning is the process of acquiring new or adapting existing knowledge, behaviours, skills, values ​​or preferences. Learning is much more than knowing: putting the learned into practice and gaining experience with it is important to truly internalise real knowledge and to gain skill. Learning must be linked to experiences from daily practice. By reflecting on knowledge and skills, so-called learning loops are created.

Learning is an ongoing process: the world is changing fast and to be excellent in your role requires many skills. So it is important to keep up! To learn effectively, learning should come from yourself, with intrinsic motivation and personal responsibility.

Learning requires a positive and open learning environment in which you can safely come out of your comfort zone to try new things. The safe environment gives confidence to make mistakes and to experiment with new knowledge and skills. It also demands a certain degree of challenge. How big the challenge is, is different for everyone. It is not that you always have to come out of your comfort zone radically. Right outside of your comfort zone, in your stretch zone,  you learn best.

Effective learning requires focused learning with clear learning objectives and preferably evaluation criteria. It should be clear what you want to learn and how you can measure that. Where do you want to grow? And how do you know that you have made a step? By setting clear learning objectives, you focus on learning.

Levels of learning
There are different levels of learning: (ref: Joris van de Griendt)

  1. In single-loop learning (improvement, behavioural improvement), it is about the visible and concrete behavioural level (what): you do something and that has a certain effect. This effect may be desirable or not, and based on that assessment, you can adjust your behaviour or not.
  2. Double loop (reframing, behavioural renewal) If you want to change your behaviour permanently, there is double-loop learning: researching which patterns the behaviour involves (how). Which patterns and mechanisms are behind the behaviour? Which helpful or obstructing thoughts are involved? Insight into this can provide a more well-founded choice to change behaviour.
  3. Triple-loop learning (transformation, behavioural development) goes even deeper. You involve your values, your purpose, the why question: why do I really want to change this behaviour? What important values ​​in me support this and what stops me?

What is reflection?
Reflection is a process of exploring and examining ourselves, our perspectives, attributes, experiences and actions / interactions. It helps us gain insight and see how to move forward. (ref: University of Edinburgh).

When we reflect, we deeply consider something that we might not otherwise have given much thought to. This helps us to learn. Reflection is concerned with consciously looking at and thinking about our experiences, actions, feelings, and responses, and then interpreting or analysing them in order to learn from them. (ref: The Open University).

Reflection is looking back at your behaviour in a certain situation. You reflect on that situation by asking yourself meaningful questions to make you think about the situation. The difference between just thinking and reflection is the intention to learn. There is a difference between evaluation and reflection. Evaluation means making a judgement about something you did. For example: did you reach your goal? Did I do the right thing? While reflecting means creating a safe space to investigate behaviour without making a judgement with the intention to grow.

Like learning, there are different levels of reflecting:

  1. Single-loop reflection focuses on behaviour and actions and is very close to evaluation.
  2. Double-loop reflection means trying to get hold of underlying convictions that interfere with the adjustment of interaction and behaviour.
  3. Triple-loop reflection is about motives and matters that touch on their own identity. There is often a relationship with issues at a higher level, that of the organisation or even of an entire system.

Iceberg

(image credit: Dutch Vision Institute)

Above the waterline behaviour is perceptible and statements are audible. But opinions, beliefs, feelings and emotions are not visible; they are below the waterline. These invisible elements, however, are often the motives for visible behaviour. An important part of the reflection will therefore consist of researching these deeper layers of the Iceberg.

By not addressing all layers within one’s competence management, you allow the coachee to act for incongruously (say A and do B, or vent a belief that contradicts his own motivation); just like external fragmentation (non-integration in the context), internal fragmentation (in the context of do-thinking motives) also leads to a real risk of energy loss.

Korthagen

(ref: How do I use the Korthagen reflection circle diagram?)

Korthagen’s reflection cycle is a tool or a strategy to be followed for learners to gain insight into their educational performance and to improve this. By applying this cycle step-by-step, one learns to systematically reflect a skill to be learned.

Phase 1: Describe the experience/situation you wish to reflect upon. What was the actual situation? You can do this by using the STARR(S) method: Situation-Task-Action-Result-Reflection-Strengthen (see appendix).

  • What did I have to do in this situation?
  • What action did I actually take?
  • What was the outcome of this action?

Phase 2: Looking back: What exactly happened?

  • What did I see?
  • What did I do?
  • What did I think?
  • What did I feel?

Phase 3: Awareness of essential aspects

  • What does that mean to me now?
  • What is the problem (or the positive discovery)?
  • What has all that caused? What does it involve?

Phase 4: Alternative methods

  • What alternative methods do I see (solutions or ways of making use of what I have discovered)?
  • What are their advantages and disadvantages?
  • What will I remember for next time?

Phase 5: Trial/action

  • What do I want to achieve?
  • What should I watch out for?
  • What do I want to try out?

Danger of thinking too much

Reflecting is an active activity that demands skills. It often happens that professionals think they reflect, while they are actually worrying.

This points out the important differences:

Worry

  • Involved in itself, looking from our own perspective, alone
  • Focused on mistakes
  • Focused on judging and condemning
  • Global approach
  • Mono causal approach

Reflection

  • Involved in the problem, also looking at a perspective outside of oneself, in contact with others
  • Focused on solutions
  • Focused on understanding
  • Analytical approach
  • Multi causal approach

Tips for reflecting

You can reflect on every situation and every problem that concerns you. You can learn a lot from that, but the pitfall is that you will be overwhelmed by the information and will keep looking back endlessly. Another danger is that you may feel that you are actually doing a good job – the work is going well, there is no criticism from colleagues or your supervisor – and so you see no reason to reflect. Yet it can also be very instructive to reflect on yourself and your way of acting.

The following tips can help you reflect:

  • Choose a concrete situation and look back on that specific moment and your course of action
  • Reflect regularly and ‘schedule’ at least once a week a reflection moment, preferably at a fixed time
  • Ask yourself open questions
  • Explain judgments about yourself; first see what really happened before judging yourself
  • Reflect in a methodical way, for example by going through a list of questions or use a reflection model
  • Reflect not only on problem situations but also on success experiences
  • Use feedback from others to reflect from that point of view
  • Read more about reflection to get inspired. This is a nice blogpost about reflection: How Self-Reflection Gives You a Happier and More Successful Life. For more inspiration read this: Tools to help you with self-reflection

Together you learn even more

It is already very instructive to consider your own functioning in this way, but it can be even more profitable if you do this together with others. Do not try to judge here either. Not about others, nor about yourself: you feel free to tell everything. For example, start doing intervision with peers or colleagues. More about intervision here: Intervision: what is it about?

Start a journal

Writing in a journal regularly (preferably daily on a specific time) helps to analyse your professional and personal growth. Journaling can give you a different perspective on things. Writing in your journal is a very useful tool to help you understand yourself and the world around you. Write down activities, thoughts, ideas, reasons, actions, techniques and reflections on specific topics or skills you want to improve. By writing in a journal you get an overview of your thoughts in which you can identify patterns. Journaling helps you to get thoughts and ideas out of your head but more important it enables making sense of things that happened. After doing something related to your learning goal, take notes on your observations, summarise facts and experiences. Also write down how it makes you feel.

More about reflective journaling in this article: Reflective Journals and Learning Logs.

 

Here are two helpful checklists to help you reflect:

Basic training for software testers must change

June 18, 2012 / / 21 Comments

This blog post was originally written as an column for www.testnewsonline.com (English) and www.testnieuws.nl (Dutch).

On this blog I recently wrote about my meeting with James Bach with the provocative title: “What they teach us in TMap Class and why it is wrong“. Mid July I go to San Jose for the CAST conference. During the weekend preceding I participate in Test Coach Camp. The title of the post is the title of a proposal that I submitted to discuss at Test Coach Camp.

In the past I have been a trainer for quite a few ISTQB and TMAP courses. The groups attending the training were often a mix of inexperienced and experienced testers. The courses cover topics like: the reason for testing, what is testing, the (fundamental) processes, the products that testers create, test levels, test techniques, etc. In these three-day courses all exercises are done on paper. Throughout the whole training not once actual software is tested!? I wonder if courses for developers exist where no single line of code is written.

In San Jose at Test Coach Camp I want to discuss the approach of these courses with my peers. How can we improve them? I feel these courses are not designed to prepare testers to test well. Let alone to encourage testers to become excellent in their craft.

During my dinner with James, I asked him what he would do if he would train novices to become good testers. He replied that he would let them test some software from the start. He would certainly not start with lectures on processes, test definitions and vocabulary. During a session the student will (unknowingly) use several techniques that will be named and can be further explained when stumbled upon. A beautiful exploratory approach I would like to try myself: learning by doing! But there are many more opportunities to improve testing courses. People learn by making mistakes, by trying new things. Testing is much more about skills than about knowledge. Imagine a carpenter doing a basic training. His training will mainly consist of exercises! My neighbour is doing a course to become furniture maker. She is learning the craft by many hours of practice creating work pieces. Practice is the biggest part of her training!

One of the comments on my blog opposed to the suggestion by James Bach. Peter says: “I have been both a tester and trainer in ISTQB and TMap. Yes we can make testing fun but without a method that testing has no structure and more importantly has no measurable completion. How will those new people on “more practical” course know when they have finished? What tests did they do? What did they forget? What defect types did they target? Which ones did they not look for? What is the risk to the system? My view after 40 years as a developer and tester is that this idea might be fun but is not just WRONG but so dangerously wrong that I am sad that no one else has seen it.”

What do you think?

What they teach us in TMap Class and why it is wrong!

April 1, 2012 / / 15 Comments

Yesterday I had diner with James Bach, Pascal Dufour and my testing buddy Jean-Paul. After picking James up from Schiphol airport, we took him to his hotel and after that we had diner. An enjoyable evening with great conversations and some testing challenges.

Pascal went home with this challenge: “Apply the Constructal Law to improve testing.” This challenge James gave himself since he is reading this book. Jean-Paul asked for a challenge via twitter and got this one: “Explain dendogram-based testing”. Since I start with BBST tomorrow, I didn’t ask for one.

We discussed a lot of topics, one of them was coaching. In July I go to Test Coach Camp in San Jose the weekend before CAST 2012. I told James I had an idea for a session at Test Coach Camp: “What they teach us in TMap Class and why it is wrong”. I think he likes it 😉 I asked James what he would do if he had to train newbies to be testers. He answered that he would have them test something. He certainly wouldn’t start with lectures about processes, definitions and testing vocabulary. During the testing session the aspirant-tester will do stuff that can be named. They will (ignorant) use all kinds of techniques that can be further explained and explored while they pop-up.

James also gave an interesting insight: the way testing is often trained and implemented results in dull testing jobs where most of the great people (who could be excellent testers) will run away from. I have to chew on that a little more, but I think this might be true. It definitely rings a bell.

Today I created a first draft for the proposal for Test Coach Camp:

“What they teach us in TMap Class and why it is wrong”

In my former job I have been an instructor/trainer for ISTQB and TMap classes. This was before I saw the Context-Driven light 😉 I trained ISTQB and TMap to people new to testing and also lots of experienced testers. I also was an instructor for all kinds of other training courses. These training courses are not focussing on the right things and are not preparing testers to do proper testing. Let alone that they encourage testers to become excellent their profession. For example: in these 3 day courses, all exercises are done on paper without actually testing software. This makes me wonder if there are classes where developers are trained without actually coding.

In this session I would like to point out the structure and content of a typical TMap (or ISTQB) class and the method/approach used. In the discussion later in the session the group collaborates in listing what is wrong with this approach and what can be done to improve it. This creates an insight in what is wrong with the majority of training courses in my country (and probably also around Europe and the rest of the world). This insight can help us create training courses to properly train people in testing, but also improve existing classes.

Let me know what you think and please share your experiences.

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http://www.huibschoots.nl

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