I was glad to be invited to run a 60 minute workshop at Lean Agile Scotland and I am now on the train back from the event.
The talk was about seriousness as a way of rebuilding a personal and communal sense of mattering and doing work that matters.
I wrote and designed the talk a few weeks ago. You can download a video of that from Dropbox: Let’s Get Serious.
All change
I attended the conference from yesterday afternoon. I am not a Lean Agile expert and know most of the practice from the original manifesto and some of the design books since then. I became aware that the talk was not appropriate. It was well-founded in my perspective and opinion but neither of those was really helpful for the people attending. Writing talks and workshops for conferences can be a bit tricky when you make assumptions about what the audience needs without being rooted in their practice.
So I wrote another workshop overnight.
No slides but another zine.
Let’s go round again
There is a core reason I wanted to do this talk and it’s based upon a discovery made when I screwed up some facilitation during a civic assembly. That story was in the original talk and in the second version.
What was stripped out was a lot of opinion about AI and some frameworks for work. Both were unnecessary as they were not the problems nor solutions that people at the conference identified with.
What I replaced it with is some exercises and discussions around the personal sense of mattering, seriousness and vulnerability.
Luckily my hotel was opposite a print shop so I could make a zine. I like using zines as they’re more tactile than PowerPoint and can be taken away and shared with people who could not attend the session.
Let’s get serious (zine)
Front page
Front page with the title and three main points of the workshop – mattering, seriousness and asking.
Mattering
Started with mattering and some ideas from bother Rutger Bregman’s Moral Ambition and C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score. On one hand, the importance of feeling you matter and do work that matters. On the other hand, how value capture strips away expertise and that sense of mattering from professionals.
The question was for self-reflection. If you don’t feel you matter then your expertise and seriousness are degraded.
If people are not self-respecting then there is a vulnerability to the use of bad AI.
Seriousness
This section is about feeling that sense of being serious that is founded on the feeling of mattering and having expertise. It is also about the power of presence.
This section was mostly built around a story from a civic assembly and the powerful effect of an expert speaking from their deep knowledge. How seriousness scales and extends among people. That seriousness is something that creates a shared sense of intent and agency.
Seriousness in action
Returning to Moral Ambition, the power of asking. Not simply the standard institutional idea of asking to help – the neediness of users who must have a new service or product made for them. More the power of asking for help. How the extended sense of capacity that seriousness can be linked to the desire of people to do things that matter and feel they matter. This is why asking for also reduces the vulnerability of projects because you can draw in the knowledge and capabilities of more people.
Asking for and asking to are a loop of gifts and reciprocity. It is how a community can be built up.
The exercise was for people to practice asking for help. It’s something that experts can find uncomfortable because it seems to project weakness. Yet it seems a strength.
Back page
Finally, a few reminders on the back page of the themes during the hour.
Post-workshop
The workshop was attended by about 20 people and we talked about the issues raised. I am thankful some people felt strong enough to talk about they don’t feel they matter in their workplaces. Also the honesty of people talking of how they haven’t felt able to ask for help. What the workshop was attempting to do was to help people both feel and speak explicitly of these problems.
Issues like burn out and feeling worthless against the wave of AI are made harder when we have neither the space nor the framework to talk about them.
I’d like to thank everyone for participating and to Lean Agile Scotland for the invitation to speak.