Doggie-Park Foundations: OpenAgile

Before we begin constructing our doggie-park, its important to have a foundation on which to build. The foundation of our doggie-park is OpenAgile and ROWE. Together, these two approaches to management will create an open, agile, and learning environment in which your team can survive, thrive, and excel. To begin, let's talk about OpenAgile.

OpenAgile provides a construct in which integrity, learning, and reactions to change are laid in place. The other day, I was talking to my neighbor about an issue he was having with a friend he hired as a contractor. My neighbor needed someone to train a new employee on a CAD (Computer Assisted Drawing) application. His buddy was a computer programmer, so he asked his buddy if he could give the training. His buddy said yes, and did a very bad job. My neighbor paid his buddy anyway, but needed to hire someone else to provide the training again.

We started talking about OpenAgile, and about the concept of "truthfulness". Truthfulness is about knowing your own limitations, and accepting that everyone you deal with has value. If my neighbor's buddy had been truthful, he never would have taken the job, because he would have known and accepted his limitation that he didn't know how to train CAD. As we talked, my neighbor exclaimed: "Integrity is a very valuable thing." It dawned on me, OpenAgile is really integrity codified!

As we build our doggie-park, integrity is extremely important. Team-members must be able to accept thier personal limitations, and accept that other team-members have advantages that can help the group. Teams that have members who are unable to do this may not fail, but the member will hinder the productivity of the team. One bad-dog and turn a doggie-park bad.

In addition to its focus on personal integrity another aspect of OpenAgile, and the primary aspect that drew me to it is its focus on creating a team that is a learning organization. In 1990 Peter Senge wrote a book called "The Fifth Discipline". In this book he outlined the characteristics of organizations that last a long time. He determined that the only thing seperating companies that last and companies that don't is thier ability to react to change.

He further found that in order to react to change, organizations need to create an environment where team-members are encouraged to learn. Change comes as a result of discovery, invention, and innovation. Team-members who learn will be able to understand changes before and as they arise, adapt to the changes, and quickly react to changes in a smart manner.

As we build our doggie-park, we need to create an environment where a high degree of integrity and learning are present.  By using OpenAgile as one of our core philosophies we are providing our employees with an environment where their learning is encouraged, and where positive behaviours like truthfulness and integrity are paramount.

My next post will be about ROWE (results oriented work environment), and is the second part of my doggie-park foundation. After that, we'll start building our doggie-park.

Why herd cats when you can enjoy a doggy park?

The other day I was looking out my window and watching my neighbor, Fred, play fetch with his dog.  He had a tennis ball that he would toss a few yards, and then his dog would bound out to it, pick the ball up in its mouth, and then bring it back to Fred.  They did this for hours!

On the window sill in front of me sat my cat, Izzy. She was not really sleeping, but rather lying down and enjoying the sun on her back.  I called her a few times, then picked up her favorite toy in hopes of getting her to play a bit.  After a number of attempts, the most I was able to evoke from her was a disdainful twitch of her ear.

I thought about the phrase "herding cats", which is used as a metaphor to describe how to lead small teams of employees.  Cats didn't sound like the right metaphor to me, if you were going to bring together a team for your work, wouldn't you rather get a team of folks who were more like Fred’s dog than my cat Izzy?

Lets take that metaphor further; lets see how this metaphor works with a small team (herd of cats versus a doggy park).  If you have a herd of six cats that you’re trying to manage, there are very few things you can use to orchestrate their combined movement.  If you put down food, only the hungry will come. If you introduce a toy, only those in the mind to play will come.

Contrast that with the doggy-park.  If you whistle and hold up a ball in your six-canine doggy park, most of the dogs will run to you wanting to play.  And, if you throw that ball, all of the doggies will compete to get the ball and bring it back to you.  Isn’t that really how you’d like your team to work? Happily working together in friendly competition to meet their goal in the best manner possible?

The purpose of this blog is to discuss the management philosophy of "creating a doggie-park" as opposed to "herding-cats". While this may seem like a very simple topic, the change of focus is very deep. It requires a change of thinking from X-Theory management to Y-Theory. It means changes in how we recruit folks into our doggie-park focusing on character in addition to technical competence. It means that we release the full potential of our employees to succeed at their tasks while providing a learning environment in which they can grow as practitioners.

To show how to implement this, I will use two primary philosophies of team-management: ROWE (Results Oriented Work Environment) and OpenAgile.  ROWE creates an environment where team-members can work hard to complete their tasks without obstacles, and OpenAgile is integrity codified. Stay tuned for more information!