The Power of Questions in Artifact Design

Effective coaches use powerful questions, not to obtain answers but to stimulate thought so insight emerges and knowledge is generated.

Why not leverage this power by designing artifacts explicitly around questions? This will work for either formal artifacts used to capture and persist knowledge, or informal artifacts used to guide a conversation or workshop.

In a recent engagement this became so clear to me that I decided to capture my thoughts on this topic and some examples of changes made along the way to facilitate better outcomes for the particular group in question.

Questions Help Clarify the Intent of a Conversation

• Getting from an artifact template to valuable knowledge is rarely a straight line, and people tend to simply regurgitate known information.
• Question-driven conversations will help surface latent dissonance and divergence.
• Helps the coach and stakeholders focus on where the knowledge resides and who may provide unique perspectives.
• Whatever question is asked, your brain goes right to work formulating answers. Use this to your advantage by asking open-ended questions. Since the brain will not be able to formulate an answer, deeper thought will result.
• Some things to keep in mind for clarifying intent:
  • Mentally map out the journey and craft questions that serve as a compass rather than turn-by-turn GPS.
  • Use open powerful questions
  • Based on the context, be willing to change the question to surface what may be hidden.
• An Example:
• Before: "Customers"
• After: "Who is impacted by your work?" 
• The team in questions thought in terms of the impact they are making rather than identifying "customers."
• Within the team, refocusing on who they impact opened up the conversation to consider others who had not been viewed as "customers."
• At the same time, other stakeholders were then identified and a good conversation ensued about the differences between customers and stakeholders.

Questions Move the Focus from Results to Dialogue

• Fields in a template or on a form appear to be “complete” regardless of quality as our minds will focus on filling in blanks, not the actual content.
• Questions can push a group beyond converging on a shared understanding to creating a vibrant, divergent pace for exploration and dialogue.
• Be aware of questions loaded with assumptions, initial results may continue to hide them.
• Some things to keep in mind for shifting focus from results to dialogue:
  • Wherever you can, replace artifact labels with a question.
  • Use questions to discover new possibilities by challenging convention and challenging convergence.
  • Review questions for loaded assumptions and either make them explicit or craft the question to remove the assumption.
• An Example:
• Before: "Customer Outcome"
• After: "What stories would your customers tell after experiencing this value?"
• Interesting conversations emerged about divergent views in the team about the true outcome they hoped to deliver.
• Helped to focus the conversation on the highest leverage dimensions of the outcome.
• Increased the energy of the entire group and even fed back into conversations about options considered.

Questions Increase Engagement by Appealing to Credibility, Logic, and Emotion

• Credibility should be apparent through the questions themselves.
• Logic can be expressed through the mental journey from answering one question to asking and answering the next.
• Emotional appeal can establish a state of receptivity for new ideas, for vigorous conversation, for openness to what is possible.
• Some things to consider for Ethos, Logos, and Pathos:
  • Use your expertise to craft questions based on principles rather than dogma.
  • Design an end-to-end chain of questions that lead the group from surfacing what they do know, don’t know, and assumptions to meaningful dialogue.
  • Craft questions that touch on the group sense of identity, self-interest, and passion. Engagement will improve and the resulting dialogue will be rich.
• An Example:
• Before: "Unique Value Proposition"
• After: "Why is this team the best suited to work in this problem / solution space?"
• Created energy in the team around why they were uniquely positioned to make the most impact.
• Helped a still forming team to rally around their passion and unique identity. 
• Vibrant conversation that led directly to articulating a compelling vision for the team in short order. 

You must change the system to change the results – to change the results, change the thinking, to change the thinking, use questions. And use them not just in coaching; use them whenever and wherever you desire to influence the thought process and generate new points of view.

The added benefit of not just using them to coach the group and facilitate the conversation, but to design or refine the artifact itself is the powerful combination of having gone through the thought process in the workshop and having the prompts persisted for reinforcement and continued refinement in the future.

Here are two partial iterations - of probably 5 total that I observed - of a template for facilitating a program level strategic conversation. However, the most impressive version I encountered was observing a new group take the most current template, and then update it even further to match how they needed to think through their particular strategy. That indicated to me that they embraced not just a template but an adaptive mental model for how to effectively frame the meaningful conversation they required. 

Partial Canvas of an Early Version

Partial Canvas of a Later Version

Meeting Notes with Doodles and Graphics

Over the last year or so I've been experimenting with graphics in several ways, the most common being replacing PowerPoint with a whiteboard and markers and replacing a pen and notepad with the same.

I'm a visual person so this naturally resonates with me, but I've also noticed some positive dynamics from those engaged as the audience to a presentation or the participant of a meeting. So I thought I'd share some feedback I've received and observations I've made along the way.

Facilitated Meeting Example

The following is a panoramic picture of a completed meeting graphical journey (with some key information blurred out). This was laid out on a conference room wall that was whiteboard from floor to ceiling and is about 7' tall and 20' long on that wall.

Feedback Received

• "...the most interesting meeting I've attended..."
• "I found myself hooked and waiting to see what would come next..."
• "It was amazing that these executives were engaged for the entire 3 hours..."

Observations

• Persisting the entire image holds the end-to-end story together well (none of the common "...can you go back to that one slide....").
• Increased engagement with the content rather than the presenter.
• Inconsistencies within the visualization and the story are very visible.
• For me, requires a lot of practice and preparation.
• Key competency - building out the image while not turning your back on the audience.

It is important to note that this entire image was not drawn from scratch. The entire visualization was designed and then key content left out until it was needed to pull the story along. Then it was drawn into the "frame" image.

Meeting Notes Example

And this visualization is the output from a 30 minute phone conversation - my co-worker was facilitating the call while I documented the conversation. Again, some identifying data blurred out.

Feedback Received

• Meeting facilitator was able to stop taking traditional notes and found the image a more effective representation.

Observations

• I was more engaged with the call than I would have been by passively listening or taking traditional notes. 
• We were able to immediately see patterns in the information both during the call and when the call ended. 
• Synthesis of information via relationships and connections was very natural and quick afterwards.
• Integrating color and annotations helped to identify the key pieces of value from the chaff.
• It is better to start in the very middle of the board as you won't know where the conversation will take you.
• To be clear, you will not find many artistic images other than basic shapes in either example. I am not an artist. But it is good enough to obtain the most valuable benefits in the areas of 1) achieving shared understanding, 2) efficient information processing and 3) stimulating meaningful analysis and synthesis of the content.

And Practice is Easy....

I now carry pens and plain paper with me into every meeting and take notes this way. I also represent books I read, or sometimes just chapters, into a graphical format for deeper understanding. And then there is the old standby of just brainstorming on a topic of interest. There are many "actual" graphic facilitators, visualization experts, and visual thinkers out there where you can find truly valuable information - here are my favs but there are many others:

• Sunni Brown - http://sunnibrown.com/doodlerevolution/
• Brandy Agerbeck - http://www.loosetooth.com/
• Center for Graphic Facilitation - http://graphicfacilitation.blogs.com/
• Dan Roam - http://www.danroam.com/the-back-of-the-napkin/

Remember and Verify for all types of #Coaching

Some thoughts I've collected over the last year - some completely my own, some inspired by reading, and probably some that have been floating out there for awhile with coaches I know but resonate strongly with me. 

It is always about the other person

Do I want this or my customer?

Am I thinking about my customer or me?

Am I listening to understand and empathize or to appear engaged?

Feelings matter, many times more than logic

What feelings and emotions are explicitly in play or lurking just under the surface?

Fear must be acknowledged and accepted

Fear is not a productive motivator and can only be released when it is acknowledged and surfaced.

A powerful question is more valuable than an obvious answer

When I don’t know the answer, ask a question.

When I think I have the answer, ask a question.

When I am certain of the answer, ask a question.

People most often start with painful events, not underlying causes.

Many people reflect the visible and painful aspects of a situation, not the underlying systems.

Don’t ever lie.

....ever.

No matter how difficult or painful, the truth is always more valuable than ignorance.

Viewpoints, while valuable and powerful, may and should change.

Point of views that never change indicate close-mindedness, laziness, or ignorance; but having a POV is powerful and useful.

Are my words and actions a service or disservice?

Always serve others and be clear about who is being served (or not) by my words and actions.

Never stop LEARNING.

If I ever think I know it all, I will be of no value to anyone.

The Principle of a Constrained System for Creativity

As I collaborate with @ChrisSpagnuolo and @rhensley99 on designing systems of creativity and innovation in a variety of enterprise contexts, one key principle identified is to constrain the system. There is plenty of research and anecdotal evidence of the impact of constraints on creativity and goal achievement - too many references to include here - but I am particularly interested in this principle of constraints that can positively impact systemic creativity in the marketplace. And the interdependencies between these constraints. So here is where we are right now - what have we not considered? What are some other perspectives out there?

A System of Constraints
This is s simple representation of my current view of core constraints:

Constraint on Ideation
It seems reasonable for both stimulating creativity and providing guardrails to the creative process that some form of constraint on ideation is needed. This concept has been identified and discussed by several others and researched in academia. So I expect the conversation will turn towards how to best identify and use this particular constraint.

What are some key considerations you've identified for designing such a constraint?

Constraint on Investment
While a start-up has this constraint naturally through a given amount of initial funding which creates an explicit "runway", when considering the introduction of a creative process into an enterprise this must be designed. I've personally observed R&D initiatives in clients that seem to go on-and-on with little visibility and few outcomes. So it is interesting to determine practices for creating this sense of a limited runway and provide the enterprise with financial risk mitigation. This may be challenging in the face of standard budget practices of a larger organization.

What are some existing financial strategies to co-mingle conventional and investment forms of funding in large organizations?

Constraint on the Time to Learn
Again, there are a couple aspects to this: create urgency / catalyze creativity and minimize feedback loops and time to achieve product / market fit. Given our experience creating and implementing scaled agile systems, I expect this will be an easier problem to solve; however, I expect the lynch-pin to be the creation of sprinting with creativity, identifying critical assumptions, and creating testable hypotheses. Since there are many practices existing in this area, I expect our focus will be on designing an overall system and building a high degree of capability in the organization.

What are some practices that you've found particularly effective for quickly iterating on learning that may not be so obvious or prevalent in the existing body of knowledge?

Over time I expect we will find even more constraints as levers in such a system, and I look forward to working with clients to identify and understand critical interdependencies between these constraints to fine-tune system performance.

I'm interested to know your experiences and your thoughts on the validity of this principle and the potential implementation of a constrained system for creativity and innovation.

Coaching the Agile Architect

As an Agile Coach, I typically find two shifts in perspective helpful for new agile architects: first, the possibility of delivering slices of functionality (typically prioritized by risk or value) and second, the possibility of delivering slices of architecture required to support incremental delivery.

I experienced this perspective change personally in what now feels like a previous life as an architect who was expected to construct solutions in addition to architecting them. As a result, I thought it might be most appropriate to discuss how an agile coach might approach the second shift in the spirit of the art of the possible while at the same time trying to keep it simple.

My goal is to incrementally and iteratively formulate a framework to help coach a new agile architect through the required transition of thought in designing architectures that enable incremental delivery of value. While it does not require BUFD, it does require thoughtful consideration of architectural requirements such as quality attributes, NFRs, and expected points of volatility and extensibility. As will eventually become evident, the details contain gotchas that are easily avoided with due consideration.

Two Potential Perspectives

The way my mind works, there are two obvious representations of the context.

In the first, I view an architecture using the following entities:

• Things – which commonly talk to other things using…
• Messages – which contain or, in some way, transmit…
• Information – for context, configuration or other processing

A second, and maybe more useful, perspective is to view the architecture in more traditional layers:

• Domain – the public face, internal or external, of architectural value delivery, typically in the form of services
• Capability – the functional or component building blocks
• Interaction – the integration of the capabilities that reside both in and on the architecture

While both perspectives resonate with me, for this discussion I will use the latter. In future posts I will delve in more depth, which will more naturally align with the former.

What are the challenges?

So what are the challenges I commonly face in this particular area as an agile coach? The following are common questions that arise:

1. How to support domain service stability during incremental refinement?
2. How to incrementally increase the complexity of integration points while maintaining robustness and managing volatility?
3. How to support component stability while incrementally increasing capabilities?

In addition, each case typically comes with requirements to ensure extensibility and backward-compatibility, as well as the realization of quality attributes such as scalability and performance.

Recognize & Address Each Type of Challenge

As a result, any systematic approach that a new agile architect will find useful must address at least each of these types of challenges.

So I’d like to propose one way to look at this challenge and help your customers complete this mental transition. A particular benefit of this approach is that all the referenced content already exists, is in use, and has extensive information available in both books and the public domain. See the References and Further Reading section at the end.

So let’s dig into each challenge with a bit more detail.

How to support domain service stability?

I suggest approaching this challenge with a discussion of Service Oriented Architecture patterns. The primary benefit of these patterns is to manage the dynamic and volatile service contexts and contracts encountered as the architecture is extended in increments. More detailed information for each of these can be found at soapatterns.org (see references at the end).

Some useful patterns to leverage in this way include:

• Service Façade supports dynamic service contracts by decoupling the core domain capability from the public contract.  This will allow either the core domain capability or the public contract to evolve independently.
• Agnostic Capability helps derive new service contexts by making available well-defined yet common domain capabilities as granular services.
• Protocol Bridging supports protocol volatility by ensuring differences in communication protocols – either type of variant – are handled adequately based on expected protocol volatility, planned or emergent.
• Compatible Change / Concurrent Contracts generally support ongoing modifications by introducing new capabilities without impacting existing ones, and by creating multiple contracts of the same domain capability for specific consumer types.

How to support incrementally built integration?

For integration that will be changing through incremental architecture development, introduce the Enterprise Integration Patterns body of work (Hohpe). The primary benefit of these patterns is to stabilize points of integration from Day 1 as they increase in capability and complexity.

Some common refinement patterns to identify and plan for include the following, which I have personally experienced on several large-scale projects:

• Basic Integration Refinement occurs as a simple integration becomes more complex and capable. An example evolution of integration may include transitions from hard-coding, to file sharing to shared memory to RPC, and finally to messaging. Using other protective patterns, this refinement can evolve with minimal impact to the solution and customers.
• Message Channel Refinement involves the paths of integration becoming more powerful and robust.  For example, message channels may transform from Point-to-Point to Message Bus to the use of Message Bridging. This would use the EIPs called Point-to-Point Channel, Message Bus, and Messaging Bridge. (Hohpe).
• Message Routing Refinement occurs as the routing mechanisms used to put messages on channels move from relatively dumb to elegant and smart. Some examples I have used to incrementally build out a robust routing infrastructure include content-based routing, message filtering, Recipients List, Splitter & Aggregator, Composed Message Processor and Message Broker. While the core integration may have also required change, it was minimal compared to the message routing capabilities protected by architectural design patterns.

How to design capabilities robust enough for incremental development?

This is probably where most technicians are the most familiar, yet it is worth discussing within your coaching conversation as this not only ties the other pieces together but also provides more tools which can be applied at all levels. Here we consider GoF Patterns at the capability level.

Some common design patterns that bring great value to incremental delivery include the following from Design Patterns:

• Factory Method to abstract and extend creation functions. Through a creation interface and inheritance, the implementation determines which class to instantiate.  In addition, more simple factory patterns that do not rely on inheritance may also be applicable here.
• Adapter, Bridge, Decorator, Façade, and Proxy to protect and stabilize structure. Each of these leverages abstraction to stabilize areas where the structure is or may end up being volatile. In most cases, if the extent of true volatility is less than expected, the cost expended for protection will have been minimal.
• Strategy, Command, Mediator, and Template Method for incremental extension of behaviors. Again, through the power of abstraction, component capabilities and behaviors can be extended as needed with minimal impact to the core solution.

Summary

My goal is to create a systematic approach to engage and coach new agile architects in the art of the possible when it comes to architectural slicing. Using generally available and proven patterns at each critical layer of an architecture: the domain, the capability, and the integration, architectures can be designed, communicated, and built in vertical slices which meet quality attributes and stability using an incremental delivery approach. As a coach, communicating this possibility and providing the tools to new agile architects is critical to empower early and often creation and delivery of value.