Books about Sustainability

During covid-19 lockdown many people discovered a version of remote working for the first time. I say a version because people that have been doing remote work for years all say the same thing, this version of remote work was different. Companies called it Working From Home, yet it felt much more “Living At The Office”.
I don’t know when we will have beaten covid and we can go safely back to the office. Yet I do think the world has changed and I doubt we will be 100 % fully at the office anymore.
This means that when we go back, we will be working in hybrid mode. Yet today hybrid meetings don’t work. If you ask remote experts, they all say, don’t do hybrid meetings.
As an agile coach, one of my expertise is facilitating in-person meetings. As a person who worked with remote teams since 2005, and led collaborations with the global agile community since 2007, I also have experience with remote meetings. And although I have some ideas and tips from hybrid meetings, I have to admit that holding great hybrid meetings is a problem we haven’t solved.
And yet the answer “don’t do it”, reminds me of the best answer the agile community had in 2005 around remote work. The general advice was to put people in a room and that got the best results. Yes, when we put people in a room it’s much easier to create trust.
Many people will tell you that when people are together, we have big bandwidth communication. I disagree with that. I think when we are in a room, it’s easier to create trust and when we trust each other we have big bandwidth communication. In the end, that feels the same, yet it’s not, because when it’s about trust if we can create the same trust in a remote setting, we have the same bandwidth in our communication.
That’s why these days people will tell you, everyone has to turn on their cameras. Because when we see each other it’s easier to create trust. It’s usually the people with lots of privilege that will say this. A large house, with a great office to work from and a broadband internet connection. Now I am a big fan of video in remote meetings, yet when I hear people talk about forcing it, I get curious about why, and very often I hear that people are distrusting the people on the other side. Now that distrust and the blaming messages that result in that, make it a lot harder to end with a trusting relationship. I think we get a lot further if we are curious why people can’t turn on their cameras. When we ask questions to discover what’s going on, we usually encounter the full person. And when two people really encounter each other, trust starts to build. And when we have trust, a lot better communication starts.
Most people in my collaboration projects, I have never met in person. And we collaborated sometimes for years on projects. Many of these people I feel I trust more than my neighbours.
I trust them because of what we achieved together. And I’m not alone, there are many open source projects that have changed the world, where the core team has started fully remote. Although some might have met over time, usually most of these teams work in a completely dispersed way. The agile world has and can still learn a lot about remote work from open source projects. These days there are a lot more people that will tell you that a fully engaged remote team is possible.
Creating such a team takes a lot of deliberate action. Just like you don’t automatically get a great meeting when you put great people in a room. We get better meetings when we facilitate the meetings. The same is true for remote meetings, doing great remote meetings is harder than great in-person meetings, because not all of us are already familiar with remote facilitation. Luckily by now, there are tons of books about remote working.
And that’s for me the problem around hybrid meetings. I agree we are not consistent in doing great hybrid meetings, yet I disagree that it means we should not do it. I think we should gather great practises how we can make hybrid working better so that we are prepared for when we go back to the offices to have better hybrid meetings because let’s face it, the reality will be, that we will have people in the office and at home, and we want to create a trusting relationship between all participants independent from where they join our meetings.
One of the best ways to make sure that everyone in a hybrid meeting feels welcome in the meeting, is by having two facilitators: one facilitator for the people in the room and one facilitator for the people remote, that last person also needs to work remotely.
Please share your tips for creating better hybrid meetings…..
Many people have started to use tools for organising their life.
On this page I will collect these.
Personal Kanban tools
Tool name | Tip | Remarks |
---|---|---|
Trello | Yves | |
A door/ Whiteboard + post it’s | Rik D’huyvetters | Doesn’t work remote |
Kanbanize | Yves | |
kanbantool | Yves | |
KanbanFlow | Yves | |
planview | Yves | More an enterprise tool |
Time collecting
Tool name | Tip | Remarks |
---|---|---|
Toggl | Rico | |
TimeInOrbit | Konstantin | |
Clockify | Pablo Domingo | Also works for teams |
Timeular | Tim Schaeps | Mini manual from Tim |
DailyTimeTracking | Niel Mouthaan | An alternative to trackers using timers. It works by periodically asking what you are working on. This way you don’t have to toggle timers when you switch tasks. |
Timesheet | David Schmitt | |
Clockly | Richard Riedel | I’ve been using clockly to track the time of all my projects for a long time, and it’s helped me to increase my productivity. It is extremely simple to use and comes with a free trial period. |
Excel | Allan Kelly | I log the time in advance and timebox; retrospective estimation is as inaccurate as prospective estimation |
Personal Calendars
Tool name | Tip | Comments |
---|---|---|
Google Calendar | Yves | Pro: Integrates well with phones and tools. Con: your data belongs to google |
Just like any list, this list is incomplete. Get in touch and I’ll add your favorite tool…
Last week Michael de la Maza tweeted some interesting tweets about challenges for agile coaches.
The first two I can sometimes feel, the third one, I was not so sure:
Q: What is my third biggest problem?
A: Negotiation
— Michael de la Maza (@hearthealthyscr) January 25, 2020
So I responded with:
For me negotiation skills are very important as an agile coach. I need it when working with teams, c-level & all kind of stakeholders
— Yves Hanoulle 🇪🇺 (@YvesHanoulle) January 26, 2020
And like so many times, that is when things get interesting on twitter.
How did you improve your negotiation skills @YvesHanoulle ?
— Michael de la Maza (@hearthealthyscr) January 27, 2020
My first and still main answer is, practising. Doing a lot of negotiations.
Now let’s make it clear, I made lot’s of mistake in each of these situations. And that’s fine, even if that never felt fine after I did make a mistake.
I know a lot of people who don’t consider most of these conversations negotiating skills. I do.
1) Every conversation where I want one thing, my conversation partner wants something else, and the goal of the conversation is we both walk away happy with the outcome, is for me a negotiation.
2) If one of us feels bad after such a conversation, it was a bad negotiation.
So for me the goal of a negotiation, is not to convince the other to give me what I want.
Last year I found out that what I thought was an agreement with a supplier, was not. He did not agree, yet he never told me. It took me months to understand why this person did not continue with the work he promised to do. He did not want to confront me, he felt doing that would be rude. We both got very frustrated.
After I found out, I’m did my best to regain trust, yet I do know it will take months, not to say years, and I know I have to be very careful as it feels that this person tries to avoid conflict. Where I believe in what Jim McCarthy says: you can not avoid conflict, only postpone it (and it will probably be worse by then). How frustrating it is, it’s not up to me to coach a supplier. This person has no desire to change. As I’m very happy of this person work, I need to adapt my conversations, and triple check if we both agree.
For a long time I had a cassette tape in my house of a conversation I had with a person. The first conversation I had with that person, I had a hung that this person was not sincerely. The next day we had a phone conversation where he made lots of promises, I felt he would not keep them. So I taped that whole conversation.
I really wanted the job as I was sure I was going to learn a lot (one of my main drivers to become independent) and I knew I would love the job & the colleagues.
I wasn’t sure about the boss. Although I think that he was a genius business builder, he was also asking me and my colleagues to lie to the clients, which I refused.
In the end, he did indeed not keep his promises and that did cost me a lot of money. Yet at some point I decided, <I knew from the start this person could not be trusted. I consider that money a payment for not listening to my gut feeling.> That never happened again. I trust people by default, yet if something tells me, don’t trust this person… I listen and I walk away.
I know that next to many conversations, I read a lot of books. Here is a quick list of books that I think learned me something about communication and negotiating. (In no particular order, other then seeing them in my library)
Also tons of books on parenting and working on my relation…
Adviced by friends:
A friend one advice me the netflix serie: House of Cards, as I’m not a big television serie fan, I never did.
What books, movies or series do you know that teached you something about negotiating?
Tweet them out to me, and I’ll add them here.