I'm a big fan of Sam Kaner's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making, ISBN 0-86571-347-2. I highly recommend it to anyone who leads meetings. In my post on Decide as a Team, I wrote about using a method called Roman Evaluation to reach a decision. Kaner talks about a more formal concept he calls Gradient of Agreement in his book. I am less … [Read more...]
Word Choices — We — Part 2
In my first entry about the word "we," I argued using the words "We decided to..." often create ambiguity. I suggested asking yourself several questions to reduce ambiguity either when you hear those words or when you are about to say them. In this entry, I will lay out the case for when using the words "We decided … [Read more...]
Rethinking Stand-Up Meetings, Part 2
I argued in my first article about stand-up meetings that the right participants were the key to a successful meeting rather than whether the participants were standing up or sitting down. Despite my dislike for forcing people to stand up, I mentioned in that article my positive regard for other elements of the standard stand-up meeting. What … [Read more...]
Rethinking Stand-Up Meetings, Part 1
Stand-up meetings are popular in software development organizations now. What makes a stand-up meeting more effective than a traditional meeting to socialize status information? Nothing. The effectiveness of a stand-up meeting, like the traditional status meeting, depends on the participants. If you have the right people at the meeting, … [Read more...]
Your Team’s Answer is Wrong, Part 2
In response to my post entitled Your Team's Answer is Wrong, my colleague Bob Lee writes -- (You wrote) "The trainers passed out a copy of the correct answer for the case study to all of us." (emphasis added) The definite article the as opposed to the indefinite article a is a killer here. Had they framed their solution as a … [Read more...]