Category Archives: RealOptions

Trust Experiment — Options

Second Order Ignorance

I know some of the things I can do, as I’ve done them before. Develop software, build teams, lead people towards a purpose, help organisations unleashing their people’s potential… I will go into more detail in a later post.

Me at Play4Agile, explaining Back of the Room Training

Then there are things that I know I can’t or don’t want to do, like writing specifications, drawing org charts, or running a marathon.

I’m looking for things I might be able to learn given the right challenge… And most interesting out of the things I could learn are those which would not occur to me myself. The things I don’t yet know that I could do or learn them. Talents, skills, challenges I just didn’t think of or haven’t been aware of yet. Continue reading →

Trust Experiment, Day 1

Some Data

Today, my blog had more than 500 views, 432 of which were of the new post. Thank you! The referrers astonished me, as Google+ apparently was way more effective than Twitter:

Referrer		Views
Google+		142
Twitter		97
Facebook		23

My tweet was retweeted 21 times, the post on google was +1′d 27 and reshared 17 times… Thank you!

Responses

Many of you have already used comments, conversations, and email to indicate that you wish me well, like this experiment, want to work with me… I’m grateful. I’ve never done stage-diving, or crowd-surfing as Amanda calls it in her video, and I guess this it how that must feel like.

I’ll keep you updated on my progress.

Questions

Many have asked about what specifically I want. Or what I can do. I plan to continue writing over the next few days to frame this experiment in a more specific way. I didn’t do that at the start as I didn’t want to limit my options. I want to be independent in order to find out what I can do, and I won’t do that if I keep doing what I did before. You may still surprise me:-)

Good night. It’s been a beautiful day.

Trust Experiment

26 Replies

I decided to become independent, I’ll be available for work from June. I am starting this with an experiment, employing the connections I made in recent years to create options for work and collaboration. I do this because I trust you, and trust myself. I specifically trust you to give me opportunities for work.

Updates:

I got my first taste of the agile community in 2009. Since then, I attended and organized coach camps, connected to many active peers through Twitter, supported the growing ALE network… We co-created a lot of events and connected a lot of people. I have enjoyed myself immensely doing this, and learned a lot. I honed my coaching and leadership skills and now feel I’m up for new challenges.

Continue reading →

20 or 12 Discoveries

1 Reply

2012 was a year of awesome growth and learning for me, some deliberate, some serendipitous. It turned out to be, again, the most intensive and insightful year of my life. I guess that’s a side effect of personal growth and living intensively: more vulnerability, increased presence, more community, more awareness, more (apparent) real options.

Deliberate Discovery (“Lone Wolf” by HKD)

To increase probabilities of me properly digesting, discerning and sharing this learning I plan to articulate the topics, techniques and practices I discovered in a sequence of blog posts.
I started to draft a list last week and quickly realised I need to ask you for help: I believe I simply do not remember everything that I discovered…

Please Help Me

So I ask you to complete and enrich the list below. Specifically, I’m interested in:

A topic (book, community, practice, you name it) that you talked about or worked on with me in 2012 that is not on this list and that you consider important and valuable.
If you’d like to work with me on one of the topics (no matter if it’s on my list already or you suggest it) I’m happy to collaborate on a post (or something else…)
If you are interested in some of the topics on the list more than in others and want me to write on it sooner, indicate your interest and I’ll focus accordingly.

This is my draft list, I’ll update it as comments come in:

Real Options—A Mindset

Magnificence Mantra

4 Replies

Presence

We are good,
Destined to be great.

Being great
Working together
We create a context
For magnificence.

Sometimes, we hesitate.
We surrender to the past.
We want certainty
Like to feel safe
While certainty inhibits growth
Safety inhibits magnificence
By limiting our options,
Our awareness
Our ability to see and absorb
Greatness.

We need to ask for help.
We need to raise awareness
Of our biases,
Expectations,
Beliefs.
Awareness of how these
Limit our options,
Limit our creative minds,
Limit our connections,
Block the relational flow of love
We need to create magnificence.

Asking for help
Expresses our vulnerability
Enables generosity
And bonds us to our goal
And to each other.

By asking for help
We uncover the things
We don’t know we don’t know
We forge a shared vision
Out of mastery and purpose
To deliberately discover
A magnificent future.

Our shared vision
Our vulnerable, generous connectedness
Creates a landscape,
A phase space,
A platform, a context,
For new and better options
To emerge.

We are pioneers
Enjoying the New
Explorers
Stretching the potential of the present
Nomads
Seeking places which need us
Visiting influencers
Inspiring to ask for help.

The journey
will sometimes be fun,
sometimes tenuous,
sometimes exhausting.
We remind each other
to stop,
breathe,
and regain our balance.

We create safe spaces
To experiment
To audaciously collaborate
To love
To dance with uncertainty.

We will not stop.
We will help and ask for help
As long
As you
Consider certainty
Interesting.

Every day,
In every way,
We get better
And better
And better.
Magnificent.

Thank you
Christiane
Pascal Pinck
Siraj Sirajuddin
Ivana Gancheva
Melli Meinen
Chris Matts
Liz Keogh
Tobias Mayer
Martin Kearns
Jim McCarthy
For loving responses
When I asked for help.

Thank you
Derek Wade
Matt Barcomb
Curtis Cooley
For challenging immersive dialogue
That pulled me
To write this.

Thoughts on Words: Change

7 Replies

Thinking is shaped by the words we use. Management thinking is shaped by the words managers use and are used to. If we want us to evolve our mindset, we must stop to use words that carry a history of bad meaning with them. Let’s start to create a new language to talk about business that explicitly avoids mistakes made in the past.

Amaani Sirajuddin, 14, picturing real options

Change: Fearless? Hard?

If we perceive our world with the expectation of stability, we frame attempts at innovation as change. If we perceive our world with the expectation of growth, we frame new possibilities as real options.

To embrace change, we need to overcome fear, and we perceive trying new things as hard. Yet this is just the result of our internal perception of the outside and our sense making of that perception—and we choose how to perceive the world. We create the frames for our sense making, thereby shaping and co-creating our world.

Real Options: Explore Betterness

Real options are a frame that facilitates a positive view of uncertainty. They act as bookmarks when we explore the potential of the present, they mark ideas which might lead us to a better future. Options are based on assumptions. We run safe-to-fail experiments to validate the assumptions and better know the value of our options, leading to validated learning.

Life is Uncertainty

Life is Growth. Stability is Death. As long as we live, we grow, we evolve, we explore our potential. The same holds true for organisations.
The two pillars of Lean are respect people and continuously improve.
If improvement feels like “making change” to us… How can it ever become continuous, and natural?
As long as we feel “changed” we don’t really own the improvement flow… And we’ll never truly transform into a Kaizen mindset.
Transformation always starts within ourselves. And it does naturally if we let it happen. Growth is sustainable by nature:)
So shouldn’t we just let go of the past so that our natural ability to grow and transform stops feeling like change?

Risk Management

A closing thought: Change Management and Real Options are both methods that could be labeled risk management. Change highlights the threats, Real Options the opportunities. You are free to choose.

Gratitude

This post is based on conversations with, thoughts and feedback from Umair Haque, Bob Marshall, Chris Matts, Stephen Parry, Pascal Pinck, Eric Ries, Siraj Sirajuddin, Dave Snowden, Andrea Tomasini, and many more… Thank you for your inspirations.
Siraj pointed out that thinking creates words… Which is true, just as my opening sentence. That discourse is a topic for other posts:-)

Olaf Lewitz

Agile: Question Systems. Trust People. Embrace Ambiguity. Increase Options. Unleash Potential.