PMI Global Insights

Chalk Talk - A Valuable Problem Solving Tool

For some strange reason, I find myself blogging about chalk and chalkboards for a second time.  No, I’m not hung up on them. But, yes, I *do* enjoy good old-fashioned slate and the smell of dusty chalk.  But – that’s not the purpose of the blog.

To make things even more confusing they’ve started painting the inside walls of classrooms where I often show up at - with “whiteboard” paint.  Now that bugs me.   A student walked right up to the wall and started drawing on it with a marker!  It looked pretty much like any other wall.   I kept yelling it was just a wall!   Some of her quicker witted fellow students whipped out their phones and announced, “This is going on Facebook!”  But of course, they were all having a fine time with my old-man ignorance and it was a “white wall.” 

OK.  Back to Chalk-talk. 

Sometimes at NASA, working as a team we’d come across a problem that just seemed impossible.  We’d work for days, sometimes weeks trying to solve a single problem.  I remember multiple times staying up for 30 hours in a row trying to solve one problem – not recommended!  This sort of effort required third-shift coffee, cherry pies from the vending machines and lots of second-hand smoke.  

What’s Third shift coffee?  Each preceding shift was honor bound to have a pot of coffee waiting for the next arriving shift.  So, the guys on second shift, at around 11PM would make an extra strong pot for the third shifters arriving at 11:30 PM.  The first thing a real third shifter would do is to add a tablespoon of instant coffee to each cup.  Everyone knew what third-shift coffee was like.  A hard (not necessarily big) problem required around-the clock third-shift coffee. 

None of this is healthy, smart or conducive to solving complex technical or mathematical problems.  But… we did it.  Our (very good) branch chief would drop in from time to time, ask a few questions and then wander off.  At some point, based upon his instincts, he would call for a “CHALK-TALK.”  This meant we’d have to leave wherever we were working, go to a new / different conference room.  And take turns standing up in front of a chalkboard explaining what the problem was and how we thought it could be fixed.  We each took turns doing this.   

I can’t remember a single time when this method didn’t get us to a solution. We were all tired, grumpy, short-tempered and wired with caffeine, but it worked. Sometimes someone would be talking at the board and the solution would hit us all at-the-same-time like a hammer.  Other times, parts of the group needed to explain it to the others.  A few times only one person would see the solution and explain it to everyone else.   Again, no rules and not much of a pattern fell out.  But I can think of a few guidelines...

Guidelines:

1. Research the problem until you know all about it.  Exhaust all possibilities.
2. Have a “judge” call for “chalk talk” time.
3. Remove the group from the area of the problem – the more different the environment is, the better
4. Have a blackboard, chalk and eraser (OK, whiteboard markers….)
5. Let one of the group play “teacher” first.  If the solution doesn’t come, someone else takes a turn.  They can restart or build on whatever is on the board
6. Participants don’t have to be quiet.  I remember them being QUITE vocal.  This involved name-calling, whistling, foot-stamping, whatever… But those sitting couldn’t stop the person with the chalk from expressing what they thought the problem or the path to the solution was.  The chalk was the power.
7. The person with the chalk could give up at any time.  Someone would have to pick up the chalk, but hopefully not someone who just was “up.”

When a solution is arrived at – everyone knew it.  It was like the room filled with water.  Quiet.  People looked at each other.  Eyebrows went up.  Some people went home to sleep right then!  Other’s went back to (regular) work to try the arrived-at solution

This past summer my 15-year old son was doing a course on careers. For his last assignment, he had to interview someone about how they chose their career and how it had progressed over time, so he decided to interview me. His last question was “what single piece of advice would you give someone starting out in life and career?”

I thought about it for a bit, and realizing what I said could really make a difference in how he looked at his life ahead, I gave him a simple four-word answer – learn how to learn.

My answer was based on a few realizations that I had based on my own career as well as the great job market uncertainties and opportunities that face today’s youth due to IoT, AI, robotics, climate change, social upheaval, an aging population – the list goes on.

I’ve probably changed directions in my IT/PM career a dozen times or more. It  is highly probable that most people under the age of forty (and even those above) will need to change career directions multiple times in their working life. As I noted in my previous post, my career changes were sometimes out of necessity, and sometimes for fun. I believe that one of the reasons that it was possible for me to keep reinventing myself, was because I like to learn new things.

Truth be told, at times I’m probably a bit too obsessed with it, but I do think it is what has kept me relevant, engaged, worthwhile to others, and most of all, worthwhile to myself. I am fascinated to read people who get things at a different level and then see if it can be applied at a practical level. I like to find out where some of the great ideas of our time came from and how they have morphed over time.

It’s part curiosity, part sheer joy in finding out things I never knew. 

Another reason I gave my son those four words as my advice is because we can never know everything. As soon as we can accept that reality, we can also accept the need to always be ready to learn. We won't know where those opportunities are until they are in front of us. Knowing that we can be ready to learn at any moment, is actually quite liberating. We don't need to be afraid of what we don't know. We also no longer feel the urge to hide not knowing something - it becomes just another thing we pick up along the way as we need it. 

There has been much talk over the years about "the learning organization". Organizations are made up of flesh and blood people (at least for now they mostly are). It is the people who learn. So my take is that to say organizations learn is to accord them anthropomorphistic qualities. We shouldn't. It's just people trying to find their way.

Uncertainty and ambiguity is the new reality. Knowing how to learn, and always being ready to learn, equips us for that reality - no matter our age.

As I approach sixty, I am in awe of people like Russel Ackoff, who at eighty is still learning and making a difference. Search for “A Lifetime of Systems Thinking” and have a read of a brilliant mind (hey, you gotta do some work here and show you are least a little bit curious!).

Over the course of the 2017 PMI Global Congress, you’ll have a chance to learn from some other bright minds and from each other. Bright minds like my friend and fellow Expert Karen Chovan who will be talking about The Necessary Culture for Soaring Performance on October 29th at 4:45PM .

Learning how to learn is also becoming a "thing" that itself can be studied. One of the most popular courses on Coursera is Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects which I intend to take before Global Congress. I'll let you know in a future post how it went.

The world of projects is also undergoing significant change and this trend will continue. What is valuable today may be less so tomorrow. What is mere idea or not even known today, may be the thing of tomorrow. Reinventing ourselves can be scary or enjoyable. It's a choice that most people will have to make at some point if they want to continue to make a difference. Knowing how to learn can make it not only enjoyable, but gives us options and choice.

As long we as are willing and ready to learn, we get to continue to make a difference.

I'd be interested to hear the community's thoughts on learning and reinventing ourselves so we can continue to make a difference.

If you’d like to talk strategic intent, adaptive strategy, back-casting over forecasting, outcomes over outputs, any of the agilities, or pretty much anything you think I may be able to help you with in making a difference in your world, here is my availability during the conference:

• Saturday the 28^th from 1:30 to 4:30
• Sunday the 29^th from 3:00 to 5:00
• Monday the 30^th from 9:00 to 12:00

Who is an Expert?  What makes them an expert? 

I don’t pretend to be a cognitive scientist, nor have I done much research on the topic – but it is a fascinating field.  And there is a *lot* of literature, books, theses, and studies on the topic to choose from all the way back to Plato and perhaps before.  This blog entry is based upon what I’ve read plus personal opinions and thoughts.  The question “What is an Expert” was planted in my brain by the good folks at ProjectManagement.com who have asked me (and others) to participate in “Ask the Experts.”  

Please let me know if you disagree or feel I need to add something!   

An expert is generally considered to be a person with extensive knowledge or ability based on a combination of personal research, experience and occupation and in a discipline.  In our case, Project Management and related topics.

I found a  scale by which experts can be judged within a specific field (Germain's scale 2006) that  gives some interesting hints…

• Specific education, training, and knowledge
• Required qualifications
• Ability to assess importance in work-related situations
• Capability to improve themselves
• Intuition
• Self-assurance and confidence in their knowledge

More down to earth definitions exist.  Mark Twain defined an expert as "an ordinary fellow from another town." Will Rogers described an expert as "A man fifty miles from home with a briefcase."

Application to Project Management

I’d going to tailor this write-up for Project Management as well as drift away from academic studies and simply express my own views.

1. Has experience: There is clearly a level of experience required to be an PM expert.  My guess is that 10+ years as a full-time PM are required.  This experience can be either specific to a field or it could be spread across many different fields that have projects.  I don’t think that makes much difference.

2. Survived failures: I also believe that an expert has had a lot of failures, and made a lot of mistakes; big and small.  I don’t mean to say that an expert always fails, or only fails, but that their projects stumble and recover or may even fail outright. That’s the hard learning that occurs during the years of experience in number 1 above.   Perhaps if a project manager had never had a failure, they could not be an expert… 

3. Is observational:  A PM is always observing what works, what doesn’t what almost worked and is thinking about what to do next time.  So, combined with item 2, It’s not just about recovering from mistakes, it’s about recovering the project in the smartest, best way and learning what *not* to do next time and how to avoid getting into that mess again.   They also observe small details in the project’s operation that don’t appear to be important.  These are all signs that can be read and parsed out to see how things are going and what the general health of the project is. 

4. Highly Confident: An expert PM has confidence in what they say and do.  Of course, this combined with number 2 makes for a wild ride.  We’re letting loose people that, with confidence – make mistakes and then recover, which leads me to point number 5.

5. Story Teller:  I’d like to substitute the often-quoted top-job of a PM is communication with the most important skill a PM has is 'Story Telling'.  I’m not talking about making up stories, I mean explaining what has happened, or what is expected to happen in an easy-to-follow cogent fashion.  *They don’t lose the listener*.  How story telling is learned is something I’m still struggling with.  I have a few ideas, but of course practice helps!

6. Strong Sense of Mission: The expert Project Manager carries within them a “sense of mission” in other words, a sense of the value of the project.   It’s the answer to “Why are we doing this anyway?   Every action, decision and communication is made with the internalized, overriding strong sense of mission of the project.  It’s expressed in meetings, to people working on the project, to stakeholders – everyone and, the PM believes it… strongly.

7. Feels the Flow of the Project:  Once all the above are in-place, confident, has failed (and recovered) many times can tell the story of the failure, and can sense the smallest details of a project and how they inter-relate, they’ve arrived.  I’d declare them to be an expert. 

OH!  They’d have to have at least one PMI certification as well! 

I can’t believe it’s been a year since I had the privilege of attending PMI Global Congress 2016 in San Diego as part of the Ask the Experts cadre. I once again have been afforded the privilege of attending, this time in Chicago from October 28-30, 2017!

The Ask the Experts sessions are designed for attendees like you to have access to your peers in the profession who may have been there, done that, but also more than likely have a few scars to show for it. The point to scars is that while they may hurt at the time of the injury, you tend not to forget their lessons, well most of them anyway.

In the lead up to this year’s event I thought I’d provide a little insight for attendees for who I am (besides the scars side of it), where I came from, where I’ve been, where I’m going, and what drives me. In so doing, I’m hoping that it will resonate with a few of you who will be attending, and that’ll cause you to want to come share a bit about yourself with me. And while doing that, feel free to off-load some of your challenges with me and I’ll see if I can offer some insights that you might find helpful.

So who is Larry anyway?

I was born on a dark and stormy night in the middle of the north Atlantic (closer to reality than you may believe as my house was less than 50 feet from the ocean) on March 5, 1958, in a very small town in Newfoundland, Canada.  I graduated with a B.Sc. in Computer Science in 1977. I started university at 16 and graduated at 19 – it wasn’t because I was that smart, it’s because we only went to grade 11 back then.  Another factoid – the year I started my B.Sc., 1974, was also the year the first graduating class in Computer Science were finishing their degrees at my university! When I turned fifty, my then 5-year old looked up and said (instead of Happy Birthday) “daddy, you’re old!”  So I just saved you the trouble – I’ve been told that already.

I did my entire B.Sc. on punched cards – the PC did not come along until a couple of years after I finished my degree. What’s interesting is that in my first job with the provincial government I did everything – requirements, analysis, design (such as it was), developing, testing and deployments. Sounds a lot like the self-organizing, cross-functional teams in Scrum, doesn’t it? (if one person can be a team, but you get the idea – you had to have multiple competencies).

Starting in the late 1980’s and 1990’s and into the 2000’s I watched the IT industry turn these competencies into roles, and eventually into entire org structures – honestly I never got that, so I mostly ignored It. I was lucky enough to be in small enough size places to get away with ignoring the trend.

Along the way I also picked up an M.A in Public Administration and 20+ industry certifications on project management, Agile and ITIL. That degree is when I had to learn how to write – I was a lousy English student. Then again, I was a lousy software developer too, so lucky for me I learned how to write. So I was clearly not a NASA scientist calibre fellow like David Maynard, another of our gang of experts. But I do have talents – we all do.

We all have those moments that we feel define us in some way. Mine was a little more than a moment – more like three years to be exact.

In the early 1990’s I worked as the Operations Manager for Ice Forecasting Services at Environment Canada in Ottawa as we faced an enormous challenge.

The gist of it is that we would be replacing aircraft that flew around the Arctic and “iceberg alley” off my childhood home of Newfoundland, taking radar images of the ice floes and bergs, with a satellite that would provide full imagery for all of Canada in a single day – 7.5 GB of new data/day in an era when our largest disc drive was 424mb. That was  a lotta data!

This meant a wire-up replacement – networks, all hardware (mini computes, the workstations, etc.), and all of our software. Oh, and we had roughly three years in which to do all of it.

Some things that were pretty obvious pretty quickly:

• Doing things the way we’d always done was not going to work (e.g. taking twelve to eighteen months to build each application)
• As our existing technology was no good, we had to figure out possible options, and quickly
• As our tech was no good, and we couldn’t do what we’d always done, then we’d have to learn new skills and new ways of doing things

Necessity as they say is the mother of invention. We went to see the vendors for hardware and some of the software options that might fit. For example, we wanted four-foot wide screens to display the imagery. The response was, “you guys are about ten years too early” (we heard that a lot).

We decided to go object-oriented for any software we had to build – and none of us knew not an iota of how to code in it. We decided to assemble two small development teams that would remain intact with all the tools they needed. We set targets for having useful things delivered every three to four months. 

We decided to look at what capabilities were common across our applications and build those before we did any application development - we called them Global Services; This was 1992 and a good ten years before Service-Oriented Architecture was a thing. Eighteen months after we had made the decision, the Object Management Group came out with the CORBA Specification and called some of what we had done Common Facilities. Who knew? Once the services were built, we able to rebuild our applications at a rate one per team every 3-5 months.

And in the midst of all that, we also managed to implement automated event and incident management, as well as automated capacity management – also ten years or so before ITIL really became a thing on this side of the pond.  We had to – we only had three system administrators and over 30 servers and a dozen high-end workstations to manage that had limited capacity in a 24x7 operation.

It was the most influential three years in my professional career.

Near the end of the projects we had started, I was asked by Auerbach Publishers in NY to write a couple of chapters for the 1996 edition of their Manager’s Handbook of Local Area Networks (the book talked about almost everything but!) on the design approaches we had used (never did find out how they found me).  That was my introduction to writing beyond project documents.

I left the government after nearly eighteen years in 1995 and went over the private sector as a consultant which I have mostly done since (except for a two year stint as an employee at a telcom company 1999-2001)

My time at Ice had a tremendous influence on everything I did afterwards, especially in how I viewed the project and the software development worlds:

• Establish the big picture early and then work backwards to figure out where to start
• Never rely on the past too much to guide how you look at the future
• Set small goals
• Assemble small teams, equip them well, and provide whatever support they need to do well
• Experiment and adjust quickly
• Always deliver something of value in short increments

(My new friend David from the 2016 congress used a similar approach at NASA before we did it).

As a result of what I learned during that period, I ended up leading teams that applied the same design principles to business process as we did for software design, taking an outcomes-based approach to figure out what we needed to do based on where we wanted to go, creating an  incremental release strategy for what became the world’s largest web-enabled supply chain, and fell almost naturally into an agile way of working before the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was released in 2001 (truth be told, I never came across the Manifesto until 2009).

All of that led me to doing more writing as part of a book series I have labeled The Agility Series (www.TheAgilitySeries.com). You can read more about the series here. The newest book I am working on is called Cultural Agility: Changing our Stories . In fact I’ll be meeting one of my contributing authors to this book for the first time during the conference. Can’t wait!

Besides writing, I am a strategic portfolio executive and trainer, with a decided emphasis on organizational adaptability and agility in all its forms. I am also involved with www.NFPPC.org where we are trying to distill all of the industry frameworks, standards, and methodologies down to their essential WHATs. Why would we do that? Because so many of them overlap with one another and at times create as much confusion as they do clarity. And with all the talk about Agile it would be kind of nice to know which parts of what we already know still has value in helping us do things in a more agile way.

Why do I still work? Besides the obvious reason of having a 15-year old who won’t be leaving home for a while and then has university ahead, it’s because I genuinely like what I do. It’s fun. I have changed careers multiple times within the IT/PM profession over the years. Sometimes out of necessity. Sometimes for fun. I find the more I know, the more I realize how much I really don’t know. It’s fun learning new things and meeting new people and feeling like I am still making a difference.

The feeling of making a difference is a very human emotion. Everyone wants to make a difference and everyone does so in their own way. There also no one way to do that successfully.

If you’d like to talk strategic intent, adaptive strategy, back-casting over forecasting, outcomes over outputs, any of the agilities, or pretty much anything you think I may be able to help you with in making a difference in your world, here is my availability during the conference:

• Saturday the 28^th from 1:30 to 4:30
• Sunday the 29^th from 3:00 to 5:00
• Monday the 30^th from 9:00 to 12:00

Oh, and as much as you think we may be able to help you make a difference, I am guessing that by the end of the conference some of you will help us see things differently and change how we make a difference.

So, let’s meet up in Chicago and make a difference together!

As PMI Global creeps up on us, there is much on the go in preparation behind the scenes - are you ready to attend?

You may have already seen some promotion of the conference - this year is all about Making a Difference...Are you a #DifferenceMaker? Who do you want to be?

You may not be aware, but PMI has a pretty rigorous process to make sure that you will have the best experience when you come on out for their conferences. And PMI Global, aka #PMIcon17, will be no exception.

The organizers have stepped up their game on developing plenty of personalized learning opportunities for you. If you haven't explored it already, I highly recommend you check out their conference Career Series - this year they will have on offer:

• Ask the Expert - where you can book a 20 minute time with several subject matter experts (and yes, self-promo...I will be one of them this year...come and meet me!)
• Gallup Certified Strengths Coaching - where you can do an assessment and discuss your greatest strengths to excel!
• Chicago Testing Center - where you can actually take a PMI exam on site...ready to gain a certification? Get it done here.

These are among just a few things under development, aside from the fabulous keynote speakers we'll hear, and the coaching that each of the speakers are getting to make sure that each and every presentation will be worth YOUR while to go and attend.

So, with all of this, I hope you have registered, have your travel plans finalized, and have begun to determine the presentations you want to hear - the lineup can be found here to start marking the calendar in your PMI Mobile app! 

Here's to hoping you have picked my all-new and updated presentation on October 29th, to learn about the "Necessary Culture for Soaring Performance" and I hope to meet you there!