Rebuilding Communities of Practice

In this episode, we discuss how to re-engage Agile Communities of Practice during periods of declining participation by clarifying their purpose, fostering psychological safety, rotating facilitators, designing for active involvement, and introducing new, relevant topics to keep the community thriving. 

Join Shawna Cullinan, Jörg Pietruszka,  Diana Larsen,  Sheila Eckert, Sheila McGrath, April Mills,  Hendrik Esser, Ray Arell, and all the callers to the monthly live event as we explore this topic.  For details on the next live event or how to support our show, please visit  acnpodcast.org.

Transcript

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Introduction

Music 0:26

<Intro Music>

Ray Arell 0:33

Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the Agile Community Network. My name's Ray Arell. I'm the moderator and one of the hosts of this monthly podcast and live event. We go through a number of different topics. If you're new to Agile, it doesn't matter. If you've been in Agile for a long time, we want to hear those perspectives. That's what builds great community. I'd like to thank the sponsors of the show, as well as the people who listen to the podcast, because that's what helps to keep us going. We also have supporting members that They go up to acnpodcast.org. They make donations for us, which keeps our webinar system paid for. It helps us to be able to produce the show on a monthly basis. So thank you for everyone who has been helping us along the years. We have some sponsors that also contribute either in-kind contribution in time, as well as financial dollars to help pay for those things I just talked about. The Agile Alliance, Cicada Organizational Agility, Diana Larsen.com, Engine for Change and New Agility And then we have a handful of members that have actually become a part of our community on New Agility. Those dollars also help to go support the show as well. I'm joined monthly by a set of co-hosts. Not every one of them makes it each time, but the co-hosts help to get the conversation rolling. That includes Shauna, Diana, Jorg, Sheila Eckhart, Sheila McGrath, April Mills, and Hendrick. They have been supporting the show for years. They offer their insights and give us an ability to encircle the space that we're looking at and help to keep the campfire going as we go through the conversation.

Ray Arell 2:11

Today's

Rebuilding Communities of Practice

Ray Arell 2:12

topic spans from a couple of different observations that I've had over the last couple of months. I'll relate this directly to the Agile community. When I go to events at Agile PDX, which is here in Portland or other open space places that are typically free to go to, I've noticed a bit of a downturn in the community. If you went to the Agile conference over in Denver, there were far less people that were there this year than in prior years. And that's, this could be an economic factors. It could be a whole set of different things associated to it. But what I've noticed is, is that Agile as a community appears, and I'll use the word appear, it seems to be a little more silent than it used to be. And this is something I really want to fix. Having built some communities of practice in the past, I wanted to just go through my perspective on how rebuilding community works or building a new community. And I approach it from a couple different things, which is one, we need to have a purpose of why we're getting together. And that purpose is for us to learn about Agile in the case of the Agile community, or it might be for other job-related things that we're doing, or it could be for an adjacent community. could be any purpose. But it sparks us to say that these are the things we're going to talk about. This is the direction that we're going to go. There's the growth phase with it, which is starting with a group of people to get together. And then you really want to have a design for participation. I try to keep the monologue in the front of this kind of light because I want to hear from you. I want to get the participation going. And really, we want to get into the meat of the Provide scaffolding, not bureaucracy. We don't want to create rules that stifle sharing great stories. And really, if you think about what most communities, the center of the communities are those stories, the stories of wins, the stories of how we might have not been so successful, key learnings that we had, and opening that up for a lot of people to go share those around. And then renew. From time to time, communities of practice, I've seen the ones that I've done internal to companies, they might start off really strong and everyone's in high attendance, and then suddenly you see it start to wean. I think that comes from the fact that we don't check the pulse of the community that often and really think about how can we experiment with the formats, how can we experiment with the things that we do in order to foster the evolution of the community. In Agile, we have a manifesto, and it's been, I would say, and please don't take this wrong, but It's been pretty stagnant for 20 years. It's a historical document, as we've talked about before. The question is, are there steps we can take to refresh it or still point back to the original document year over year as there's new trends in the environment? How can we keep it fresh? How can we keep people coming in and joining? And if people leave, how do we invite them back? How do we bring them back to our community? With that, what I'd like to hear is, do you have your own story about a great community of practice success or learning and I reframe the word failure into learning because I believe that all there's not really truly a catastrophic failure it's really just about us learning together what steps would you add to the list that I just gave is there anything that you would add to keep a community vibrant or to grow community what part of agile needs to evolve to keep it relevant I'd love to hear that as well if this whole line of questioning is interesting, but you have a different purpose in mind in order to come here today, you're welcome to ask that question of the moderators and the group, and we can talk about that as well. So with that, to get us going, Shauna, you haven't been here for a few months. Love to hear your perspective.

Shawna Cullian 6:25

Thanks, Ray. So there's quite a few things to peel out from here. I think I'm going to focus on community of practice, a community as a whole. I have a community of practice that I started pulling some key people from different organizations that I worked in that I thought were talking about the same things and would be really excited to come together. We started in 2021 towards the end of the pandemic. That community of practice is still going on today. We do it once a month. One of the things that I think was is really important with any community of practice is to understand and start with a shared why. Remind everybody why we're coming together, ensure that we all have the same values. What are we here to share? Is it knowledge? Is it building skills? Is it solving problems? Why are we here and coming together so that we can level step and make sure that we all have that common purpose? And so from there, we can center ourselves on what the discussions every time we come together can really be about. And so those having tangible outcomes, not just using communities of practice to feel like it's another meeting as a place to vent or complain. I think that's not always great in bringing people together and it kind of reinforces a negative energy. I really like to have people come to the table with the problems that they are trying to solve. Thinking ahead of time, one of us will play the group and say, what kind of problems are you facing today that this group can help you with? And we'll use that time to do that. I think ensuring to keep it fresh, rotating facilitation, rotating who's coming in and speaking about or bringing their thing to the table that they want this group to problem solve on is really important. And going back to the why, revisiting that purpose every six months. What is every six to 12 months? Is this working? Is it not working? What do we need to do to change the format of this? But I think it's really important to bring things that you can actively talk on. If you just show up and say, what are we going to talk about today without having a clear purpose, really people start losing interest. Those are some key things about the community of practice.

Ray Arell 8:55

I'm kind of curious when you're taking the pulse of the group and you do that first initial chartering of the group and maybe these are the five I'm curious, how do you not make three or four people who might have their idea not chosen?

Shawna Cullian 9:19

This is why I think it's important to keep the communities of practice smaller. I have found that larger communities of practice or communities that you are bringing to the table, together. Oftentimes voices can feel drawn out and heard. My community of practice has four to five people at any given time that attend. If you're looking for a brown bag or a reading group or something like that, then, you know, that's less intimate. That may have a different purpose. Then I think it's good to bring more people in. But I think having an intimate group where people feel safe to talk about things is important as part of the community. of practice.

Ray Arell 10:03

That makes a lot of sense. I'm curious, as the facilitator, are you helping to like say those three people, they have something in common and those people have something in common? Are you encouraging them somehow to get together and work on that stuff and then come back to the main group? What is your facilitation?

Shawna Cullian 10:18

I mean, at this point, in the beginning, it was a little more facilitated because people were just getting to know each other. At this point, I think everybody has established pretty strong relationships. And so So, you know, they they are chatting outside of the community of practice and they're attending each other. You know, they all have their own events that they'll run. And within that community, everybody's participating in each other's events. And we've just kind of all become friends. And so it hasn't been such a it's no longer a poll. Right. It's like we enjoy being together. OK,

Ray Arell 10:53

that is awesome. Thank you so much for that. Let's see, Scott, what do you have on this? Hey, good to hear from you.

Scott 11:02

So. So I started a community of practice a while back with new scrum masters that were interested in learning more about the role. In the beginning of that community of practice, we met every other week for an hour. I would throw out in Miro a thought-provoking question, like, how do you promote continuous improvement within your team? Or how do you build psychological safety within your team so that we have something to kick us off with? The participants were able to add either with a written card or verbally their thoughts around these topics. If these topics morphed into different topics throughout the hour, that was fine as well. As the group progressed, I got the feeling it seemed more like a cohort than a community of practice. So I started asking other folks within the team to start coming with their own thoughts or questions or if there were topics they wanted to present to the team to go ahead and do that. So we've been doing that lately over the past couple of months. And to some of the comments already made, right after this meeting, I asked somebody else on a team to conduct a retro with the team to see where we're at, where we can improve. What should we do more of? What should we do less of to see if we can bring this and iterate it to the next level?

Ray Arell 12:22

Oh, nice. So I'm kind of curious on the Miro perspective. I don't think we do enough asynchronous things in communities of practice. We do better in circles and face-to-face. to face when we're together. In your Miro model, are you actually having some of that work go on asynchronous? And you said as the ideas evolve, you're allowing that to grow in the background?

Scott 12:47

Well, it really all happens together. So basically what happens, and again, we're all remote. So being able to do this in person is not really something we can accommodate. We do the best we can by using a tool like Miro, where it's a question I put on the screen in a box. And then I have a whole bunch of sticky notes. I give the group a few minutes to say, if you have anything that you want to talk about related to this question, anything you're doing with your team currently that you want to share, go ahead and put that on a sticky, put it on the board, and we'll just go around the room and talk about these different things and see if we can come up with ideas that you may be able to bring back to your team. At the end of the day, it's trying to help these new scrum masters generate options that they can go help their teams with so that hopefully their teams are better tomorrow than they are today.

Ray Arell 13:39

Thank you for that. Diana Larson, what'd you have?

Diana Larsen 13:43

Yeah, I was intrigued by another Scott, Scott Sampson, who was asking about who gets invited and whether or not the business would get involved or invited. Participation in the community of practice is a significant thing to look at. Every community of practice I have been involved with has been a community of practitioners focused on a certain area. You could have a community of practice of the business folks, the product folks or so-and-so, but it's generally, unless you're really enlarging the idea of what the practice involves, you're not going to include anyone who might say, whose presence might suppress the participation of the general group you were intending to have. So that, and I think there's some important things to look at there. I mean, like you mentioned retrospectives, and if we're doing team retrospectives, it's only for the team. If we're doing a release retrospective, we might have some business people there or some you know, so on. So I hold to the same rules about the community of practices that I get involved in. And mine very often are topical. Like I'm in a community of practice that meets in person annually, but also has a, it's not a Slack, but like a Slack thing that we use in between when we meet annually. That is all about facilitating retrospectives. So it's a community of practice of retrospective facilitators. Until someone has really expressed an interest in how they facilitate retrospectives or how they would like to learn more about facilitating retrospectives, that wouldn't be someone that we would necessarily invite to be part of the group. It's how do you define who participates in this particular group? So I just wanted to throw that in because I saw Scott's question there and I want to make sure it got an answer.

Ray Arell 16:04

Well, I thought that that's a great answer. I'm curious. And you are a very talented facilitator. I've watched you work. I don't know, you know, it's sort of like, hey, Dumbledore, how do you do this magic trick? How do you get an individual that invites themselves that really shouldn't be there? How do you deal with that? I've had that happen multiple times. I believe in boundaries.

Diana Larsen 16:32

As maybe you could tell from my earlier answer. I believe that there are people that inclusion is a benefit and that inclusion has boundaries as well. And so a person needs to have a reason for being there, or I would invite them not to come. In the communities of practice I'm a part of, it's not just my responsibility to say, no, this this isn't your kind of meeting or this isn't a meeting where we have observers, for instance. If you're just coming to observe this meeting, unless you have an intention to join it and participate later, this isn't a meeting we want you. I don't believe everybody has standing in every single meeting. So I think you have to establish, does this person have standing in this meeting or not? Do they have something to contribute or some way to benefit from it. That's usually my heuristic. Will you both benefit and contribute to this meeting? Then you're somebody that we would love to have here. If you just are coming to take what you can get, not contribute, then you don't have a reason to be here. Who is it that the observer is the observed? Likely to affect the course of this meeting in maybe intended or unintended ways, but not in beneficial ways. Usually it's a group responsibility for who they invite or don't invite. It's not just one person's responsibility to make that happen.

Ray Arell 18:15

Yeah, I was more curious about when you vote somebody off the island. Is it the dear sir or madam, thank you very much for attending our community of practice. We'd like to inform you. I'm not sure how formal you get there. You just use the personal conversation with the person. I feel

Diana Larsen 18:30

like Scott's comment in the chat.

Ray Arell 18:32

You have no power here. You have no power. You have to have faith to use that manifesto. Well, thank you for that. Dennis, what do you have?

Dennis 18:44

Oh, hi, Ray. Ray, you had the question, why is engagement lower today in some of the communities of practice? And I've got a long-term observation because I've been involved in stuff way before Agile where we had to build communities of practice to have effective technology transfer. In a challenging employment environment, we are all reluctant to admit that we are still learning. We pretend that our skill set is complete. To run off to a community of practice or a seminar would be a sign of weakness. And in the community of practice environment, why share what we know with our potential competitors? Even if it's an internal community of practice, if layoffs are coming, other people in our company are potential competitors for us. You know, we want them to be laid off before us. Basically, we've lost the spirit of exploration and can't imagine a win-win collaboration. I don't know what the solution is, except maybe we need to socialize more about some of the win-win successes we've had, grow from that and say, hey, you could be part of this process too. I think what we're having is cycles where we're We say, oh, we really want to learn, come up to speed. And then the other part of the cycle is just fear. That's interesting.

Ray Arell 20:22

That's an interesting perspective. Knowledge hoarding was an interesting trend way back when. I've seen it. Maybe that is some root cause to that. I appreciate your opinion on that. April Mills, what do you have?

April Mills 20:36

I'm maybe coming from a different perspective, thinking about a decade ago, what it looked like when we revealed Agile community and today to the last comments point about the sense of competition within companies and outside of companies that shift from we need each other in order to make this work to a scarcity mindset. There might not be enough for all of us to do. I think it's one of my most concerning trends that seems to be happening. And I think for those of us who join a call like this, it's our opportunity to actually help reframe that scarcity back to abundance, which from my perspective, I would say there might not be as many agile coded jobs, not agile coding, but coded, right? An agile coach or a scrum master or others in organizations of the future. But there is an abundance need for agile thinking and being agile in order for companies to thrive now and in the future. I would say it's an opportunity for those of us who are passionate about the practice of being agile to lean into community and encourage others to join us by broadening it out from just getting agile positions or how to succeed in agile positions to being agile and change agents and the attributed habits, behaviors, and mindsets across organizations. That would help us rebuild community in the places where we've lost it and strengthen our own confidence and our own networks, which helps us long-term for our own careers and our own sanity.

Ray Arell 22:35

I think it's kind of curious that our old alma mater, Intel Corp, in their latest announcement of another set of layoffs, said that they're doing it to rebuild agility. I mean, directly to be a more agile organization. Not quite sure how that equates when you have a lot more work on people's plates, but it's just interesting. I mean, did you read that? Did you have a perspective on that?

April Mills 23:02

Yeah, I think, unfortunately, a lot of that ends up being core We say what we want to say so that people feel good about what we're saying. Engineering first, agile. These are things which are good to say, but hard to do in practice. And we've seen that a lot, not just at our alma mater, but plenty of places where the right words come out and the wrong actions continue. Call me a realist in that sense, which is love it. Show me.

Ray Arell 23:28

So it's the marketing side of the business. Exactly. Well, thank you for that. Dylan, what do you have?

Dylan 23:35

Thank you so much. My thing that I was going to talk about has changed as each successive person spoke, which is a great signifier that there's a lot of good information happening here. But I do believe that this, it's not a silver bullet because it's not easy. It's not fire and done. But the outcomes, the impact of the work that we do, I do think will remain an area where someone who is an advocate Thank you so much. So I don't think that the agile movement is dying. I think there is a healthy emphasis on what we contribute when working with the other members of the team, which is where our value has always been.

Ray Arell 24:53

Yeah. I mean, one thing just to clarify, I wasn't saying that I believe there are just as many agile people as there used to be. What I don't see them doing is hanging around each other, sharing their stories.

Dylan 25:04

Good call. Good call.

Ray Arell 25:07

I could use more of that as well. Put your hand back up so I can find you. There you go. Valerie.

Valerie 25:40

Hi. Thank you. I just wanted to kind of expand upon with Dennis what he was sharing. In regards to my experience, I felt like as an agile coach, I would reach out to different areas of people's expertise or interests. So I would have a community of practice for product owners, scrum managers, and agile coaches. And agile coaches were more like trainers because we were doing a lot of getting folks certified. With Dennis's point, my Agile trainers and coaches, I felt like there was a little bit of knowledge hoarding going on. I think that was the words that you used, right? And which I was really surprised because I'm like, okay, you all are kind of like the top layer of, you know, the Agile community and it's like you don't want to share amongst yourselves. So I It was just kind of an interesting takeaway. And the way I would keep the conversations going, I would create a confluence page for each of the communities and ask them to create a topic. So that way, whatever topic was selected, when I would meet on a monthly basis for each of the different communities, it's something of everyone's interest. And then I would record it and then post it onto the confluence page so that those that couldn't make it could listen to it later. Everyone knew it was being recorded. So I felt like everyone spoke openly and freely. But yeah, I just wanted to expand upon Dennis that I was surprised that my top tier, agile, knowledge base people were the last ones engaged to meet on a regular basis. But scrum masters and product owners, for the most part, they were really excited to come to a community or product test.

Ray Arell 27:33

I'm kind of curious, because you hit on that A, asynchronous component again. Now, Confluence is a database, right? It's a page library.

Valerie 27:40

Yes.

Ray Arell 27:41

Correct? Yes, it is. So I'm kind of curious. So you have this discussion, put the video of it, and then you're offering it wide, which I think is great. I think most communities of practice, time zones really get in the way. Do you then leave the page open and allow people to put in comments and keep the conversation rolling underneath that?

Valerie 28:01

I did leave it up for comments. It was really more so knowledge-based. if folks wanted to come back to that particular community practice, but maybe because of a meeting, because I would take into consideration the time. But a lot of times that was really hard because it was between the West Coast and maybe Asian time zone. Okay,

Jorg Pietruszka 28:21

makes sense. If I may, I want to pick this apart so that there's community and practice. Very often I prefer to start off with building community because it allows for discovery potential for practice, especially if you're doing this internally with a company where you don't know exactly where they stand on what they're actually doing, bringing some people together who are curious into the new stuff and opening up that discussion. First, getting them to align that, yes, we want to share, yes, we want to improve, yes, we want to talk about it. Keep that up, even if they totally stray from the topic. So somebody new comes in says I don't know exactly how stuff works and it's not about that but we help him that's a good thing to open up minds for trying something new bringing their real talent to bear separating a bit building the community or improving the practice at least at the start of whatever gathering you're doing it's quite helpful in a way and for the practice I find working a lot with engineers that That is something they grab much more easily. In my management role, I put in challenges like, this is how you can help me. So get together and help me with that one, which nobody has ever asked or nobody in management has ever cared of your opinion. But now I want you to answer that question. I'm not going to promise something will happen, but at least you can sometimes vent your frustration. And then they come up with new practices suddenly where they were stuck before because suddenly there's interest. Maybe then on top, there's actually one kind of community that has evolved. My project team and later on, a lot of people showed me that it started as a simple project meeting. Like, where are we? What are we going to do? Nothing specific. But with success in the project, it became much more a community of praise. This is what we achieved. I'm proud of having done this and it now goes on for years. Nice to be here. Tell me what has happened and make me proud of the team. Every week they come up with something big, surprising, but it's really a fun thing to do.

Ray Arell 30:42

I'm kind of curious. Some of the thread of what I've heard through what you've talked about, do you think your role as the steward of one of these communities is just to sometimes give people permission?

Jorg Pietruszka 30:54

Yeah, definitely, especially for the community building stuff that immediately falls to you if you're the first person and to set it up to write the invite. A lot of people just, at least in Germany, with my major friends, they always tend to ask for permission, even ask for permission to, I can only join for the first half of the meeting, should I come? And they can decide for themselves if there's value in they're always welcome to join. So that one is practically easy, but it isn't. A lot of my time is spent of pushing the responsibility to the team. opening this up, especially in the new ones. I always have an opener. I have a warm-up question. I have a topic. I always have a visual for the topic because some people need something to see or read. I try to give room first for the really urgent things. What's really bothering you today? Can we as a community help you get along? And you ask that question 10 times and don't get any response. On the 11th, then some Somebody suddenly says, yeah, I really have something that I want to get out of my head and discuss and get your ideas. I very often find myself talking too much in those situations and nobody stops me. If you have a great idea how to more easily hand over, I would really appreciate that one. A

Ray Arell 32:23

lot of times communities tend to be like a junior high school dance. People are on the walls looking at each other. Will they dance with me or not? I think it does require a special song or something to get people going. It takes time to nurture a community. Thank you for that. Alireza! Are you there?

Alireza 32:45

Yes, I'm here. I wanted to share my story about the CoP. This is about a company about size of 800 to 1,000 game industry, educational game industry. So, so many different practices in there. Animators, illustrators, engineers, QA, like about like 12 different trades in the same team and departments working together. I was there as the enterprise agile coach. We had our weekly center of excellence meetings that everyone were joining. But what I've done was going to and try to find like alliance with someone, finding champions from director of animation, one person from the engineering team, one person from each of these trades that were actually joining us to our community of practice for Agile. But then we started after a couple of months, we started the community of practice in animation where all these animators got together on a weekly, biweekly, monthly basis, but whatever they thought is right. And then just talk about their practice. That was very helpful. Like we saw that they were working on silo from their practice in one team. So we couldn't have three animators in one team. We had several of them in one department, but the whole company had about 20 animators who met weekly or biweekly and shared their practice, their success, what they've done, especially when we hit the AI wave, when like in 2021, 2022, AI started coming, that helped them a lot to keep themselves relevant because there was these one or two people who learned about AI, how to use it in the practice, illustrators, artists, and brought that to that community of practice to help the company to change toward becoming an AI first. So that was a success story. I think it was very, very great and build up energy in different departments, not just our project managers. That's the start.

Ray Arell 34:52

Well, cool. Thank you so much for that. I think that's a great story.

Sheila McGrath 34:54

One of the things that I'm thinking about is in the organizations where I've been, I've been a consultant. And a lot of times the community of practice is set up intentionally or by accident only for employees. Therefore, I and other consultants would not be included. I wouldn't even know they were having meetings. I found out about the meetings and got us included. But in other places, I didn't necessarily know that they were having, they're going off to a meeting. They go off to a lot of meetings that are employee-only meetings that have nothing to do with me. I don't have a lot of experience with being included in the community of practice, unless it was in some organizations, they call it a community of practice, but it's really standards. And they come out with a standard list of things you must do, and that's about it. Yeah, I know that's not what you're thinking of. That's not what it should be, but that's what my reality has been.

Ray Arell 35:57

Well, I'm kind of curious because, I mean, there is one, having been a former director of engineering, I know that there are laws in the United States that say, okay, we've got to make sure that we firewall consultants and regular employees because if you make it look like it's an employee-only event.

Sheila McGrath 36:15

Yeah, I've only explained about, I don't know, eight or ten different NDAs in some organizations So obviously, I'm a risk.

Ray Arell 36:22

Well, I think the challenge is that I think it's just an education of managers and people who run these events, which is it's perfectly OK if you have a voluntary community of practice that consultants can join.

Sheila McGrath 36:36

The other thing you run into is if I've worked in this organization and a competitor's organization, I have to think really carefully about what I say that might be competitive advantage for one or the other. That's true.

Ray Arell 36:50

And that's part of the NDA trick, right? You know where the bodies are buried. So you got to keep those things secret. And I think the competitive van is your secret sauce. And one of the things that, and April probably remembers this, is when we were running an industry consortium where we were sharing knowledge about how we were doing engineering with Agile to other companies. And I remember getting a call from the person in charge of legal counsel for Intel saying, what the heck are you in a meeting with? these companies right now. And he was pissed. He discovered that I was in this meeting and he thought I was going to share like fab details or something. We had to stop the meeting and draft a document that every company had to sign, which says we're not going to go talk about processes or price fixing or any of those things he thought we might be doing. It comes down to the openness of making sure you have good boundaries around And even sometimes contracts. This sometimes works really well. But yeah. Sam, are you there?

Sam 37:57

Yes, I am. Hi. What do you have in mind? So I've been practicing agile for about 17 years, but decided recently to find two years to join. And mostly I'm motivated with the fact that I'm actually starting a startup to build a product that helps scale agile cultures. And I wanted to share my experience with everybody since that's it relates to this topic. It has been very challenging trying to find a community that is helpful. We'll talk about asynchronous LinkedIn groups. forums online I didn't find a lot of help in there and I didn't find it welcoming but posting a simple question but hey I want to talk to agile coaches to see what pay points they have so we could build we got comments and I'm going to read those some are simply BS some would say we don't need tools we could do our jobs with thickies some people touched on that like the open-mindedness into new things and some goes back to something you mentioned earlier Ray which is if you want to help us get us a job. So I don't know if the economical situations we're in is causing some of this, but it has been surprising seeing how this has been more difficult than other things that I've been trying to do with the startup right now. Just trying to get involved with the community that I want to help.

Ray Arell 39:18

I've noticed a challenge getting groups together. I think about what are the boundaries that are inhibiting people from coming together. That in its own right needs a sort of a brainstorming session between a lot of people saying, well, what are the current boundaries that keep people from wanting to come in? What's the hesitance? That, I think, is a key factor we need to explore more of. Thank you for that, by the way. Darius, are you there? Yes, I am.

Darius 39:46

And I am thinking about what you just said, that one of those barriers or constraints which exist is conversational capacity of people. What Dennis mentioned earlier The conversation becomes really worthwhile and interesting when people start talking freely. That means that your community of practice is not going to evolve into community of mutual adoration people, which by the way, the acronym would be KOMA. You will be put to sleep, right? If you only say what people approve or those power strings are inactive. And maintaining the conversational capacity, which means not only I can, but I am encouraged to say the things things which I see are not right or I disagree with, with the hope that someone either will correct me or open my perspective. And you can apply this to technical skills purely, to programming issues, hardware issues. But most of the time, these are going to be human issues related to the fact that we cannot talk with each other. We shy difficult conversations, even though those difficult conversations are the most useful. Maintaining and caring for this on a constant basis is going to be the key point. And I want to give you an example how that works because I do favor totally open participatory organizations like community of practice. And if someone shows up who is inclined to use the power strings, I will tell you a story which I observed this year, completely unrelated to agile, how people handle difficult situations. It's in Rome, in Italy. Pickpockets were really troubling people in the subway, in the buses, etc. And the police knew about it. It was all over, but they couldn't do a thing. So what happened was the community, the people who knew who those thieves were, when they boarded the train and they spotted them, they would immediately say to everyone, this is a thief. Be careful because you may lose your personal belonging. This type of stigma of the community works well to remedy something which people in power cannot remedy. If in a community of practice someone comes and starts throwing grenades and using power, I think it's up to the wisdom and ability to the community to handle this so it would not happen again. All of this, in my judgment, will come through the ability to talk and not to avoid difficult topics, right? Like employment, secrets, right? My personal performances will be hampered if I do X, Y, and Z. All of these things, which are hardly visible to us, are discussed because we have low conversational capacity.

Ray Arell 42:58

Do you think of the capacity of trust? It

Darius 43:02

is part of it, but it's also certain practices. If I start the meeting every time by saying, folks, I'm going to tell you what I think about X, Y, and Z, but it's only my point of view. Prove me wrong, especially speak up if I missed something or when you see a hole. I want you to disagree with me. Ask yourself, how many meetings did you participate in where the speaker who is presenting especially hot topic starts like this with those questions?

Ray Arell 43:33

Well, I think this gets back to what Georg was saying about giving people permission. I think that, you know, one aspect of community, I think, does come down to we need to be very careful on, you know, the ground rules. What could be open and said, what's off topic, whatever those things are. I think we don't sometimes explore those deep enough.

Darius 44:00

In the open participatory organization or in the community of practice, I just walk with my feet. If they don't allow me to say there is a problem and they don't want to discuss it, I just walk away. It's very simple.

Ray Arell 44:12

Well, I think that's the open space rules. The law of two feet.

Wrap up

Ray Arell 44:15

We are approaching the top of the hour. Where'd the hour go? I hate this. Month by month we go through these conversations and these calls and that always leaves me wanting a little bit more. So if you want more, guess what? September 26th. That's our next meeting. We're going to get together and have another in-depth conversation. If you guys have any particular topics that you want to discuss or thread into the conversation, you can send me an email. If you go to acnpodcast.org, you can find my picture there, which I noticed some people were sharing today. As far as building community, they were sharing their LinkedIn on the chat. I really think that is absolutely awesome. If you go to acnpodcast.org, you'll find all of the hosts. If you click on our pictures, it'll take you to the LinkedIn pages. So you're welcome to join any of our networks at I think some of us really value, especially if you're currently unemployed, we've been doing a lot of referrals through our networks. And I think it helps when you have a couple of friends that have several thousand connections. That makes it a little bit easier to get your name out there. So feel free, link in with us. You can also go and join New Agility. You're welcome to support us. Also listen to the podcast. We've got eight years of them out there. Be surprised if anyone could get through eight years worth of content but we try to keep that knowledge up there as long as we can. I hope you all have a great month and we will see you in September. The ACN Podcast is for educational and informative use only. If you'd like to know more about the ACN community, please come up to acnpodcast.org and support our show.

Music 46:06

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