Marvin Weisbord

I am always looking out for simple models that illuminate more effective ways of acting, especially when they relate to teams and organizations since these are the units of work in today’s world. Thus, I was pleased when I came across the following model at yet another excellent OSR seminar during which Marvin Weisbord spoke of his life’s work of experience exploring and describing how to improve organizations and communities. In particular, he showed a simple diagram, which I have scanned from the brand-new 25th anniversary, 3rd edition of his book Productive Workplaces: Dignity, Meaning, and Community in the 21st Century:

Marvin Weisbord's Learning Curve

This diagram illustrates how our strategies for effective organizations have evolved over the last 100+ years. In 1900, the trend was for experts to solve problems. Insights into group dynamics in the 1950s led to adding a new strategy to the mix: “everybody” solving problems. The rise of general systems theory in the 1960s resulted in experts improving whole systems. This evolved in the 2000s to be “everybody” improving whole systems. Each addition provided a new set of tools and approaches that are helping to drive productivity to new all-time levels. Experts have led the way creating knowledge and practices that were then adopted by “everybody”.

Marvin goes on to say:

“While the four learning curve strategies coexist, if you aspire to dignity, meaning and community, you won’t be satisfied until you get everybody improving the whole. Not if you seek the economic benefits from ever-changing technologies.”

Dignity. Meaning. Community. Those are laudable goals. And essential parts of what make us human. And economic benefits are needed along the way.

The Cynefin framework

Since becoming a professor in September 2010, I’ve been thinking more and more about our higher educational system and how to improve it to become even more effective. Marvin’s diagram resonates with me. It connects with my understanding of the complex systems in which we live and act: biology, organizations, products, teams, etc. One of the most illuminating descriptions of complex systems that I have found is David Snowden’s video describing the sense-making Cynefin Framework.

In complex systems cause and effect are only obvious in hindsight, changes to the system are largely irreversible, and the system has unpredictable, emergent outcomes. There are no “best practices” or “right answers”. The system is too large, too diverse, with too many interacting parts for any one person to understand the system. This is no longer the domain of experts. Every practice needs to be contextualized, adapted for the particular context of that person, and the context is always changing as is the person. Thus, practices need to be continually modified to respond to the emergent behaviors of the system.

In such complex systems, the most effective leadership move is to create an environment in which “everybody” does lots of experiments to continually learn about how to best adapt their practices. In other words, create a situation where “everybody” improves whole systems.

So what does this mean for UW Bothell, where I work?

UW Bothell is in the upper left quadrant of the Cynefin framework: it is a complex system (an organization) working with complex systems (students, staff, faculty, their families, communities, industries, etc.) doing complex activities (learning). We need to continually adapt to the changing context of the systems that we are in. We need to be acting in the upper right quadrant of Marvin’s Learning Curve diagram.

Are we training our students to effectively act in complex systems? Are we providing them with tools, principles, practices, and experience of being part of “everybody” improving whole systems? Do they understand that there are different types of systems with different ways of acting effectively? Do they understand what “whole systems” means? Do the faculty and staff emulate these practices?

And perhaps most important, how can we get “everybody” improving the whole UW Bothell system?

Yesterday, I was revisiting the Liberating Structures website and took a pause to enjoy the beautiful and authentic images in the slideshow on their homepage. I was especially taken with the layered and semantically rich beauty of their Graphic Tapestries & Facilitation images, such as this one:

One of Keith McCandless's illustrations from the Liberating Structures website.

Then even devote an entire page of their website, Gallery & Aesthetics, to showcase beautiful images. I can admire a group that does things like that.

Today’s discovery was the Group Pattern Language Projectwebsite devoted to the topic of “a pattern language for bringing life to meetings and other gatherings”. Their multi-year collaboration resulted in a beautiful and impressive set of cards describing aspects that help facilitation of group processes. “The Group Works cards express shared wisdom underlying successful approaches that is more specific than general values and less specific than tools and techniques.” Here is one that seemed particularly pertinent to this post:

An example card from the Group Pattern Language Project's deck of 91 full-colour cards.

What would it be like if such beauty was in all of our products? In a similar vein, my colleague Skip Walter asks, “What would business look like if art making were an integral part of work?”

This past weekend I had the honor and privilege of hosting and being part of the UW Bothell Innovation and Creativity BootCamp, part of the UW Bothell Innovation Forum. From 7 PM Friday through 3 PM Sunday, 17 campers (UW Bothell students, staff, faculty and spouses) joined 7 consultants for an immersive simulation about how to create great products and how to be more innovative and creative.

Art is an integral part of BootCamp. There have been over 200 BootCamps, and in every one there has been art. In our case, a corner of the room in which we started the weekend had a table of canvases and acrylic paint. From the moment we opened BootCamp through to the very end there was a steady stream of campers working on the canvases. It was exciting to see the energy around the art table. And breathtaking to see the beauty of what they produced. Here is a sample of the art they created:

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Here is a clip from a moment ago. My wife was having some problems entering addresses into a Microsoft Word table, in preparation of printing Christmas card address labels via mail merge. She just came into my office for some help while I was dictating an e-mail. I forgot to turn off Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and here is what I found in my e-mail when I looked back at my computer:

Guess who took the step has 2 arrows to swallow okay you want one template size that could then it doesn’t matter these things rap’s from these small shoot. I very get by the Academy for a small and a test is a success okay okay and yes I’m just so I can do now and really in some ways rather do well to listen to a spreadsheet probably thought I’d be gagging daily is a really simple social work and other but we also allow North

Gibberish? Yet, it was based upon coherent sentences that I had spoken. Honestly!

Upon further reflection, I think I was wrong. Designing a course is quite different from designing a product, and the differences might not be good for any of us. The cost of a standard education has become prohibitively expensive for many. The world’s people need global access to knowledge. Many educators are already reassessing their role in the changing dynamics of this world, and new models of education are emerging, such as the Khan Academy. It is very likely that the range of educational opportunities in 20 years will be quite different from what we have today. And that these changes will be good for the vast majority of us.

How can we increase the rate of innovation in education? Can product design tell us something useful about course design? Is it time for educators to adopt some of the principles and practices from product design?

Here is an initial list of the similarities and differences between course design and product design. What other similarities and differences do you see?

Successful products operate within enormous complexity, scale, amount of variation, and pace of change. They adjust to the complexity of their users and the marketplace. They operate on large scales on several dimensions (quantity, geographically, diversity) during design, deployment and use. They often go through the hundreds of iterations necessary to systematically improve their quality, decrease costs, increase rates of delivery, and increase variety for different types of users.

Courses, on the other hand, are typically designed by an individual, perhaps with a small amount of assistance from others, and delivered locally to a relatively small number of people. In the absence of a manufacturing process to replicate the delivery, assessment and coaching, the instructor is a bottleneck for many activities. This means that each course is delivered (iterated) at most a few times a year, resulting in a relatively glacial pace of change. It also makes it difficult to adapt the course to the individual needs of each user.

Is a course inherently different from a product? I think of a course as a service with a human touch. Online and hybrid learning can help a course to scale a bit, while maintaining some human touch. Systems like the Khan Academy, however, truly scale by successfully packaging course material in easily consumed and useful chunks that are created once, and consumed untold numbers of times. It scales like good products do. This certainly works well in some domains, such as mathematics. Does it, however, provide the same quality of learning as when the course content is confined with a good instructor who can give individual guidance? How far does it get in covering the territory described by Bloom’s taxonomy? When does scale trump quality of learning? How can we have both?

Next quarter I am teaching a course in human centered design, so my thoughts keep returning to how to generate the insights necessary to allow us to redesign our educational system in order to meet the needs of our local and global communities. In particular, I wonder two things:

What it would look like for education design to use some of the product design practices?

More specifically, I wonder:

What would it look like to design a course via human centered design?

Who are the purchasers, influences, and users for which we would need to design? How could we use the observational and ethnographic practices that are central to human centered design in order to discover insights about the latent, unmet needs related to a particular course concept? How could we have a team of designers that collaborate persistently and intensely during this design process, over the hundreds of iterations necessary for creating truly magnetic products that can transform our world?

What would look like if we could do this? What is necessary in order for this to happen? Is it possible for education to operate at the scales of product design? How can courses scale? How can course design more quickly go through hundreds of iterations in order to increase the rate of innovation? Can course design become more iterative, with shorter iteration times? How can course design be informed by the richness of the data analytics in order to uncover more insights? How can courses become more individualized?

In the end, it is all about creating better learning opportunities and increasing levels of scale. Yet, I suspect many of us, including me, are asking the wrong questions, focusing on changing the existing system, being blind to new and highly effective type of system that will emerge.

How can we get out of our heads, as educators, and into the heads of the people we are trying to teach?  Or vice versa.

James Whittaker of Google

Last week I attended a fantastic and fascinating QASIG talk by James Whittaker of Google. The talk was about how test engineering is done at Google, but it really wasn’t about testing at all. It was about quality. As James points out, people care about quality. They don’t really care about testing. James listed 10 things that Google does to dramatically increase quality, and few of them are what we would call testing. James laid out a vision of where computing is going, and where Google already is. The tools he describes are all open sourced, by Google. At the moment, they are all aimed at web apps, but Google is seriously looking at the Android market as well for these system interventions. You can see the talk here:

• Video: James Whittaker at QASIG Seattle
• Slides: James Whittaker’s slides for the QASIG Seattle talk – you will need to follow along with the slides, since they don’t show on the video

Certainly, not everyone can use the approaches that Google is using, especially if they have legacy architectures that are not amenable to those types of approaches. But lots of startups could use these approaches. I bet lots of other organizations are using similar approaches. It’s about scalability. When you are releasing a new version of a web application every day, or multiple times a day, and that application is used by hundreds of millions of people, you need to reduce the number of bugs that get released to near zero and very rapidly roll back when you do find any bugs. This is what Google does. His book is available online here: How Google Tests Software book - it’s not out in print yet, but available in Safari Rough Cuts in eBook form.

James mentioned that Google uses uTest, crowd sourced testing startup, instead of dedicated testers, for some of their projects – a fantastic idea. James also talked about a bunch of Open Source software from Google in the talk:

• Test Analytics (ACC) Tool – replaces test plans
• Browser Integrated Testing Environment (BITE) Tool – record browser scenarios in Javascript, record video, file bugs automatically
• Quality Bots – compare web page layouts, even across browsers – much is done automatically, but it does forward to humans when necessary

The point of the exercise was to work as a group to arrange a set of Scrum-related nouns and straight and curved arrows in what the group thought represented how Scrum should work. Adam had provided a piece of paper with the nouns and arrows on it, and the pair scissors to cut it into pieces.

During the exercise, lots of conversations emerged around the trade-offs involved in ordering the parts. Should this part come before that part? What is central in the diagram? Should there be one “center” to the diagram, or multiple? Which parts connect to other parts? Was one role more central than another role? Given the relatively few number of arrows, and that most things relate to most of the things in Scrum, what are the most important relationships to illustrate? Which relationships are linear, which are cyclical? How large are the cycles?

The people in my group had lots of experience with Scrum, and it was a rich and interesting set of conversations.

I also was surprised at how much more effective it was to have cutout pieces of paper that you could slide around. It made it very easy and lightweight for people to rearrange the structure. Multiple hands could easily work on different parts of the diagram. Quite people could simply rearrange part of the diagram without having to enter the ongoing discussion dominated by more vocal people. I’m a big fan of whiteboards, and found these pieces of paper to be even more effective since they reduced the cost of change even more.

After finishing our diagram, I looked at the other group’s diagram and was surprised at the differences.

Reflecting on the exercise, I realized that this type of “Build Your Own” exercise could be used in other ways.

Nouns or verbs? Adam’s system has a set of nouns that you arrange with arrows. Our society tends to put a lot of focus on the nouns, but systems thinking, biology, and other fields tell us that the relationships (the verbs) are much more important than the individual entities (the nouns). What would it look like to have a similar “Build Your Own” exercise where the identified entities were verbs, not nouns? For that matter, what are the verbs that are central to Scrum?

Other processes? How about creating a “Build Your Own ____” exercise for other processes? Given that it works well for Scrum, would it to work well for other processes? I would think so.

I got a chance to try out the latter idea in the last week of the Analysis and Design course that I was teaching at University Washington Bothell. Wednesday was the last day of the course, and I wanted an engaging way for the students to reflect upon the range of modeling tools they had been learning to the quarter. One of the textbooks for this course was Scott Ambler’s book Agile Modeling: Effective Practices for eXtreme Programming and the Unified Process.

Would a “Build Your Own Agile Modeling Process” sheet adapted to the content of my course help the students review their course material? It was worth a try. I quickly contacted Adam, asked to use his template as a starting point for mine, and then put together a “Build Your Own Agile Modeling Process” sheet containing the 25 different types of models covered in this course. Given that I had 25 nouns instead of the 15 nouns in Adams system, I included more arrows (turns out I didn’t need that many):

The next day, I walked into my class carrying a tub of scissors and a pile of paper for the students to cut up and rearrange. As one of the students remarked during class, it reminded him of a Montessori classroom. I took that comment as a complement.

First, I asked the students to do the “Build Your Own Agile Modeling Process” exercise. Each team used a pair of scissors to cut up the parts, and then arranged the parts in what they thought would be a good agile modeling process.

As in the exercise at the Scrum Gathering, each team had a different diagram (click on the diagram to see the details):

Two things stood out to me.

Every diagram was different. As in the Scrum Gathering exercise, the students also found a surprising. As one of the students wrote, “The most shocking drawing for our team was seeing our design team showing completely different steps that we expected from them.”

There were far fewer cycles than I had expected. While every team included some parallelism or cycles, 4 of 10 the teams had an almost linear progression through the artifacts. Only one diagram appeared to be highly cyclical, and even that diagram acknowledged some natural progression from initial concept through to the software design diagrams. Perhaps it is related to the linear sequence in which artifacts were introduced into the course. Perhaps it reflected the linear sequence in which the students started using the artifacts. Perhaps some teams were more iterative than other teams in the use of their artifacts.

Next, I asked the students to arrange the models in the order of how important and useful they were during this course.

As a side note, during the quarter each team had worked both as both a design team and the customer team during the quarter. For instance, team A had designed a product for team B, and team B had designed a product for team C. This arrangement solved several important problems. It helped make the design conversations authentic, since the models became a mechanism for the design team to ensure that they actually communicated well with their customers. It highlighted the role of models as a medium for creating understanding. And it forced each team to try to get into the head of their customer team, to understand what their customer team wanted, instead of making up whatever suited them. It also seemed to make the conversations more engaging for the students, though I do not have any hard data for this assertion.

So for the “rank the models in order of usefulness” exercise, teams A and B arranged the models to show how useful the models had been for their collaboration, and then teams B and C did the same. Here is what they produced:

One thing stood out: In general, the software design diagrams were the least useful to the teams. This surprised me and the students somewhat. Some students suggested that this occurred because they did not actually write any software. Without taking the step to code, these diagrams could not fulfill their intended role of helping to bridge the gap from conceptual models to code. That makes sense, and was one reason I wanted to be a will to get to code during this course, though I could not see a way to do that within the 10 weeks available. If you have ideas on how to overcome this, please let me know!

All in all, the students were very engaged during much of the exercise, and seemed to enjoy it. It highlighted some useful lessons about diversity and that there is no one correct modeling sequence or set of models to use. And some students commented that it was a good overview of how much they had learned during the quarter. Once again, I do not have good data about this part, unfortunately.

What do you think? Would you do something like this with a group for process other than Scrum?

It’s a lovely place to sit and work. The light is great, and my eyes can scan over the seasonal changes in the beautiful nature of the 58 acre wetland that composes 60% of our campus, or watch the Jetsons-like flow of vehicles along the elevated roadways joining State Route 522 and I-405.

Anyway, while I was sitting there grading papers Mark Kochanski stopped by. Mark is a fellow teacher in the Computing and Software Systems program here and teaches some of the same courses I teach. We got to talking and I mentioned how my students are using whiteboards in my class. Mark was intrigued, so I showed him where the whiteboards are cached in one of the computer labs, and offered him their use.

He tried them out the next day in his CSS 411 / BIS 421 Computing Technology and Public Policy class. Here’s his story of how the whiteboards worked out in that class.