The Guest house | Reinventing Work | www.the-guest-house.com

THE GUEST HOUSE
Reinventing Work
www.the-guest-house.com
Copyright The Guest House 2016

YOU’VE BEEN ON A LONG JOURNEY TO
ARRIVE HERE AT THE GUEST HOUSE

Reinventing work
www.the-guest-house.comCopyright The Guest House 2016

Hi – My name’s Helga.
Welcome to the Guest House!
Can I offer you a guided tour?
YES PLEASE
NO THANKS

THE-GUEST-HOUSE.COM:
A GUIDED TOUR
The home of various guest microsites including:
theagile.net
theagileculturecoach.co.uk
reinventingwork.org

THE FACETTED SEARCH ‘HOME’ ROOM :
YOUR INSTANT GATEWAY TO ANYWHERE
& EVERYWHERE IN THE GUEST HOUSE

The Guest House is founded to be a place where people from all
walks of life can share their stories opinions, hopes, fears, ideas
about whatever work they've done in the past, are doing presently,
or plan to do in the future to provide a livelihood for themselves
and/or their families.
It's also a place for those of us engaged in leadership role to
exchange practical experiences of what has and hasn’t worked for
us in terms of being change agents for complex systems change
using dialogic methods.
The Guest House welcomes anyone and everyone across the world
who is is somewhere along their journey to climb the Mountain of
their Life’s Work. I believe through facilitating new types of
conversation genuinely new core narratives and 'mental maps' of
reality can emerge from a co-creative process focused on
strengths and opportunities for positive change rather than
dwelling on diagnosis of past problems.
It’s a conversation, a campaign an information hub and a shop-
front for the hosting service we offer organisations. I am supported
by a strong associate team who are all experts in dialogic process
design and delivery as well as SME’s in areas from mindfulness to
sustainability.

OUR DOJO: THE PLACE OF THE WAY
MOVEMENT PRACTICE
MEDITATION PRACTICE
LARGE EVENT HOSTING SPACE

THE BLOG: OUR STORIES OF OUR
PRACTICAL EXPERIENCES OF CATALYSING
COMPLEX ORGANISATION CHANGE
✿ The Blog or Knowledge Base contains opinion prices and
stories ’from the trenches' about my successes and failures in
facilitating dialogic methods and implementing organisational
change through managing the development and
implementation of enterprise business applications,
outsourcing, software agility methods, culture change,
sustainability transition and employee engagement.
✿ All members are warmly invited to contribute to the
conversation by commenting or authoring their own blog
which they can do here.

THE Q&A CORNER

NAVIGATING THE GUEST HOUSE:
TOP-LEVEL CATEGORIES

NAVIGATING THE GUEST
HOUSE: SUB-CATEGORIES

NAVIGATING THE GUEST HOUSE:
TAGS

GETTING UN-LOST:
JUST FOLLOW THE COMPASS SOUTH AND
YOU WILL ALWAYS RETURN TO THE
FACETTED SEARCH ‘HOME’ ROOM

THE GUEST HOUSE
Applying dialogic change processes to solve
complex systemic problems

THE GUEST HOUSE
Applying dialogic change processes to solve
complex systemic problems
reinventing

ACTIONABLE

THE CYNEWORK FRAMEWORK:
CHOSSING THE CHANGE APPROACH
APPROPRIATE TO THE SYSTEM

CHANGING THE WHAT, WHO & HOW OF
CO-WORKER CONVERSATIONS IS AT THE
HEART IF DIALOGIC CHANGE METHODS
Copyright The Guest House
2016

COMPLEX CHANGE CHALLENGES THAT
RESPOND WELL TO DIALOGIC CHANGE
METHODS AND MINDSETS.
✸ Employee engagement
✸ Business agility
✸ Mindfulness@work
✸ Strategic sustainability
✸ Participatory leadership
✸ ‘The Digitization of Everything’

EXAMPLE DIALOGIC CHANGE
PROCESS
An example multi-session facilitation to intervene to change the
who, what and how co-workers converse.
“You never change anything by fighting the existing reality. To
change something build a new model which makes the existing
model obsolete” – Buckmaster-Fuller

A TRIED AND TESTED ‘BEST OF BREED’
FRAMEWORK PROCESS
Hosting group processes that shift the who, what & how of conversations
between co-workers to facilitate the co-creation of emergent 'leaps in core
narratives' and shifts in mental maps/mindsets. Although we would of course
design and tailor each process according to the organisational context I have
a tried and tested 'out of the box process' based on a mash-up of 'Integrated
Clarity', 'Chaordic Stepping Stones', 'Technology of Participation (ToP)', 'The
Cynefin Framework', 'AI' 'Pro-Action/World Café, Agile Retrospective,
Empirical Process Control, Lean War of Waste & Culture of Experimentation.
•‘Think Big, Act Small, Fail Fast, Learn Quickly’ .
2016

A TRIED AND TESTED ‘BEST OF BREED’
FRAMEWORK PROCESS
1) First creating a safe container for teams to express how they feel about their role, their relations with
their co-workers and the organisation.
2) Seek to create divergence in opinion and get away from 'group think' consensus meeting norms -
push habitual norms of conversation to breaking point.
3) Look for convergence and collective buy-in around genuinely novel strategies that are actionable - at
least through experimentation - with amplification and dampening strategies worked out in advance for
succeeding or failing experiments.
4) Actionable ‘public’ experiments that can be rapidly scaled up or stopped depending on the outcome.
‘Think Big, Act Small, Fail Fast, Learn Quickly’.
The 'groan zone' can be uncomfortable & anxiety provoking for some participants, is not without risk as
a facilitator, and has no guaranteed results - except that we will have developed the quality of team
communication skills - but my experience is that there is no other effective intervention a change-agent
can make in complex systems.

CHAORDIC STEPPING STONES:
DIVERGENCE & CONVERGENCE
2016

ART OF HOSTING
FOUR FOLD PRACTICE
2016

2016

INTER/INTRA TEAM
WORKING AGREEMENTS

ACTIONABLE EXPERIMENTS

CULTURE OF CONTINUOUS
IMPROVEMENT THROUGH EMPIRICAL
DATA GENERATING EXPERIMENTS

PARTICIPATORY LEADERSHIP
Empowering teams to self-organise how they achieve short
and medium term SMART goals.

CHANGE IS HARD
“With appropriate humility, we accept our inability to control
the world. … We accept that losing is part of life. We do not
fear adversity or suffering. Out of them comes new learning,
new growth, new hope, and new life.” - Dennis Bakke

Resistance
Denial
Self-Delusion
Stop Listening
Apathy
Cynicism
Mistrust
Inertia
NIMBI’ism
Passing the buck

SHIFTING MINDSETS: A HIGH LEVERAGE
POINT IN SYSTEMIC CHANGE

THE NATURE OF CHANGE:
PATHFINDING

PERSONAL PRACTICE AS THE REALISATION OF
DISCIPLINE

THE POWER OF LEVERAGING MINDSET
CHANGE

AGILE APPLICATION LIFECYCLE
“Complexity requires participation, collaboration and listening together; it
requires all stakeholders to be in the same room. We need to ask powerful
questions of one another and there needs to be a willingness to
experiment. From the apparent disorder, a unique and powerful practice
emerges that everyone involved can be an ambassador for.” - Gill Evans
2014

VALUE BASED PRIORITISATION

AGILE REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING

THE ROAD OF EMERGENT PRODUCT DESIGN
& ADAPTIVE PROJECT MANAGEMENT IS
NOT LINEAR

THE ART OF SIMPLICITY
2016

REMOVING IMPEDIMENTS
✸ Impediments are not people or ‘tasks’
✸ Use a boston-grid to categorize impediments visibly as
high/low impact and external or internal.
✸ Separate the process of problem identification (i.e. root
cause analysis) from solution finding.
✸ Using the SCAMPER technique to holistically consider all
angles on solutions.
✸ Engage other team members ‘impediment huddles’ and
while if you are the Scrum Master you maintains
ownership you can delegate action
✸ Use experiments to test different hypothesis

EMPLOYEE DISENGAGEMENT
"Outstanding Agile Team Leaders go out of their way to boost the
self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, its
amazing what they can accomplish" —Sam Walton

EMPLOYEE DISENGAGEMENT
✸ In 2013 Gallup commissioned a global study spanning 140 countries to investigate to find out level of purpose,
meaning, commitment, enjoyment and positive identification workers across the world felt towards their working lives. It
concluded that a mere 13% of employees worldwide were engaged at work — that’s just 13% that were are psychologically
committed to their jobs and likely to be making positive contributions to their organizations. The bulk of employees
worldwide — 63% — are “not engaged,” meaning they lack motivation and are less likely to invest discretionary effort in
organizational goals or outcomes. And 24% are “actively disengaged,” indicating they are unhappy and unproductive at
work and liable to spread negativity to coworkers.
✸ This is a scandal that affects not only those working menial jobs, or jobs with no prospects or poorly paid jobs in the
developing world — shockingly it is equally as endemic amongst those working in supposedly wealthy highly educated
societies — For example in Western Europe the figure was 14%. engaged and 20% actively disengaged.
✸ “Engaged employees are more than three times as likely to be ‘thriving’ in their overall lives as those who were actively
disengaged.” - Gallup 2013

THE QUALITY OF LIFE IMPACT OF
DISENGAGEMENT @ WORK

AUTOMOMY + MASTERY + GOALS =
MOTIVATION

THE KEY: TEAMS NEED COACHING ON THE
SOFT/INTER-PERSONAL/MANAGEMENT
SKILLS WHICH ENABLE SELF ORGANISATION
✸ Collective Ownership
✸ Collective Decision Making
✸ User Story Sizing & Iteration Task Identification and
Estimation
✸ Resource Levelling (matching skills demand and
supply)
✸ The Art of Storytelling, Listening and asking
insightful questions.
✸ The Art of Giving and Receiving Feedback
✸ Iteration Plan vs Progress Monitoring

SHOWING UP WITH OUR WHOLE
SELVES

DIGITISATION OF EVERYTHING
FROM SMAC TO TIOT & WEB 3.0
“Not since the digital revolution in the early '90s has technology
placed such a comprehensive burden on business, employees
and individuals to reinvent their business plans, services and
products, and themselves to keep pace with the changing
marketplace.” - Simon Mainwaring

Applying mindfulness techniques at work to cope with stress,
negative thought patterns and dysfunctional emotional
reactivity.

MINDFULNESS
Applying mindfulness techniques at work to
cope with stress, negative thought patterns
and dysfunctional emotional reactivity.

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