Last November I attended the 2006 Scrum Gathering in Minneapolis along with fellow Conchangoens Colin Bird and Gavyn Dowst. It was a conference like no other I've attended; earlier last year I co-presented a session on Agile Architecture at the Microsoft Architecture Insight Conference with Simon Evans, where to be quite frank, the reception of talking about how two experienced architects had managed to deliver and continued to deliver business value, iteration after iteration, was frosty to say the least and in some cases downright offensive.
The reception these ideas and experiences received at the Scrum Gathering couldn't have been more different. Instead of being confrontational and pouring on vitriol in order to justify their own job or methodology, attendees of the Gathering were so open minded. More often than not the reaction was "Wow, my experience of doing X was completely different. How did you handle situations like Y?" Ideas were cross-pollinated and people came away with a myriad of new techniques to try.
There were a couple of things I took away from that conference; firstly that Scrum and Agile Methodologies are really crossing the chasm - large organisations are starting to believe in them and are trying to roll it out in a top down manner (I think the largest number I heard was 700 development teams) with varying degrees of success. Secondly, Scrum causes organisational change and business transformation, more and more practitioners are realising that there needs to be a programme level project for organizational transformation otherwise Agile project teams meet friction where they have to interact with any other part of their organisation, which severely hampers, if not cripples their productivity. The third actually has nothing to do with Scrum or anything Agile - it's actually the technique called "Open Space Technology" (OST) that was used to run the Conference.
Open Spaces Technology
Open Space Technology was created in the mid 1980's by Harrison Owen who had spent a year of his life organising an international meeting with over 250 delegates; the overwhelming feedback from the delegates was that they all enjoyed the coffee breaks more than the keynotes because the breaks allowed them to interchange ideas. He was asked to arrange the event again the following year and while pondering if there was a fundamental mechanism for organising a successful conference, he remembered his experience of witnessing tribal meetings in Africa; where the circle is a fundamental form of communal meetings; if people are invited into a circle they will participate and communicate – a circle has no beginning, no end and no hierarchy.
Conferences run using Open Space Technology are different – there are no keynotes, no panels, and no pre-announced schedule; instead the Open Space Technology relies on self-organisation and is a vibrant mix of order and chaos. It can be used for any type of meeting; from envisioning to conflict resolution and it's been proven to work with 5 – 2000 delegates for 1-3 day conferences.
Anatomy of an Open Spaces Session
If you walk into an conference or meeting run using OST you'll probably find yourself in a large room with a circle of chairs in the middle (or if there are lots of delegates it will be a spiral or series of concentric circles of chairs). In the corners of the Room you'll probably see flip charts and on one of the walls you'll probably see a matrix of post it notes – this is called the Agenda Wall. When an Open Space Conference starts the delegates sit on the chairs in the circle. The first person to speak is The Sponsor – who will outline the context for the session and their hopes and expectations. For the Scrum Gathering our theme was "How do we sustain the values and principles of Scrum as we adopt the practices in our organisations?"
Next The Facilitator speaks to the delegates from the centre of the circle; they reiterate the theme and explain the process of Open Space Technology; that the agenda wall is a matrix of times and locations which can be used to host discussion groups:
Anyone can create a discussion group – all they – The Host - have to do, is take an index card, write the title of the discussion on it – assign it to a free time / space slot on the agenda wall and then announce it to the rest of the delegates.
Those who are interested in participating in that discussion should initial the card to signify their interest.
The Facilitator also has to and explain and ask the participants to adopt The Principles of Open Space for their discussion groups:
1. Whoever comes are the right people
2. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
3. When it starts, it starts
4. When it's over, it's over (and when it's not over, it's not over)
5. The Law of Two Feet – If you are not learning or contributing where you are, use your two feet to take yourself someplace where you can learn or contribute
Next the circle is disbanded and discussion groups convene in their allocated location, at the allocated time. The Host of a discussion group asks for a volunteer to act as The Note Taker, who captures the conversations on the flipchart while The Host facilitates the discussion. Once the session has ended – it's The Host's responsibility to turn the notes into a more permanent record of the session and so that people who couldn't attend because of a conflicting sessions can have an overview; at the Scrum Gathering we had a dedicated wiki that was used as the permanent record for both Wednesdays and Thursdays sessions – the benefit of this is that it can be opened up to the wider community who could not attend the Open Space; one of the discussion groups Gavyn and I attended was called "The Managers Role in Scrum", hosted by Jens Ostergaard. Since then, the topic has been picked up by Jeff Sutherland and continues to evolve. Another example of this happening is that Gavyn and I ran a session on "Testing in Scrum" although the turn-out was small because we were scheduled against Colin's ridiculously popular "Scaling Scrum" discussion group, some great experiences were shared and ideas were crystallised and were published in Gavyn's series of blog posts "Testing in Agile" parts one, two and three.
If the event is a multi-day affair then there will be "check-ins" in the morning and afternoon – where new sessions can be added to the agenda wall – this allows new ideas to be spun out of discussion groups and elaborated on. At the end of the event the Space is closed by The Facilitator who invites the attendees to briefly share their thoughts, reflections, experiences or learnings.
Open Spaces Technology works so well when you're trying to discuss any complex topic, especially when there are passionate people involved. The fact that there is no pre-announced schedule means that as interesting ideas crop up, new discussion groups can be spun up, which allows people to discuss much finer grain topics than are usually discussed in conferences and because of The Law of Two Feet, you only get people who are willing to contribute and so the session are so much more vibrant. I'm hoping that we try and run a Conchango Community Day using Open Space Technology soon.