AYE Conference - 2007 Program and Schedule

AYE 2007 Conference Preliminary Program

Sunday, November 4 - Wednesday 7, 2007

The program is shaping up. Here's what to expect. We might shuffle a few sessions around, and a few of the descriptions are being updating, so watch this space for updates.

Day Time Event

Sunday 8:00 AM - 1:00 PM Registration

4:00 PM - 7:00 PM

9:00 AM - 5:00 PM 7.00: Warm-up Tutorial

Don Gray and Steve Smith

6:00 PM - 9:00 PM Buffet Dinner and greeting old and new friends

Monday 7:00 AM - 8:15 AM Registration

Buffet Breakfast with old and new friends

8:15 AM - 8:25 AM The Morning News

Track Satir Teamwork Testing Management Personal

8:30 AM - 11:30 AM 7.08: The Satir Change Model 7.30: Dynamics of Distributed Teams 7.15: What could possibly go wrong? 7.02: Multitasking 7.36: Survive as an Introvert

Steve Smith Esther Derby Elisabeth Hendrickson Johanna Rothman Naomi Karten

11:30 AM - 1:30 PM Lunch on the patio

Track Personal Leadership Management Tools Personal

1:30 PM - 4:30 PM 7.23: Congruence 7.18: Leading from the Middle 7.32: Behind Closed Doors 7.16: Renegotiate! 7.01: Who Are You Really?

Jerry Weinberg and Dwayne Phillips Diana Larsen Esther Derby and Johanna Rothman Dave Smith and Elisabeth Hendrickson Naomi Karten and Don Gray

5:00 PM - whenever BOFs, Dinner on your own or with others

Tuesday 7:00 AM - 8:15 AM Buffet Breakfast with old and new friends

8:15 AM - 8:25 AM The Morning News

Track Satir Leadership Management Tools Personal

8:30 AM - 11:30 AM 7.21: Satir System Coaching 7.19: Leading Appreciatively 7.14: Reflect and Adapt 7.06: Communicate Effectively with Upper Management 7.35: Building Connections

Jean McLendon Diana Larsen Elisabeth Hendrickson Steve Smith Naomi Karten

11:30 AM - 1:30 PM Lunch on the patio

Track Satir Leadership Satir Tools Satir

1:30PM - 4:30 PM 7.22: Satir Followup 7.28: Resistance as a Resource 7.05: Organizational Mapping 7.10: Experience the Diagram of Effects 7.04: Transforming Rules in to Guides

Jean McLendon Dale Emery Steve Smith Don Gray Johanna Rothman and Jerry Weinberg

5:00 PM - whenever BOFs, Dinner on your own or with others

Wednesday 7:00 AM - 8:15 AM Buffet Breakfast with old and new friends

8:15 AM - 8:25 AM The Morning News

Track Management Leadership Management Tools Personal

8:30 AM - 11:30 AM 7.07: Exploring Tradeoffs 7.31: Crossing Cultures 7.17: Cultivating Trust in Teams 7.25: Interviewing by Rehearsal 7.33: Writing Workshop

Steve Smith Esther Derby Diana Larsen Dave Smith Johanna Rothman and Naomi Karten

11:30 AM - 1:30 PM Lunch on the patio

Track Satir Leadership Management Tools Personal

1:30 PM - 4:30 PM 7.09: Do You See What I Hear? 7.27: Putting Your Power to Work 7.26: Deciding How to Decide 7.37: General Systems Thinking 7.24: Growing Through Differences

Don Gray Dale Emery Dave Smith Dwayne Phillips Jerry Weinberg

4:45 PM - 5:30 PM The Closing. A final session where we will connect with friends and colleagues, reflect on our conference experience, have a few laughs, and say our au revoir's.

Thursday All day A free, all-day session for all members of Jerry Weinberg's SHAPE Forum who are staying over.

Sunday
7.00: The AYE Warm-up Tutorial
Don Gray and Steve Smith

At the first AYE conference, some people commented that a pre-conference tutorial, introducing some of this material, might be useful not only to those who had not encountered it before, but also to those who had. Since then, we have offered the "AYE Warm-Up" to make it easier for everyone to participate from a shared understanding of the basics. It is a big hit.

One thing that makes the AYE conference different is session design. At many conferences, the basic format is one or two presenters talking from the front of the room, to rows full of people seated in chairs. While there might be some of that at this conference, the emphasis is more on simulation and experience. We believe that this approach can be especially effective for this kind of learning, and we'll use it in this tutorial too. That means that you'll have a chance to participate in the session, determining what happens to a very great extent, and having a lot of fun doing it.

We'll introduce the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and several of the tools, techniques and concepts of Virginia Satir, possibly including items from this menu: triads, the five freedoms, the self-esteem tool kit, the communication stances, the change model, the interaction model, safety, and feedback.

Monday Morning
7.08: Experience the Satir Change Model
Steve Smith

A gift from pioneering family therapist Virginia Satir is her model of how change takes place.

The Satir Change Model describes the:

major stages of a change

transition between stages

effects each stage has on feelings, thinking, performance, and physiology

interventions that are helpful during each stage

interventions that are harmful during each stage

Although there are benefits from an intellectual understanding of the model, we will go beyond the intellectual during this session. You will climb inside the model and experiencing how you feel, think, and perform during each of the stages. You will hear how others experienced the stages. You will explore with others constructive interventions to nurture change.

Our goal is to help you take the next step to effectively applying the Satir Change Model for changing the way change takes place for you, your team, and your organization.

Objectives

Experience how you feel during each stage of the model

Experience how you think during the transition between stages

Explore helpful and harmful interventions

7.30: Exploring the Dynamics of Distributed Teams
Esther Derby

We know that project teams work best when they are co-located. But many organizations continue to use distributed and off-shore teams to build software. In this session, we'll use a simulation to explore the dynamics of distributed teams. We'll also discuss strategies to compensate for distance.
7.15: What could possibly go wrong?
Elisabeth Hendrickson

"The thought that disaster is impossible often leads to an unthinkable disaster." -- The Titanic Effect, Jerry (Gerald M.) Weinberg.

We're going to design tests by imagining worse case scenarios. We'll brainstorm the most horrific news headline about some failure in the software, then use that to imagine what contributed to the failure, and then design test cases to see if those contributing factors could actually happen.
7.02: The Savvy Project Manager: Understanding and Transforming the Dynamics of Multitasking
Johanna Rothman

Multitasking is an excellent strategy to prevent project completion. Multitasking brings projects to their knees by by hiding true status and undermining the commitments we make to each other. But when your manager says, "Just multitask," what can you do?

In this session, we'll experience some multitasking, and discuss and practice techniques to deal with senior management, the project team, and ourselves.

Learning objectives:

recognizing individual multi-tasking and choosing when to take action

recognizing your multi-tasking

techniques to discuss the problems of multi-tasking with senior management

organizing the work in the face of too much to do, not enough time, and too few people.

7.36: How to Survive, Excel, and Advance as an Introvert
Naomi Karten

Has your introversion posed challenges for you in succeeding in your current position or advancing in your career? Would you like to strengthen your effectiveness in communicating and working with your more extroverted teammates, colleagues, and customers?

This session will provide a safe, respectful setting in which we will:

compare and share our experiences, challenges, frustrations--and successes--as introverts in an extroverted world

discuss ways in which our introversion has been an impediment and ways in which it’s been an asset (and how to convert impediments into assets!)

identify the skills that can help us survive and thrive without sacrificing our natural introverted preferences

describe ideas and techniques that can help more introverted and extroverted people work together effectively

hear from extroverts who attend (extroverts: please join us!) how they perceive our behavior--both the positives and negatives--and discuss whether and how we should modify our behavior to maximize positive perceptions

If there are other aspects of this issue you'd like us to address, contact me at [email protected].

Monday Afternoon
7.23: Congruence is the Foundation of All Effectiveness
Jerry Weinberg and Dwayne Phillips

Congruent communication is the primary change agent in the Satir system. Accordingly, it is both a means and an end to quality in relationships, performance, health, and spirituality. Congruent communication arises from your personal and contextual system of validation and esteem, and demonstrates that system to other people. Virginia Satir wrote in The New Peoplemaking (p. 369-370):

"I wonder what would happen if suddenly during one night, all five billion persons in the world learned the essentials of congruent living:

To communicate clearly with directness and honesty
To cooperate rather than compete
To empower rather than subjugate
To enhance individual uniqueness rather than categorize
To use authority to guide and accomplish 'what fits' rather than force compliance through the tyranny of power
To love, value, and respect themselves fully
To be personally and socially responsible
To use problems as challenges and opportunities for creative solutions

I think we would wake up in a very different world, a world in which peace is possible.

Participate in this session and learn how to approach congruence, deal with incongruence, and convert incongruence to congruence.
7.18: Leading from the Middle
Diana Larsen

Caught between the grassroots and executive initiatives, middle managers experience the pinch of conflicting expectations. What to do? Lead from the middle. How? Get savvy about your organization, your boss, and yourself; then, communicate, collaborate and adapt. In this session you will practice strategies for leading from the middle.
7.32: Behind Closed Doors
Esther Derby and Johanna Rothman

Great management happens one interaction at a time. Many of those interactions happen behind closed doors -- in one-on-one meetings. So if great management happens in private, how do people learn how to be great managers?

Great managers consistently apply a handful of simple--but not necessarily easy--practices. In this session (based on their book Managment Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management), management coaches Johanna and Esther will reveal management practices we (and our clients) have found useful, and explain how to perform them.

Note: This session is related to, but not the same as Johanna and Esther's new workshop: Behind Closed Doors: Managing One-on-One.

Learning objectives:

How to conduct an effective one-on-one meeting to learn status, develop capability, and uncover obstacles.

When and how to coach.

Determining the strategically important work and the not-to-do work

7.16: Renegotiate!
Dave Smith and Elisabeth Hendrickson

When we're under extreme pressure, we often forget that there are options other than Yes and No, Fight or Flight.

In this session, we will explore how we lose our power to see choices, and what we can do to get that power back.
7.01: Who Are You Really?
Naomi Karten and Don Gray

Have you ever had an experience where you behaved a certain way and later thought, "Why did I act that way? That wasn't like me at all"?

Have you ever found that at different times, you act in diametrically opposite ways, such as very serious at certain times and totally silly at other times?

Have you ever wondered: Which is the real me?

The reality is that we all have multiple “parts” -- different aspects of our personality that coexist and that surface at different times and in different circumstances. Some of these parts support us as we make our daily rounds; others might hinder us, disturb us, or drive us nuts. Some parts we might like a lot; other parts we might prefer to banish.

This session will draw from Virginia Satir’s activity called "A Parts Party" to help you identify and appreciate your own parts. You'll be given guidelines and sample questions to help you, individually and in small groups, to gain insight into the many aspects of who you are and how each part contributes to the overall you. And you'll learn about integrating your parts so that together they can help you amplify your effectiveness.

Tuesday Morning
7.21: Satir System Coaching
Jean McLendon

All of us are learners seeking to be more effective. Sometimes we need help. It can and has come to us from various directions: parents, friends, partners, clergy, therapists, consultants, supervisors, teachers, mentors, managers, owners, coaches etc. The form and quality of help available is equally wide ranging.

Jean McLendon, coach, friend, mentor, consultant, to many of the AYE community, has over 30 years of professional experience in helping people deal with change, conflict, and connection. Utilizing the methods and models of Virginia Satir, she explores both the inner and outer dynamics of her client's challenges. This session allows individuals, partnerships and teams an opportunity to seek Jean's guidance.
7.19: Leading Appreciatively
Diana Larsen

Join in exploring the value of appreciation and an appreciative mindset as we step into leadership--shared or solo, formal or informal, defined or emergent. Looking through an appreciative lens can transform leadership into a magnifier for outstanding performance, for critical day-to-day contributions, for the joy of an unexpected moment, and for the lessons from a difficult experience. Try on the practices appreciative leaders bring to their organizations.
7.14: Reflect and Adapt
Elisabeth Hendrickson

The only constant is change. Teams change. And when teams become agile, their working agreements need to be agile and changeable.

In this session, teams will learn to reflect on the current conditions, and adjust their working agreements as their environment changes.
7.06: Communicate Effectively with Upper Management
Steve Smith

Do you wish you could break through and communicate better with upper management? You aren't alone.

Employees do their best to share their ideas with busy upper managers. But they rarely receive feedback about the interaction. In this workshop, we will simulate interactions with upper management and provide feedback about the interaction.

Behind closed doors, upper managers complain that employees whine about difficult problems: They don't clearly define the problem; they don't state the impact of the problem in business terms; they don't provide actionable recommendations for fixing the problem; and they don't explain why fixing a problem is more important than fixing other problems.

Transform how you propose ideas to upper management so they hear your proposal and act on it rather than hear complaints.

Objectives

Simulate communication between employee and upper management

Hear participants' experiences proposing ideas to upper management

Discover patterns for effective interaction between employee and management

Simulate making a proposal to upper management

Receive feedback about your proposal and resimulate making the proposal

7.35: Building Connections that Amplify Your Effectiveness
Naomi Karten

Two people meet. Something draws them together. In time, they forge a deep, long-lasting, mutually supportive relationship. At least, it sometimes happens this way. But often, the relationship they develop is more transient or superficial, even if enjoyable. And sometimes, two people meet, find little that draws them together (or a lot that drives them apart), and they go their separate ways. What influences which way a relationship will go?

This session will take place on two levels. The first is theoretical. Through simulations and discussion, we'll explore how relationships develop, grow, and deepen, and we'll try to identify what contributes to or hinders valued professional or personal connections.

The second level is practical and personal: The activities we'll do will enable you to get to know your fellow attendees a little (or a lot) better than you might otherwise--without requiring you to do or disclose anything more than you care to. In the process, some of you may find connections that will help you amplify your own and each other's effectiveness not just during this conference, but long after the conference ends.

Tuesday Afternoon
7.22: Satir Coaching Followup
Jean McLendon

This sessions is an extended debrief for current and past attendees of Jean's "Satir Systems Coaching" sessions. Join with Jean to explore the implications of the experiential work from the Coaching session, and to develop "take aways" to help you apply the experiences back home.
7.28: Resistance as a Resource
Dale Emery

You are a change artist, creative, intelligent and insightful. Part of your job is to improve your organization. You identify a need, envision an improvement, and make your proposal.

Someone to your right says, "But we tried that before, and it didn't work." Someone to the left says, "But we've never done that before." Right in front of you, a third person says, "But that's no different from what we're doing now." From the background, you hear a rising chorus of, "But we don't have time!"

You're getting resistance. Now what do you do?

In this session, we will explore an approach that works: Crank up your curiosity and empathy!

Whatever else it may be, resistance is information--information about the values and beliefs of the people you are asking to change, about the organization, about the change you are proposing, and about yourself as a change agent.

This session is about how to turn resistance from a frustration into a resource. You will learn and create new ways to interpret people's responses as valuable information, and new ways to translate that information into effective action to move forward with change.
7.05:
Steve Smith

Organizational mapping is an adaptation of Virginia Satir's approach to family system sculpting. It's a powerful technique that can be used in several situations:

to help an organization understand and diagnose its own interpersonal or intergroup dynamics

to help a group from similar organizations understand typical dynamics

to help a group understand the dynamics of its relationship to outside groups

to provide consultation in a training context to a consultant engaged in a change effort with a client system.

In this session, we'll learn the technique by giving each person a chance to map an organization of interest, with consulting from other participants.
7.10: Experience the Diagram of Effects
Don Gray

A Diagram of Effects (DOE) helps you see the dynamics of a system. This is a powerful first step for solving a system problem or, at least, mitigating it. When a team creates a diagram, it helps members arrive at at a shared view of the system. With a shared view, it's easier to reach consensus about an approach and convince management of the need for change.

You will learn to create a DOE in this session. You will create interventions to address the problem, and you'll share your work with other teams.

Objectives:

Review DOE notation

Collaborate with others to create a DOE for a system

Collaborate with others to add an intervention to the diagram

Share your team's DOE with other teams

7.04: Transforming Rules in to Guides
Johanna Rothman and Jerry Weinberg

Our survival rules and rules about commenting are central to the way we participate in interactions. Rules are not to be thought of as bad; on the contrary, we should honor our rules for helping us to survive this long in a difficult world. Then we can acknowledge that our rules may need to be updated to fit the changing world--what was good for us at age four may not fit perfectly at age forty.

By transforming a rule into a guide, we keep the old possibility and add a few new ones. For instance, take the common rule, I must always do a perfect job. Analytically, we can see that this is impossible, but emotionally we may keep trying to be perfect all the time. When the rule is transformed, we can try to be perfect some of the time, when it is appropriate, and be free to settle for good enough when that is more fitting.

In this session, we'll demonstrate the technique for transforming a rule into a guide, while giving each participant a chance to surface some rules to be transformed.

Wednesday Morning
7.07: Exploring Tradeoffs: Quality vs. Speed
Steve Smith

Experience making tradeoff decisions between the quality of a product and the speed it is delivered to the market. As a member of a team, you will work to deliver a product to market that has more value than your competitors. Parts of your product work as designed: Other parts are defective. You must remove defects, but if you spend too much time removing them, the value of your product will decline.

We will debrief how teams dealt with these predicaments. We will explore how to make more effective tradeoff decisions throughout the product development process.

Objectives:

Experience the interplay of logic and emotion in making tradeoff decisions

Discover patterns in how teams make tradeoff decisions

Formulate strategies for making more effective tradeoff decisions

7.31: Crossing Cultures
Esther Derby

Whether or not your team members look similar on the surface, there may still be cultural differences. Those differences in culture can be a source of creativity or can torpedo the team. Cultural difference isn't limited to nationalities. It can also arise from professional specialization or regional differences. Understanding the affects of culture and building bridges can reduce misunderstandings and improve productivity.
7.17: Cultivating Trust in Teams: Six Approaches
Diana Larsen

Lots of folks talk about trust in teams, but few do anything about it. Team observers and members agree that trust plays an important role in teams reaching high performance, but how does trust happen? Team trust involves both trustworthy and trusting behaviors. In this session we’ll investigate six ways to accelerate trust-building within teams.
7.25: Interviewing by Rehearsal
Dave Smith

You want to make good hires. Recovering from a bad hire is expensive--living with one can be worse. But you often have but a short period with a candidate. What can you do in thirty to sixty minutes to get a good feel for a candidate's temperament and capabilities?

In this session we will practice several interviewng techniques, including one that Dave has used and refined over many years of hiring developers into start-ups.
7.33: A Writing Workshop
Johanna Rothman and Naomi Karten

Do you ever get stuck trying to put words on paper? Would you like writing to be more fun and less drudgery? Could your writing benefit by becoming livelier? Would you like to know some of the tricks and techniques used by experienced writers? Have you thought about writing as a way to build credibility and create name recognition? Whether you're interested in becoming more skilled in writing memos, reports, articles, books--or email messages--you'll get lots of tips, coaching and practice in this workshop given by wordmeisters Naomi and Johanna.

This workshop will offer ideas on what constitutes good writing, how to get past writer's block, techniques for critiquing your own writing, traps to avoid, editing do's and don'ts, ways to get the ideas to flow, and more. Whether you have yet to write your first complete sentence, or you are an experienced writer who wants to become better at critiquing your own work, this writing workshop is for you. Writing activities will be included, so bring paper, pen--and your questions. Come prepared to take your writing to the next level.

Wednesday Afternoon
7.09: Do You See What I Hear?
Don Gray

"You can see a whole lot just by watching" - Yogi Berra

The first step in the Satir Interaction Model is Intake. If we don't make the correct observations we have a flawed intake. The following steps, Meaning, Significance and Response become off centered.

In this session we'll explore:

What influences observations?

How do we decide what to observe?

What biases exist in our observations?

Can we improve our observation abilities?

What models can we use as a framework?

Learning Objectives:

An understanding of our preferred intake modality.

Explore what influences observations.

How to improve our observations.

7.27: Putting Your Power to Work
Dale Emery

Do you want more power at work? Less power? Better power? Do you want to use your power more wisely and effectively?

Power can be one of the most fascinating and frustrating aspects in our working lives. In this session, we will identify what power is, and some of the forms it takes in people, relationships, and organizations. We will explore often-overlooked sources of power that are readily available to us, and learn how to connect with those sources to empower ourselves and others. We will identify and practice ways to use our power wisely, to serve our highest needs, the needs of other people, and the needs of the organization and the world around us.
7.26: Deciding How to Decide
Dave Smith

How does your team make decisions? Are you sure?

Many teams march forward under the mutual illusion that there is an agreed upon way that decisions are made, until some crisis--and the team's response to it--shatters that illusion.

In this session we will explore the pitfalls that may be present when your team lacks an agreed-up, understood way of making decisions. Along the way, we'll explore ways of deciding how to decide.
7.37: A Sessions on General Systems Thinking
Dwayne Phillips

"My orange is on fire!" Yes, oranges can burn. So can Fritos corn chips. How can that be?

Ever work on an average project? Given the hundreds of thousands of projects out there in the world, I must have worked on at least one average project. But I haven't. How can that be?

Seeing is believing. Unless of course you see something that you cannot believe or believe something that you cannot see. Which most of us have done. How can that be?

I am open to new ideas, but closed to some. My brain doesn't grow any physically, but I learn new things. Can I also be forgetting what I have learned? How can that be?

This session will explore these and other topics of General Systems Thinking.
7.24: Growing Through Differences
Jerry Weinberg

"We connect through our sameness. We grow through our differences."

All of us have some difficulty dealing with people who are different from us. In this session, we'll experience and learn how to do it better. If you have ever felt difficulties because you are different, this session is for you.