From flying coach to the flight deck: Using the Cynefin framework for creating meaningful, high-impact work

flighttime.png

Let's face it if we have the option, none of us would fly coach. Depending on how long your flight is the seats transform from disagreeable into various types of torture devices, the food is literally peanuts, your chances of seeing where you are going depends on your luck and stretching your legs relies heavily on whether the person next to you is willing to give you the chance to do it. 

Now I know the last 2-3 years meant that quite a few of us have yet to get back to flying but the picture above can also depict being stuck on a project as ye old "bums on the seats".

How many times have you led teams who feel disengaged and demotivated working on projects that made them feel more like part of the furniture rather than experts and problem solvers? How many times have you found yourself in projects that have a massive laundry list of tasks and outputs but with no clear target outcomes? How many times have you as a project sponsor wondered if you are getting the most value out of your consultants?

If any of these situations resonate with you, this discussion is for you -  a discussion on creating meaningful and impactful work for you and your teams using the lens of the Cynefin framework. 

Equipped with the Cynefin framework, we will incrementally move from the lumpy, occasionally painful seats at the back of the plane towards the flight deck, a journey from doing tasks to solving problems that create an impact for both our stakeholders and our teams. 

While this talk will use experiences mostly coming from a consultant perspective, the use case and how the challenges and opportunities for improvement were addressed will be useful for industry practitioners or consultants. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

Outline/Structure of the Presentation

 

Take-off (Introduction)

  • The case for meaningful work 
  • The subjective nature of meaningful work 
  •  The importance of strategy to meaningful work

Reviewing the Flight Plan

  • A review/introduction for those that are new to the Cynefin Framework 
  • A quick group discussion on examples of work and how they fit in the framework
  • Understanding your current reality using the Cynefin framework 

Flying coach to moving the flight deck (Use case breakdown and discussion)

  • From  "busy work" to problem-solving work
  • Engaging your stakeholders and working with your team to clarify and shift towards meaningful work
  • Data, metrics and other tools to keep the conversation going 

Turbulence (Pitfalls and gotcha's and how to avoid them)

Final Approach (Conclusion)

  • WIFM (What's in it for me /and my teams)
  • Recommendations
  • Q&A

 

Learning Outcome

  • Gain a new perspective on "meaningful" work 
  • Understand the Cynefin Framework and how you can use it to assess how "meaningful" the work is for your stakeholders and your team 
  • Get practical tips in shifting the conversation from working on tasks to solving problems
  • Get ideas on how to use data to continue creating "meaningful" work 

Target Audience

Team Members, Team Leaders who have a desire to create meaningful work for themselves and their teams.

Prerequisites for Attendees

An open and curious mind. Attendees are also welcome to share use cases, or examples during the course of the presentation/discussion.

schedule Submitted 9 months ago

  • Grant Sutton
    keyboard_arrow_down

    Grant Sutton - Engineering better solutions by combining Event Storming and Human Centered Design

    Grant Sutton
    Grant Sutton
    Head of Delivery
    Digio
    schedule 10 months ago
    Sold Out!
    80 Mins
    Skills Workshop
    Intermediate

    The best software is designed when teams collaborate to understand, prioritize and trade-off customer experience, business process, organizational and technology considerations. In this workshop, we will discuss modeling techniques that work together to enable practitioners to engineer robust solutions - for humans, by humans. 

    Learn how Event Storming, a workshop-based approach from domain-driven design, can help engineers to better design software in collaboration,  not in opposition with business stakeholders. As we event storm to engineer robust, flexible, and extensible solutions, we'll also look at how to integrate human-centered design practices to identify so that the design responds to customer/user needs and key pain points.

    During this session, we'll give you an overview of domain-driven design, and how event storming works, use case studies as an example. For those of you who've missed collaborative workshops and thousands of sticky notes, we'll also have multiple break out sessions where we'll put some of the theory into practice on example scenarios so you'll leave the session with some practical experience on how to apply the technique.

  • Amanda Brown
    keyboard_arrow_down

    Amanda Brown - Rapid Customer Interviews - Why Insights Don't Need to be Expensive

    Amanda Brown
    Amanda Brown
    Product Manager
    Pretzel Lab
    schedule 10 months ago
    Sold Out!
    40 Mins
    Skills Workshop
    Beginner

    Teams avoid gathering customer insights for the following reasons: 

    • time
    • money
    • expertise

    In this session, I hope to solve all three issues by providing a technique and approach to gaining rapid customer insights by answering the questions you really need to know (plus a few tips on hustling).

    Building the wrong thing is much riskier than spending a small amount of time and money on getting feature level insights. According to a study conducted by Pendo (2019), 80% of features built by product teams are either not used or rarely used by customers. By understanding if your feature, product or program meets the need of your end user ahead of time, you are far more likely to be part of the successful 20%.

  • Matthieu Siggen
    keyboard_arrow_down

    Matthieu Siggen - Supercharge your organisation's layers of consciousness

    Matthieu Siggen
    Matthieu Siggen
    Delivery Principal
    DigIO
    schedule 10 months ago
    Sold Out!
    80 Mins
    Skills Workshop
    Intermediate

    Frederic Laloux's "Reinventing Organisations" introduced the concept of Organisational Layers of Consciousness. 

    This workshop will briefly sum them up before helping you dissect your own organisation and understand:

    1. what current level the different parts that make up your organisation are at
    2. what opportunities and pitfalls you may encounter by levelling up some of these parts
    3. what optimal level each of these parts should strive for

    Note that this workshop will be underpinned by the real life example of how this is done at Mantel Group.

  • Jochy Reyes
    keyboard_arrow_down

    Jochy Reyes - Step into the intersection: Tech for Social Impact

    Jochy Reyes
    Jochy Reyes
    Delivery Manager
    DigIO
    schedule 10 months ago
    Sold Out!
    40 Mins
    Presentation
    Beginner

    "You can be a rich person alone. You can be a smart person alone. But you cannot be a complete person alone. For that you must be part of, and rooted in, an olive grove." ― Thomas L. Friedman

    They say the best chance to innovate lies in the intersection. It is in here that you will find remarkable ideas that blurr the lines of studies and disciplines. It is in here you will find the unusual, the desirable, the valuable and if we are really lucky valuable to humanity. 

    But the smart does not depend on luck and with social issues abound, the clock is ticking. We need to expedite innovation, seek and step into the intersections.

    This talk is a conversation in quotes, in stats, uses cases and memes divided into three parts all aimed to have you leaving the room encouraged and excited to find innovations (big or small) addressing social issues.

    The presentation covers ideas from the book the Medici Effect, research on global trends and statistics, the UN Sustainable Development Goals and a healthy amount of Twitter quotes.

     

  • Sonal Premi
    keyboard_arrow_down

    Sonal Premi - Security fails at the seams: A Case study using DDD modelling to validate the hypothesis

    Sonal Premi
    Sonal Premi
    Lead Business Analyst
    DigIO
    schedule 9 months ago
    Sold Out!
    40 Mins
    Case Study
    Beginner

    As analysts, engineers and delivery folk working in areas with a lot of uncertainty, there's often times a need to justify our "why" - why are we investing time and energy building bespoke engineering solutions, and where is the value for the business?

    In one of my recent projects working within the area of security and control automation, this question of "why" came up multiple times, to justify how the program of work was shaped, to justify the solution approach, and to justify the value to the business, among other things. 

    In our 40 minutes together, I'd like to embark on a journey to address these whys using a Business Analysts' favourite approach: modelling. At this point, you and George Box are likely to say, "but Sonal, all models are wrong". Yes, I agree, but humour me.

    Using a case study from one of my recent projects, I'd like to uncover the utility of DDD modelling techniques and bounded context, by demonstrating its creative application. Along this journey, I hope that as we validate or disprove a working hypothesis, we'd also uncover its impact on ambiguity and the ability to shape the program of work.

  • Grant Sutton
    keyboard_arrow_down

    Grant Sutton - Gaming the System: Using Simulations to Understand Flow

    Grant Sutton
    Grant Sutton
    Head of Delivery
    Digio
    schedule 10 months ago
    Sold Out!
    80 Mins
    Simulation
    Beginner

    When it comes to agile many people get caught up with the adoption of particular frameworks rather than focusing on the goal of actual agility in work and releasing software.

    In this session we'll discuss the fundamentals underpinning all frameworks -  maintaining flow and  explore how the choices you make impact it .

    We'll reinforce each of your learnings with some simple simulations using dice and sticky notes that you can  then use with your own teams to teach the same concepts.

help