Santa Barbara Clean Language Workshop

Here is a quick recap of the Santa Barbara agile community meetup workshop I led on January 6th and a list of learning links as many expressed interest in continuing their learning journey.

There were about 40 people in the room at Citrix headquarters. A quick poll showed an even distribution of developers, analysts/product owners, coaches, and ‘other’ – including a few designers\UX folks and testers.  We started the session with the ‘Life is like..’ warm up exercise to introduce folks to metaphor.  There was lots of laughter and confusion as people played with the words and meanings. 

The workshop continued with a mix of stories about clean, how it evolved, and how to create clean questions. I interspersed that with exercises, practice and demos. While some left curious and pondering its application, several folks came up to me after and knew that they would be figuring out how to incorporate clean thinking processing into their work. I recall in particular a designer and a person dealing with selling of the product who could see the usefulness of clean questions.  Another lady, not affiliated with IT at all, had come because she is in career transition into health arena and thought it might be applicable. She left sure that she would continue exploring and taking classes.

Here is what I compiled for the participants afterwards so that they could have access to further information and learning opportunities about Clean Language. 

My personal recommendations list for books and online resources is posted on my webpage, Adaptive Collaboration. 

For those who do want to continue ‘live’ with practice and learning, here are a few links to upcoming events:  

A webinar by Caitlin Walker coming up February 4th (9 am pacific time on a Thursday)  – this will be similar to the workshop I gave. Caitlin has been doing Clean Language for 20+ years. She’s an expert. There will be lots of interaction via the text chats, and some live participation with volunteers using Adobe Connect.

If you would like to participate in small group Skype based Metaphor Mastery class, Judy Rees does a great job facilitating those. Scroll to the bottom of the link to sign up. 

There is A LOT of information on clean learning events around the world. Go to the April timeframe for links to Clean for Teams type programs some of which are occurring in Portland, and others of which are occurring in Asheville, NC.  

My friend in San Luis Obispo, Sharon Small, has not yet posted a full 2016 schedule of trainings but will likely do them in the fall timeframe in the San Luis Obispo area. You can sign up for her newsletter and learn what her curriculum is like here.  Sharon offered the nice bookmarks for the event. She’s the co-author (co-compiler) of the book I mentioned that she and I put together, called, Who Is Using Clean Language anyway.

By the way, don’t forget to pick up your copy (for free) here – for inspiration. The book contains interview stories of people and how Clean Language changed their life outlook, business, and relationships. It is similar in style to the Who Is Agile book that is also published on Leanpub.

Lastly, a few of you wanted something more concrete on how to use this right away at work.  The CleanLanguage.co.uk web site is an absolute treasure trove, but can be a bit daunting to find just the right stuff.  So I propose you take a look specifically at the section here, on business applications.  There’s a particularly good transcript of Meeting facilitation using Clean Setup – something Caitlin Walker developed, that may give you a sense of how you might begin to use the basic questions to get great clarity for an upcoming meeting. 

Thanks again to Citrix for hosting and Heidi Helfand for inviting me. I loved Santa Barbara and wish you all well and a fantastic 2016. 

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