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The Agile Within
Providing agile insights into human values and behaviors through genuine connections.
The Agile Within
Learning Organizations Love Workshops with Paula Lipnick
Discover the secret sauce behind creating impactful workshops that foster learning and innovation within organizations. Join me as I engage in a lively conversation with the insightful Paula Lipnick, a seasoned product agility lead, whose expertise in orchestrating transformative workshops is nothing short of inspiring. Paula shares her valuable strategies on aligning workshop goals with team objectives, ensuring sessions are not just productive but also engaging and motivational. Learn how to nurture curiosity and professional growth in fast-paced industries like technology and product management, and explore Paula's engaging analogy of setting the table to create a welcoming environment for collaborative learning.
Explore the journey of maximizing workshop benefits through intentional planning and continuous improvement. We delve into the intricacies of value stream mapping workshops and uncover how breaking down silos can optimize processes, build empathy, and spark innovation among team members. Paula and I also swap stories about the thrilling world of immersive workshops, akin to hackathons, where creativity meets excitement, and nerves turn into innovation. Whether you're curious about adopting new tools or eager to facilitate hands-on learning experiences, this episode offers a treasure trove of insights for making workshops a cornerstone of your learning organization.
Connect with Paula on LinkedIn:
linkedin.com/in/paula-lipnick-mba-pmp-psm
When in Dallas, visit the Dallas World Aquarium:
https://dwazoo.com/
Follow us on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-agile-within
Welcome to the Agile Within. I am your host, mark Metz. My mission for this podcast is to provide Agile insights into human values and behaviors through genuine connections. My guests and I will share real-life stories from our Agile journeys triumphs, blunders and everything in between, as well as the lessons that we have learned. So get pumped, get rocking. The Agile Within starts now.
Speaker 1:Before we dive into today's episode, I'd like to take a moment to thank our sponsor, impact Agility. Impact Agility specializes in training and coaching through scrumorg and proconbonorg, empowering teams with cutting-edge tools and techniques. Their classes are designed to deliver actionable insights, whether you're a scrum master, agile coach, delivery manager or organizational leader. Whether you're a scrum master, agile coach, delivery manager or organizational leader, at the helm is president and founder Matt Domenici, who has guided over 50 organizations toward professional agility. With his hands-on experience, matt helps teams and organizations take ownership of their processes and outcomes, unlocking their full potential. To explore free learning resources, check out their training schedule or book a free consultation, visit impactagilityco Once again. That's impactagilityco. Well, hey there everybody. Welcome back. This is Mark Metz, your host at the Agile Within. My guest today for this episode is Paula Lipnick. Paula, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me here, Mark. I'm so excited to be here.
Speaker 1:Glad to have you Well. Paula is a product agility lead with over 15 years of experience driving innovation and improving business value. She's passionate about agile, lean and DevOps practices. She holds multiple certifications, including an MBA, a PSM and a PMP, and when she's not transforming teams, she enjoys volunteering, hiking and catching waves whenever she's near the ocean. Ooh, what's your next trip to go to the ocean, paula?
Speaker 2:I'm actually leaving here pretty soon to go to Sri Lanka and go surfing.
Speaker 1:Wow, so you don't go close, you go big.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's right. Gives me an excuse to go somewhere international. Enjoy some awesome waves, some great beach time.
Speaker 1:Sounds awesome. International enjoy some awesome waves, some great beach time Sounds awesome. Well, paula, you reside in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and I've been there several times, but let's say, if I haven't been there and I were coming for the first time, what's one thing that Paula would say that I couldn't miss doing?
Speaker 2:Mark, you have to go to the Dallas World Aquarium. The Dallas World Aquarium is located in downtown Dallas. It has animals and all aquatic life forms. It's amazing. It's one of my favorite places in the world.
Speaker 1:I have not been there and I wish I would have talked with you, because my daughter was actually in Dallas last week and I could have told her. So, hey, that's a good excuse for us to get over there.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, absolutely. You will love it.
Speaker 1:Great. Well, I am an animal lover, so we'll definitely put that on the list for my wife and I to do. Well, the title for today's episode is Learning Organizations, love Workshops. So, Paula, why workshops specifically?
Speaker 2:Workshops give you a chance to get away from your desk and get immersed in all of the knowledge and all of the learning and, plus, you're taking the work that you're doing, taking it into the workshop and learning with that, so it helps everybody not only learn but build confidence towards. This is something that I can do and this is something that it's works and it's going to be helpful, and we should bring it back after the workshop.
Speaker 1:You and I were talking about this before and you were talking through some common definitions, so maybe's all about how can we get better together?
Speaker 2:and providing that environment so everyone can learn. It's designed for continuous improvement and evolving practices and many of the practices today in technology and product management are evolving.
Speaker 1:How do you do that encouragement? Because you say you want to encourage that learning and that professional growth. Some people might be a little more resistant to that and they may look at it as you know. This is fluff time or this is time that I could be spending doing actual work. How do you encourage that curiosity to be able to have people interested in learning and growing?
Speaker 2:And it's important that everybody knows that many of the things that we're doing today, especially in technology, they are changing. So we've got to change with that, knowing that this is something that we can all do together and that not everybody has all of the answers immediately. It is something that we should be learning to do and then focusing on what skills that takes, identifying that and letting everybody know how to achieve that. It starts with, similarly to how we're creating value for our customers. You've got to know what your goal is. Once you know what that goal is creating, the learning for that lets everybody understand that this is creating value. This is absolutely essential to creating that value for our customers.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to raise my hand and say guilty as charged here, paula. I've gone in and done some workshops where I felt like I had some goals. They weren't the same goals that the team felt like were important and it ended up being a dumpster fire and I had comments of why are we even doing this? What's the purpose of this? How is this going to help us? So how do you choose those goals so that the team is bought in and you really I like to use the term set the table and maybe that's a term that gets lost but really when you invite a guest over, you want to have a table set so that it's really nice and sets the environment, sets the attitude that you're going to have a very relaxed, nice, comfortable meal. So how do we set the table for a workshop?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and this is something that I learned from a very wise coach myself and what he would do is he would bring us into the workshop. We would define our goals together, so we would be creating the goals as a group for the workshop.
Speaker 1:That's really good. What did that look like? What kind of? How did you do that? Like brainstorming session, of of getting everybody together?
Speaker 2:We would all get together and then there would be an over overall value goal that we wanted to have, and then we would have goals that would help us achieve that. So we started out with a big goal goals that would help us achieve that. So we started out with a big goal. We'd break that down into smaller goals. We'd decide on it all together. So we knew what we were working towards, we knew what our North Star was going to be, and then we had some ways that we would also quantify that too. So you have your goal and you have your metrics.
Speaker 1:There were some characteristics that you had talked to me about that workshops should have. What are those characteristics?
Speaker 2:Okay, the characteristics that we should have is that it should be a cross-functional team. You need to have all of the members of that team that are doing the workshop. They should be able to deliver that value from end to end. There's a lot of value to being immersed in it, which means that you're not bringing in your laptop batting on your messaging, you're trying to leave your phone on silent and I mean like happens right? I mean like there are things. But having that air cover, being able to go in there and say, hey, I'm going to focus all of my energy on what we're doing today in the workshop, is very valuable.
Speaker 1:And I would guess some working agreements would be good to set up front. Make sure everybody agrees to those rules. I mean obviously, like if I were coming into a workshop, if my daughter calls for an emergency, I'm going to pick up the phone, but if it's a work-related call, hey, I'm going to put it down for an hour and I'm going to give I'm going to give Paula my undivided attention for an hour.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, absolutely. And yeah, having that working agreement is always a part of the beginning of a workshop, and letting everybody decide on what those components of the working agreement are together, that aligns the team too. Working agreements are essential for outlining how you're going to work together, but they're also one of the other value drivers that they have is aligning a team.
Speaker 1:What about experimentation? Where does that come into workshops? So how do we learn and how we feel safe in the team to? I'm just going to say, to be real, because sometimes when you go into a training class or a workshop, maybe they're not people that you're intimately familiar with and maybe you don't work with, and I've seen people that definitely want to come in and they want to show their best side and they want to impress. But how do you get down to the nitty gritty and say we want to talk about the warts, not just all the pretty fluffy stuff?
Speaker 2:Mark, I love that because, like you did say, you touched on something very important getting real Many of the people that you're going to be in the workshop with sometimes you don't work with them every day, and how do you get to psychological safety? How do you build that trust and make it so it's okay to fail? Things don't always work out the first time you try them. That's actually a really important part of learning is having the opportunity to fail and learning from what didn't work out. So these are all things that help in the workshop environment and they help when you go back out into the real world and you're using the skills and the practices that you learned inside of the workshop. And so all of the things that you're doing up front, where you're creating the working agreement, you're creating the common goals, you're doing some icebreakers, you're doing a lot of those things they help build up that trust and they help build it up where everyone can work together inside of the workshop and be real.
Speaker 1:I've done a check-in before just to see what people's honest feelings were about you know what are they coming in with. Do you feel distracted coming in? Is there something that you're bringing in with you into this that you can't give it your full attention? Are you coming here just because your boss told you to? Are you super excited about coming into this and excited about the expectations of what you might learn? And you know you think that all right, if I put this in front, nobody's going to be that honest. But I have been surprised like really surprised that people will be bluntly honest about yeah, my boss told me to come to this, so I'm here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and I love that, I applaud that honesty because that does it helps build up everyone working together as a team.
Speaker 1:And you kind of know what you're up against and kind of I don't know. You can read the room to a certain extent, but it's just another extension of being able to read the room. Well, paula, talk to us about some of the benefits that you've seen through holding workshops.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of benefits because everyone's learning new practices. That is going to help their regular work flow better become something that's an optimized process. The learning can be used immediately after the workshop. So this is something where nobody has to wait to get the value from it. They can take it, they can use it and then if they run into any issues and there's something that they can always reach out to me on or they can reach out to anybody from inside of the workshop and then it also builds that community of practice, of practice. So everybody that you go into the workshop with you can be on a chat with later and talk about some of the things that you've learned or some of the things that you still need some more information on, but you get to work on it together and then allowing those teams to focus on those goals and benefits.
Speaker 1:How do you really reinforce that? Because it's very easy to go to a workshop and even if you are fully engaged, you've come out energized, right, and as soon as you come out at it, come out of the workshop, you head back to your desk and guess what? There's five fires that immediately need to be put out, and it's like that just gets pushed way back to the back part of your brain. So how do you encourage others to really leverage those learnings and put those into practice and not fall into the trap of just dealing with the urgency of the day?
Speaker 2:One of the things that I do is I just touch base with people. I like to reach out and say, hey, how's that working out? Is there anything that you'd like to talk about? But also in the past, a lot of times, some of the things that you do inside of that workshop that create those magic moments, capturing those. So I mean, like there's there's things that happen while you're you're doing some of these really immersive workshops. You take pictures of them, you document that and then having everybody have those memories from that will take you back to that time where you were like this is the best thing that I've ever done. I cannot wait to do it when I get back to my desk.
Speaker 1:You are excellent at that because I know for a fact. I've seen you, I follow you on LinkedIn and I see all the pictures of the smiling faces that you take. So, yes, you practice what you preach.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 1:All right. So our listeners that are out there, they may be saying, well, this is all great, I like what I'm hearing, but how can you make it more tangible? Can you talk about some examples or give us something a little more concrete than just talking on a theory level? So can you share with us some examples of workshops that you've done, and maybe some lessons that you've learned, or even some mistakes you've made along the way? Dare I ask?
Speaker 2:We all learn from making mistakes, that is for sure. One of the types of workshops that I really enjoy facilitating and being a part of is a value stream mapping workshop, because that takes a process from end to end and it gets everybody that's involved in that value stream together to improve that process and everyone that is in the value stream they own a part of it, so they're all getting together, they're all removing those silos that can sometimes prevent the value from happening and they're asking each other what their pain points are. How do I resolve this? How do I make this better for everyone in the value stream? It's amazing to get everyone together to feel that energy and it's like the room becomes alive because you're working together, you're solving that common problem, all of those problems together, and you can get tangible results.
Speaker 1:And it's a time where these people typically don't all get together right.
Speaker 2:That's true, that's true.
Speaker 1:That's true. Just see the whole picture.
Speaker 2:It's always interesting because sometimes they work together every day but they don't talk. So it's getting everybody in that whole value stream to talk to each other and then they understand why something's waiting in queue for so long. Understand, like, why something's waiting in queue for so long. You know, when you're waiting for something you're always wondering whether it be somebody that's coming to your house to fix your lawnmower or to, like, help you with your plumbing or something like that. You're always wondering why it's taking them so long to arrive. Getting everybody together to talk about that and what some of the challenges are on their side, then that creates empathy and that makes everyone work together and collaborate even more.
Speaker 1:So people can be impatient sometimes and they want, like, immediate results. So this value stream. You know it may take a month to get through this value stream. If it's something that's rather complex, you're like we need to get this down to a day. So what are some techniques that you do to make progress and keep people interested and energized without being let down of well? Their expectations might not be met. So maybe a better way to ask this is how do you keep people's expectations in check?
Speaker 2:I usually have a really clear agenda of what it is that we're going to cover and value stream mapping usually takes three days at the least, but you can break that down into smaller chunks. I just like to make it so everybody knows what they can expect, what day, how long it's going to take. That usually helps. But then also just going back over and reviewing the progress that we've made and how many things that we like we've got five process improvements. It's going to take, you know, reduce this process by this many hours. Telling everybody all of the progress that we're making as we go to that helps everybody stay engaged, because we all love progress.
Speaker 1:So, paula, how do you keep people's expectations intact for, like, let's say, a value stream mapping workshop like you're talking about? So this may be over a few days that you're doing this, this workshop, but the value stream itself of that process, let's just say maybe it takes a month for work to work its way from beginning to end of the value stream, and that's not optimal and everybody's complaining about it. And maybe you have somebody in with very high expectations. They're like this value stream should be executed in no more than three days. It's this very complex value stream. You're going to condense it from a month to three days, right? So how do you keep those expectations of? Okay, first step, we're going to take it from maybe a month. Let's just shave a week off of that. Or what can we do to make some gradual process? And maybe there are big levers to pull, but we're not going to eat an elephant all in one bite. How do you communicate that and how do you facilitate that?
Speaker 2:Mark. There's a lot of ways to make it visible. One of my favorite ways is with a prioritization grid showing just how much effort it's going to take to implement some of these process improvements. I always like to tell everybody that we're going to go for the low-hanging fruit first, and the low-hanging fruit is easy to implement and it might take a couple of days to implement, but it's only going to save one or two days off of it as far as an overall process too. So that's one of the things that everyone will understand the amount of effort that goes into implementing some of the process improvements. We prioritize that list and then we estimate how long it's going to take, but it's part of the process to make sure that everybody has the same expectation of how long it's going to take.
Speaker 1:Have you had any experiences where I'm saying this? People can't see the smirk on my face, but I'm kind of setting you up here. What about those people that are very good at pointing the finger of, well, they need to do this and they need to do that, but they're not quite as good at looking toward themselves and what improvements that they can make in the process?
Speaker 2:I always like to explain to everybody that what we're going to do is we're going to take the overall time and go for an overall time reduction. So that doesn't mean just reducing the time for one team and having that team sweep some of their work over to another team. We need to work together collaboratively because we can reduce it overall. That's the way that everybody's working together to solve that common problem and make things better across the board for everyone.
Speaker 1:I'm sure you've never heard the term. Well, my team's good.
Speaker 2:I mean, you know it's been known to come up.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, value stream mapping, that's a great one. Any other examples that come to mind?
Speaker 2:You do a merchant workshop where you're developing a whole product, and those are extremely fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so tell me a little bit about what that looks like. So you're creating a new product from the ground up?
Speaker 2:Yes, so it's an immersive workshop to create a product, and this could be a product at a very prototype level. But what you're doing is you want to take something that is a concept and deliver on that value Understanding what the product is proving out, that it's going to create value for your customers, and then getting everybody together to work on it and build out that prototype and be able to demo it at the end of the workshop.
Speaker 1:So that almost sounds kind of sort of like a hackathon type approach, is it? Is there some overlap for talking Venn diagrams with the two approaches, or maybe not?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, because you're really delivering some kind of a working product at the end of this, and similarly with a hackathon, you're you're developing a solution.
Speaker 1:So I have to tell you a funny story. I went to a college hackathon where they hosted it at a school, but there were multiple schools that came in. It was rather large and so they had students. It was very typical of a hackathon, right, if you think about just. They had air mattresses on the floor, they had snacks everywhere. I mean it was truly working like overnight for two days to come up with this product, and I was one of the ones at the hackathon and I was one of the judges that would walk through and all the students would show me their product or their prototype they had put together. And this one group showed me this very, extremely well polished application and I couldn't help but ask them are you sure you completed this in a 24 or 48 hour period? This looks like you've been working on this for a while and I could see the little smirk in their face. And yeah, we've been working on this one for a little while. It's like you cheated, but it was really cool.
Speaker 2:I've coached at hackathons before and the students they're amazing because they get in there, they create these amazing products and they create these amazing solutions. The only time I ever see anybody get nervous is when they have to do the presentation for the judges.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I didn't know that I felt like or portrayed one of the sharks on Shark Tank, but apparently I did because, yeah, you're right, some of them were a little bit nervous, but anyway, Okay, so we talked about a value stream mapping workshop and we talked about creating a product for a workshop. Any other ideas that you can share with us, or any other examples?
Speaker 2:There's shorter workshops that you can do, and this has to do with something that you're. It could be a tools adoption or just a new practice that you're trying to learn, so not the whole implementation of a product, but maybe how you're going to make it work better with, like, a DevOps practice. Or it's something like you're going from one tool to a new tool and you just want to get everybody to get their hands on that tool with their real work so they're able to learn it that way.
Speaker 1:What's been your favorite workshop that you've held so far, if you had to pick one?
Speaker 2:I love all of the workshops that I've had the honor to be involved in. I do love to gravitate towards value stream mapping and process improvement. Anytime we can get everybody in the room together to solve a problem like that, those are always near and dear to my heart.
Speaker 1:Ah, okay, so you're a value stream mapping girl Gotcha.
Speaker 2:There you go, there you go.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, as we're coming to an end here, just want to kind of put a bow or put a wrap on this, can you just summarize and give us, like, what are the common elements of putting a workshop together, a successful workshop?
Speaker 2:As we talked about earlier, it's defining those common goals, making sure that your scope is where you want it to be. So you're not trying to boil the whole ocean, you're just trying to deliver on what it is that you're trying to solve for that day. You're getting fast feedback, like you said, mark, you're asking everybody how they feel about things and you're doing check-ins, then also doing those retrospectives, making all of the work that you're doing visual so covering those walls with sticky notes and having giant post-it notes everywhere and then following up with the teams, making sure that they're able to implement the practices. If they're running into any issues, that you're available to help them. Those are the things that'll help the workshop be successful.
Speaker 1:All right, Paula. So if our listeners out there want to get in touch with you, what is the best way for them to do that?
Speaker 2:Through LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:Gotcha Through LinkedIn. We'll put a link to your profile in the show notes. That's great if people have questions and want to reach out to you, but probably not for a while If you're getting ready to head to Sri Lanka to hit the waves. So I can't wait. You'll share some pictures. Absolutely, that's really exciting. So I can't wait You'll share some pictures. Absolutely, that's really exciting. I can't wait to hear back from you about that. But, paula, thank you so much for coming on the show. This was very interesting, and all our listeners out there. If you're interested in workshops, I think this has been a very educational session. And, yeah, just thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Mark. It's been an honor being here.
Speaker 1:Well, that brings to an end another episode of the Agile Within. We'll see everybody next time. Thanks for joining us for another episode of the Agile Within. If you haven't already, please join our LinkedIn page to stay in touch. Just search for the Agile Within and please spread the word with your friends and colleagues Until next time. This has been your host, mark Metz.
