“What is the use of a book,” thought Alice “without pictures or conversation?”
Last week in the Agile Tour 2010 Hangzhou stop which was hosted by Perficient, the keynote speaker Jean Tabaka introduced a great method called ORID from a book titled “The art of focused conversation”, (the title contains both “Art” and “Conversation”:) From my perspective it’s the most useful thing I learned from her presentation.
What follows are some excerpts from her exercise text:
“ORID is an approach to better guide conversations that can lead to well-informed decisions”,”the approach is immeasurably helpful in “peeling back the onion” of what lies beneath our reactions that then lead to our actions”,”ORID is a great way to prevent people from jumping to decisions”.
” I introduce ORID as a tool for several situations. One is as a debrief approach”, “it is a great framework for conducting sprint retrospectives or even longer term team retrospectives”, “I invite ScrumMasters and others to use ORIDs in conflict resolution”,”ORID helps you as a ScrumMaster engage people in a way that separates emotion from the facts”, “I encourage ScrumMasters to think about this as a way to help with one-on-one conversations when a team member comes to them about a problem or a situation that he or she is struggling with”.
The ORID method separates the questions that will be discussed into four categories:
Objective — these questions help us zero in on the “WHAT”
Reflective – these questions now guide us to describe our reactions or emotions about that, the “GUT”
Interpretive – once we have information and reflections, we can begin to assemble what this might mean to us in our context, the “SO WHAT”
Decisional – and with all these insights, we are prepared to figure how to move forward, or the “NOW WHAT”
According to a question list template from the book mentioned above, we did an exercise to discuss a movie in small groups. The name of the movie my group chose to talk about is “A Chinese Odyssey”, which is very famous among Chinese college students. At the beginning we really doubted that we can discuss about such a well-known movie. To our surprise, as we moved on answering and discussing the questions one by one, every team member became involved in the conversation. They expressed their ideas actively and warmly. We found a lot of information we had never noticed before and finally everybody agreed, as required by the exercise, to give the movie a new name: “Destiny”. This experience is amazing. Finally we totally agreed with what the book said: “Isn’t it interesting how a movie can get us talking about our lives?”
After the exercise a lot of practitioners said: “It’s really useful. I will apply it in my future work”. So will I!
Abel,
Thank you so much for this blog post. I firmly believe in the value of ORID for retrospecting. I am so glad you found the exercise in the Agile Tour Hangzhou event useful!
Jean
Jean,
Really thank you for your great presentation and interesting exercises,I truly found what I learned from you is very useful even when I was asked to help relieve a conflict between a young couple who are both friends of my wife and I these days:)