This Story Below Was Shared on the AI Listserv By

This story below was shared on the AI Listserv by:

Christine Whitney Sanchez
KAIROS Alliance Inc.
2717 E. Mountain Sky Avenue
Phoenix, AZ85048
480.759.0262

It takes place in Korea.

Subject: [XP] Appreciative Inquiry with 400 people

Hello everyone.
I gave a talk on the 7th Java Developers' Conference in Korea
yesterday. The conference is annually held and it is one of the
biggest IT conferences here. This time about 3000 people attended.
Me and two more speakers (Jeyong Shin and Alan Kang) gave a talk titled
"Adoption Patterns for XP 2.0". The 2.0 part is a parody for Web 2.0.
I'd like to share our experience and I hope it can be a help to
someone in the mailing list.

I will describe the whole time (lasted for 1hour and 15mins) in
chronological order.
Before our talk began, we posted two sheets of big empty paper nearby
the door of our room. There was written "What would you like to hear
from this talk? Any questions? We'll try to include them JIT, with
post-it notes and pens hanging on the wall.
We first asked people to bring their chairs close to the platform so
that there could be more space between the lines of the chairs. There
were about 400 people in the room, some standing at the back of the
room.
Then we introduced ourselves very shortly.
Now we told them that we were going to do some warm up exercises
before our talk and asked them to follow a very simple rule: "make all

the people(maximum 8 people -- it's like in life game cells) around
you be strangers -- whom you don't know"
People grabbed their bags and moved around to make their surrounding
cells to be "unfamiliar". In asia, the threshold of feeling

uncomfortable when sitting next to strangers is usually lower than the
western countries, and they prefer to stick together with the
"familiars" ; they sit together with friends, colleauges, and etc. Our
intention was to make an artificial unfamiliar situation and let the
people focus more on our talk and participate in our acitivity more
actively, and also learn from other people.
Now one of us, holding a roll of red tape, walked out of the stage
into the audience and circled back to the stage. Effectively, about 30
or some audience were surrounded by the red tape. It was like a scene
from a performance art. People were carefully watching him exploring
in the mass of the audience this way and that way with the red tape
roll.
Then we asked the 30 or some people to follow our rules. They played a
game of experiencing "emergence". And then we scaled the size up to

the whole audience. It was such a spectacular scene. While they were
doing the game(it was something like raising both hands sometimes and
trying to sync with the nearby cells), we videotaped it(twice, once in
small size, the second in large size).
Now we played it back on the big screen and let them compare the two

cases.
Next time, we played that in a simulation program written in NetLogo.
People watched it with breathless interest and when the whole pattern
was emerging on the screen some people yelled an exclamation,
"Ah....!".
Now we loaded a new program. We programmed another simulation showing
how changing pairs frequently affects knowledge sharing in a group,
depending on the size and various parameters.
We said to the audience that the activities you've done is the theme
of our talk and you must think over this during the talk and after the
talk, what the relationship is between Adopting XP 2.0 and them.
Now a few presentations describing what's changed since XP 1E. Values,
principles, practices, accountability and so on. It was not very long.
Then the main thing started. We showed them the principles for the
adoption patterns, such as Low Hanging Fruits First, The Most
Important And The Worst Thing First, Making a New Practice from
Principles(using Dependency Inversion Principle between practices, for
example) and etc. There was Focusing on Solution(Appreciative
Inquiry), too.
We asked them to form groups of four people and they don't know about
each other because of what we have done in the beginning of the talk.
We did AI with Energetic Work practice. I asked them to remember the
experience of doing "Energetic Work" in a team or by oneself. Some
people shook their heads left and right, denying as if they never had

that kind of experience. But I told them, "you don't need to go back

to the kindergarten time to find it. it doesn't matter how short that
experience was. Even one day, or one hour of energetic work is okay."
Strange thing was beginning to happen. At first people seldomly talked
to each other but slowly but steadily people started to talk with each
other. 400 people were talking to each other at the same time,
actively! It is a very rare thing in Korea, esp in such a big IT
conference.
After a couple of minutes, I changed the direction. "Now think about
the situation, conditions of that experience and share with the
others"
As an example, I lead that step with one of the other speakers in
front of the audience.

Finally, we asked them to think about how they could apply those
conditions and those past time memories to today's situation. After
that, I asked one of the audience how it felt. "I, strangely, felt
very enthusiastic again while telling my past experience of energetic
work, and felt energetic" I told them to do that practice with the
team members when they go back to work, or a close colleague in the
work place.
Then we came back to the presentation and showed them a few patterns
of adopting XP into a team or individually.
Now we answered some of the questions that were written on the big
paper outside the room, and then got some more questions from the
people.
That's it. Some of the audience left comments on our blog (in Korea,
sorry) today.
"It was a life changing experience and I couldn't sleep last night"
"I have been doing XP for many years and I expected nothing I would
learn from the talk but it was amazing. When we were talking about
energetic work experiences one person in our group shook her head
strongly and said she just has to do what she should do and she really
dislike the work. But as the time and discussion went on, she was
starting to talk pleasantly, and finally I could read a lot of
confidence and pleasure in her face: she was changing. I also learned
something I didn't know before, while telling them my experience."
Thank you very much Kent Beck, and other members of this community
helping me have this wonderful experience.
June Kim