My Ideas For 2024

Roughly every six months, I use the Liberating Structure “Ecocycle Planning” to reflect on what to start, stop, and change. Although I also include things I do in my personal life, I’ll focus this article on work-related activities.

Ecocycle Planning aims to analyze the complete portfolio of activities & relationships and identify obstacles and opportunities for progress in a non-linear way. It is based on the life cycle in nature.

Plants, for example, grow from seeds when they land in fertile ground (Gestation or Renewal). Seedlings will sprint when the ground is fertile enough, depending on sufficient sun, shelter, and minerals to grow (Birth). When these conditions have been met, seedlings grow into plants that bear fruits and/or spread new seeds (Maturity). But eventually, even mature plants die and are composted to become energy for new plants. Or their removal makes place for new seeds to grow (Creative Destruction).

Activities may get stuck in the Scarcity/Poverty Trap or the Rigidity Trap. The first holds the activities that aren’t getting the energy and time they need to grow into something valuable. In contrast, the second has the activities that are costing us energy and time while their value is diminished or diminished.

Some examples of how we used Ecocycle Planning are:

• To reflect on my usage of Liberating Structures;
• To help Scrum teams advance their technical practices;
• To support organizations with their Agile transformation;
• To spark innovation within organizations;
• To make relationships and personal connections visible.

The possibilities of using Ecocycle Planning are endless. If you want to make the ‘forest visible, instead of only individual trees,’ consider trying it!

My Ecocycle Explained

Below, I’ll share the result of my personal Ecocycle. It took about 30 minutes to create it. Thinking about what to start, stop, and change isn’t something I only think about every six months. It’s continuously on my mind. As a result, creating the Ecocycle isn’t difficult; it does offer me a complete overview of my state of mind. And that’s very helpful to determine what to do next.

Gestation

Activities I’m thinking about doing but haven’t started doing yet.

• Create actionable content based on research. Columinity — our product to help teams improve — is grounded in scientific research. Christiaan Verwijs and Daniel Russo have already conducted academic studies on Agile team effectiveness and the importance of diversity. More studies will follow in the upcoming period. For example, a study about Agile scaling approaches, teaming strategies, productivity metrics, and the impact of leadership styles on team effectiveness. In a collaborative effort, it’s my ambition to make scientific research actionable for teams by creating content and materials.
• Facilitate strategic (Columinity) workshops. Organizations can use our tool, Columinity, to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights. They can diagnose one or many teams, receive extensive feedback, and resolve broader organizational issues. We created a set of facilitation guides (do-it-yourself workshops) to support organizations in developing strategies to improve team effectiveness. Not on gut feeling only but based on actual data. With our facilitation guides, organizations can run these workshops themselves. I do want to offer guidance and support whenever needed. This might mean facilitating strategic workshops myself.

Birth

Activities I recently started doing.

• Facilitate the Liberating Structures advanced workshop. Yay! I managed to move this from ‘Gestation’ to ‘Birth’! The advanced workshop contains ~15 Liberating Structures that aren’t part of my foundational Immersion Workshop. For example: Helping Heuristics, Conversation Cafe, Improv Prototyping, Min Specs, and What I Need From You. I’ve also included unofficial structures like Myth Turning, Tiny Demons, and 4–2–1-SNAP. As a bonus, I use the concept of Strategy Knotworking as the backbone. I facilitated the first edition at the Ministry of Defense and have already scheduled other opportunities for 2024. One of them is a public workshop at the Volkshotel in Amsterdam.
• Engage in public events. Participating in public events was stuck in the Poverty/Scarcity Trap for years. The COVID-19 epidemic was a logical showstopper, but even afterward, I didn’t feel motivated to participate in in-person events anymore. XP Days Benelux was the first event I joined in years. I loved it! A couple of weeks later, I also joined Scrum Day Europe. It’s not my ambition to participate in many events this year, but I have re-appreciated in-person gatherings.
• Provide Columinity onboarding workshops. The rapidly growing number of customers also resulted in many onboarding workshops. I provided online demos, facilitated kickoff workshops, and supported organizations in diagnosing the tool's results—something I expect to keep doing (and improving) this year.
• Create awareness of the rebranded Scrum Team Survey. “Scrum Team Survey” worked well for us for several years. It started as a survey about Scrum for individual teams. However, our platform has matured into something much broader over the years. “Columinity” is our new name. It combines three core principles of our platform. Collaboration (Co), shedding light on how things are going with data (Illumination; lumin), and doing so continuously (Infinity; ity).
• Grow Columinity. The growth of our product remains our primary focus. We’ll extend the Enterprise tier with advanced features (e.g., MFA, SSO) and develop a lightweight partner program of companies and coaching agencies that can support teams and organizations using Columinity. We’ll create an action-learning-based approach to providing feedback to teams, support with more ongoing feedback, and extend our model for effective teamwork with other kinds of metrics. There’s no shortage of ideas ;-)

Maturity

Activities I’m comfortable doing and that provide value.

• Write blog posts. Writing remains my number one activity to reflect and validate if I truly understand something. The more I struggle, the more reason I have to learn more. Keeping a steady rhythm isn’t easy. I used to write one blog post a week. This shifted towards periods of writing nothing, followed by multiple articles in a compressed period. It’s not ideal, but writing a daily LinkedIn post AND a weekly blog post is challenging. Next year, this activity end up in the Rigidity Trap.
• Facilitate in-company Liberating Structures Immersion Workshops. Although I facilitated two public workshops last year, I have already shifted my focus toward in-company workshops. One reason is convenience. It’s easier to prepare and brings less risk. Canceling a public workshop due to a lockdown brings lots of financial risks AND administrative work. Another reason is that in-company workshops can be easily integrated with our product, Columinity. Finally, I enjoy working in different environments and contexts. So, in-company Liberating Structures workshops are here to stay, although I might shift my focus slightly toward the advanced workshop.
• Provide the Scrum.org PSM II class. Of all the classes Scrum.org offers, the PSM II class is the only one I teach. I still highly enjoy it, although it’s slowly moving towards the Rigidity Trap. Next year, I’ll facilitate a public PSM II class in Amsterdam; as I see it right now, I’ll make it my final public class. I’ll keep providing in-company classes a bit longer, but it’s not unlikely that I’ll stop as a PST after 2024. It's nothing dramatic, but I’m not super engaged with Scrum.org anymore, and our work for Columinity requires most of the time and focus. All of this can change; it’s how I currently see it.

Creative Destruction

Activities I’m currently changing and rethinking.

• Facilitate online meetups. For quite a while, I stopped running online meetups. The high number of no-shows, the struggle to make it Patron-only, and the time and effort preparation took demotivated me. More importantly, I noticed it started to drain energy instead of fueling me with fresh ideas and a fully charged battery. So, what changed? I made the meetups public for everyone. It’s fantastic that most participants are patrons, but I also enjoy meeting new people. I also embraced the ‘Open Space’ mindset: whoever comes is the right person, and whatever happens is supposed to happen. As a consequence, I started to enjoy online meetups again!
• Writing LinkedIn posts. I’ve got an interesting ‘relationship’ with LinkedIn. For years, I have written one article a day. It’s something that takes no effort; I love doing it. I have noticed that the most popular articles aren’t the ones I enjoy writing. The LinkedIn algorithm tries to promote in-depth posts, but simplistic clickbait seems to win every time. I write posts I consider fun/exciting/valuable; if others share this opinion, it’s a nice bonus. I enjoy writing about my adventures, lessons learned and struggles as a facilitator, entrepreneur, and product developer. That’s what I’ll keep doing (more) because that’s also what I actively do daily. Makes sense, right? The reason it’s still in ‘Creative Destruction’ is because I am still studying the LinkedIn algorithm to determine if I need/want to change something without letting go of my principles.

Poverty/Scarcity Trap

Activities I want to invest time in, but somehow, I don’t.

• Expand the facilitation team for The Liberators Network. In 2023, I shifted my focus from supporting the start of new local user groups toward the global Liberators Network. It was — and still is — my ambition to grow a small group of facilitators who run their meetups. We now have about 5–10 people who occasionally facilitate meetups. Similar to my experience with the local user group, initiatives will only really lift off when you give it time & attention. Something I continuously struggle with. Given our ambitions for 2024, I fear it might remain stuck in the ‘Scarcity Trap.’
• Cherish our Patreon community. Patrons appreciate our work and support us with a small monthly financial donation. In return, we offer them benefits like early access to our content and free/discounted materials and products. We owe our patrons eternal gratitude for their support during the Covid-19 epidemic. Not even for their financial support but primarily because of their appreciation. It helped us move forward with our company and confirmed that we are on the right track. I’d love to create (even) more exclusive materials, products, and meetups for our members. If you’re reading this — and you are a patron — know that we highly appreciate your support!
• Create new products for our webshop. We aim to liberate teams from ineffective ways of organizing work by letting them shape their future. We carefully designed each product to help your team collect data about what is happening, make sense of that data together, and identify improvements. So far, we managed to create new products each year. Last year, it was limited to only a small selection of digital work. A lack of ideas isn’t the problem; it’s mostly time & focus (as always). The new products we have in mind can also help teams use our product Columinity; enough reasons to remove this activity from the ‘Scarcity Trap.’

Rigidity Trap

Activities I want to stop, rethink, or change, but somehow, I don’t.

• Facilitate the public Liberating Structures Immersion Workshop. I already explained above why I’m considering stopping public LS workshops. So far, I kept scheduling new ones. Last June, we even provided a workshop with ±70 participants AND had a waiting list! So, the lack of participants isn’t why it’s in the Rigidity Trap. It mainly combines financial risk, administrative work, and other priorities. As I see it right now, I won’t schedule a new public LS workshop. But because I haven’t decided, it’s stuck in the Rigidity Trap.

Closing

I used the Liberating Structure “Ecocycle Planning” in this article to reflect on what to start, stop, and change. What would your Ecocycle look like? What are activities in your ‘Scarcity Trap’ or ‘Ridigity Trap’? Or what activities are you currently actively changing or rethinking? Feel free to share it; let’s learn and grow together!