Release 6: Everybody gets an "A"

From the same Ben Zander mentioned in previous posts...

Ben Zander is also a tutor/teacher for young (and less young) musiciancs.

At the beginning of the course, he wants to avoid the behaviour of participants which is to compare themselves to the others. He believes that progress by comparion does not allow people to reach their actual full potential.

And yes, in the end, some people will perform better than some others, but at least he wants everyone to have developped to their streched limits.

How does he do that? On the first day of the course, he gives everybody and "A". Everybody gets the same mark for the course! And the even have sarted!

But ahhh, there is a condition... In order to get an "A", everybody has to write the story of who they will be at the end of the course, and how great they will be.

This in effect create the right conditions for people to focus on comparing who they want to be with who they are today, and apparently it works. Zander says that it allows people to see the world as a "world of possibility".

When introducing XP in an organisation, comparing XP with the existing approach will happen. What is damageable for XP is if its implementation is driven by this comparison as opposed to being driven by the results we know it can produce.

Give everybody an "A" on your team, ask them to write the story of what the results will be in 1 year,and see what happens.

Some time ago, I ran a "past and future future retrospective" with one of the team I was working with (mentioned by Rachel Davies in the Retrospectives Yahoo Group).

The results were really interesting, and what we found is that some things that people wanted to see happen in the future, although they could be seen hard to achieve actually happened.