2. Foreword
Of all the people who could be writing a foreword to this short book, and tell you all the reasons why the book is so wonderful that you should skip straight to it and skip the damn foreword… I’m probably the least qualified to do so.
To explain why, I need to tell you a little story, if you would spare me the time. But I think that the story will, in fact, tell you why the book is so wonderful. So, if you are still reading, please settle in…
I first met Yves and Ignace in 2004, in Mechelen, a small town near Brussels. The occasion was XP Day Benelux, a one-day conference for people interested in Extreme Programming and other Agile approaches to developing software.
At the time I was intrigued by the notion of “self-organized” teams, which I thought contained a paradox: if a team doesn’t want to be self-organized, it could be a bit difficult to force them to be. My colleague Emmanuel Gaillot and I had created an activity, based on Emmanuel’s experience with the theater, to explore that paradox and collect insights from people attending that workshop. I’d made the trip from Paris to present that workshop.
Ignace attended the session, found it interesting, and discussed it with Yves. Apparently, they found inspiration in it to create a new workshop, one that would explore the broader theme of “Leadership”. It was also considerably more sophisticated and well thought out than my own attempt.
The next time we met was in 2005, at that year’s XP Day in Rotterdam. Yves and Ignace were presenting the Leadership Game. As my rotten luck would have it, I was presenting a session myself at precisely the same time, and couldn’t attend.
Afterwards, I kept running into people who gave me rave reviews of the Leadership Game.
I don’t mean just at the Rotterdam conference. In 2006 I found myself organizing the first XP Day in France, and I wanted to see for myself what the fuss was about. Yves and Ignace were willing to come to Paris, so they were invited to present there.
If you’ve ever planned to organize a conference because you were interested in all the cool sessions you could then get to see, I have one word of advice: don’t. As an organizer, I was running around all the time trying to see if everyone was happy, and missed all the sessions.
So I managed to miss the Leadership Game once again. Everybody was raving about it again.
This turned into a tradition of sorts. Yves and Ignace were back in Paris in 2007 with the Leadership Game. Perhaps I could have attended the session that year; a conference in its second year tends to run itself with less oversight by the organizers. But the game was very popular, and seats were limited - if I attended, that meant someone else couldn’t go, and that didn’t feel right to me.
I missed the Leadership Game once again in 2007.
And I’m going to cut the story short, since you’ve probably spotted the pattern. The tragic fact is that in all these years I’ve never actually attended a session of the Leadership Game.
That isn’t going to stop me from endorsing the game wholeheartedly, and for saying that Yves and Ignace have done a remarkable job over the years of tweaking and refining it, and that what you now have on your Kindle or iPad or Kobo or whatever device is a wonderful gift from them to you.
Creating an experiential learning session is difficult. One of the ways people get it wrong is, they create a game or activity which “forces” you to agree to some predetermined conclusion. For instance, a game that is rigged in favor of the “Agile” way of doing things, so that when you try both the Agile way and the more traditional way you can only succeed with Agile.
That’s not experiential learning, that’s manipulation.
Even though I never participated in the game, I know Yves and Ignace well enough to know this isn’t their style. And even if you don’t know them, you too can tell by browsing the book and noticing how deep their thinking about Leadership goes. This depth of thinking is reflected in the way the game doesn’t blindly favor one or another style of leadership, but in fact forces everyone in the room to confront the sum of their life experiences that lead them to prefer one particular style of leadership. This in turns brings them to thinking deeply about what leadership is for, and why they might want to explore other sides of it.
That’s powerful stuff. That’s what experiential learning is about.
And that’s why the Leadership Game has been getting rave reviews since 2006.
And now you hold in your hands the key to making that happen even if you don’t have Yves and Ignace in the room to do it for you.
What are you waiting for?