The answer is "X has gone dark". The question is "What frustrates me?". I don't like feeling frustrated.

A high signal to noise ratio will help you have an effective conversation.

I have noticed that the words "I don't disagree" (IDD) reduces the signal to noise ratio of a conversation.

What does IDD mean? What do I recommend if you are in the habit of saying IDD? What do I recommend if you hear someone say IDD?

In response to my post entitled Check the Box where I suggest that you choose not to argue with your manager about doing a task whose primary purpose is the furtherance of a PR campaign with their manager, my colleague Bob Lee writes "How much Fantasy Experienced As Reality is building up above?"

I confess. In the mid-1980s, I really liked Powerpoint. I was a Systems Engineer for the Amdahl Corporation who gave hundreds of presentations each year. Up until PowerPoint, my choices for media was either a slide projector or overhead projector.

A participant in a workshop that I led drew the above picture to describe the role he played in his company's process:

Do drawings help members of a team to better reveal their point of view?

My article Drawing Out the Facts: The Art of the Discovery Interview was published in the July, 2007 issue of Better Software Magazine. The article explores how to conduct effective client interviews.

You can find a copy of the article here.

Stand up meetings are popular in software development organizations now.

What makes a stand-up meeting more effective than a traditional meeting to socialize status information?

I argued in my first post about stand-up meetings that the "right" participants were the key to the success of a meeting rather than whether the participants were standing up or sitting down. Despite my dislike for the stand-up component, I did mention in my first post that there are components of a "stand-up meeting" that I do like.

What components do I like? Why do I like them? How can we innovate?

You have heard repeatedly that an agenda is a vital ingredient to a successful meeting. But little is ever heard about safety in meetings—the environmental variable that determines whether people participate or merely observe. How do you measure safety? What actions are available to leaders for creating a safe meeting environment?

Talking to upper management about information technology resource consumption can be a tricky proposition. Resource consumption is complicated but upper management demands a simple story that makes business sense to them. This article explains how an effective manager of a storage management group frames the conversation.