Levi Technique, partial googlewhacks and the growler

Several years ago, James Bach put me onto Googlewhacks, and I soon included a link to them on my testing spot site. A googlewhack is a word pair searched for at Google that only returns one result. Unfortunately, this definition means that “Levi hand signal technique” is not a Googlewhack. While it satisfies the output criteria (one result), it fails the input criteria twice (four words, and using quotes). It is possible to use different input data to get a special googlewhack at the same page, “hippopotami endangeredness”. This is special because the two words do not randomly occur on the page but are presented together. As I write this, both of these terms uniquely return one result, but once this is posted, that will change forever . While it is a googlewhack, I can’t register it because “endangeredness” isn’t found in their dictionary. So close…

Now back to Levi. I’ve recently given two workshop discussions on Agile Retrospectives, one for my local agile group MXPEG, and one at CITCON Sydney. At the Melbourne session, we had about 20 people, and lots of discussion with people raising their hands to speak in turn. One familiar meeting issue occurred: one person might start talking about a new topic, only to be followed by someone returning to the previous topic. I know there are colored cards for meetings but I wanted something simpler.

Before the Sydney session, I did some research and struck gold, well Levi at least. He’s probably a Canadian cyclist, but I’m not sure. The unique web page explaining his technique is the Otesha Project Guide to Meeting facilitation . Otesha run long distance bike treks across Canada, and the organisers meet at the end of the day for a retrospective/planning meeting, typically sitting in a circle at a campsite. They have the ultimate lean/agile meeting guide. Some aspects may not have universal appeal (“Start out by offering words of love and affection, if desired”, I wonder if this includes statements like “I’d love to hitchhike tomorrow” [grin]), and others sound hilarious, (“One creative solution to irrelevant comments is to appoint an irrelevant comment watchdog. This person barks and growls at irrelevant or redundant comments”). The Levi Hand Signal Technique, LHST, is a simple way to avoid backtracking in conversations. People still raise their hand to speak, but raise one finger to talk on the current topic, or all fingers to change the topic. While Otesha has the facilitator control the order of speakers, this technique also works for groups without a facilitator. So thank you Levi for your technique, which belongs in the toolkit of anyone working in the agile space. Thank you Otesha for your meeting guide and partial googlewhacks. (I’m sure there must be a full googlewhack on the page somewhere!). Oh, and thanks to the people who came to my retrospective workshops. I get the feeling I’ll be running them again…..