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Help Your Managers Want Change: How to Explain Nonlinear Effects

Some stubborn problems don’t lend themselves to linear thinking or solutions. That makes it more difficult to explain why anyone should change. However, if you can invite your managers to potential solutions with images. When you show pictures and explain them, your managers will sell themselves. You can draw those pictures, with reinforcing and balancing feedback loops.

In this workshop, Johanna will introduce you to the ideas of balancing and reinforcing feedback loops and how to gather useful, but imperfect data.

  • You will learn to draw Balancing and Reinforcing feedback loops.
  • And because sometimes, you need some data, you will learn to gather a single source of useful (but not necessarily perfect) data

You will use your problem(s) to practice, so you can learn to see your system and how to make the problems more malleable to change.

Bring at least one specific organizational problem so you can practice. (Make sure your problem is “big” enough for you to learn from.)


Johanna Rothman

About Johanna Rothman

Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” offers frank advice for your tough problems. She helps leaders and teams learn to see simple and reasonable things that might work. Equipped with that knowledge, they can decide how to adapt their product development.

With her trademark practicality and humor, Johanna is the author of 18 books about many aspects of product development. She’s written these books:

  • Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility
  • Become a Successful Independent Consultant
  • Free Your Inner Nonfiction Writer
  • Modern Management Made Easy series: Practical Ways to Manage Yourself; Practical Ways to Lead and Serve (Manage) Others; Practical Ways to Lead an Innovative Organization
  • Write a Conference Proposal the Conference Wants and Accepts
  • From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams (with Mark Kilby)
  • Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver
  • Agile and Lean Program Management: Scaling Collaboration Across the Organization
  • Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects, 2nd edition
  • Project Portfolio Tips: Twelve Ideas for Focusing on the Work You Need to Start & Finish
  • Diving for Hidden Treasures: Finding the Value in Your Project Portfolio (with Jutta Eckstein)
  • Predicting the Unpredictable: Pragmatic Approaches to Estimating Project Schedule or Cost
  • Manage Your Job Search
  • Hiring Geeks That Fit
  • The 2008 Jolt Productivity award-winning Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management
  • Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management (with Esther Derby)

In addition to articles and columns on various sites, Johanna writes the Managing Product Development blog on her website, jrothman.com, as well as a personal blog on createadaptablelife.com.

More About Johanna »

ARE YOU READY TO GET STARTED?

Two and a half days of insightful sessions, inspiring ideas, and meeting your peers. Learn the skills and methods that will take your organization to the next level.

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