Product Tonic Cohort 2 Closing Retreat Day #1

19 November 2022 — Open Space

After an 11-week break during which participants arranged their own mentorship sessions and attended an unconference, PTL program concluded with two closing retreat sessions. The first session is designed as “Open Space” activity centred on the theme of “Shift your perspective to increase your success” to reflect on their experiences in the program and consider next actions.

Welcome Intro

• Recap of Product Tonic Vision and Guiding Principles
• Open Space Principle & Law of Mobility
• Bumblebees and butterflies
• Prepared to be surprised

Temperature Reading

Based on the work by Virginia Satir in creating space for sharing our self and listening to others, we did “Appreciative Inquiry” and “Triads Conversations” with following questions:

• What is one thing you appreciate about PTL
• What is one thing you are puzzled by?

Following are emerging appreciations and questions themes generated:

Appreciate: program, experiments, people and spontaneity

• Community that has spirit and heart; Collective learning — Meeting people that make it worthwhile and fun
• People show up despite pretty random timing; (Long) journey together — opportunity to run workshops, enough time to interact, personalised sessions with mentors
• AHA in chaotic situation — Interesting how the group can play well given loose structure

Puzzled: applicability, structure and time

• Learning through loose structure vs order and certainty — Are we missing anything?
• Given PTL is broader than product and goes into life topics — How do people who are looking at product specific skills find this program?
• Applicability is as good as your effort to apply it in your own use case

Sharing: Shift your perspective

Hosted by Mic on PTL Background, Concept and Roadmap:

• Recap on Why we are here.
  PTL is organised because of the belief that leaders need more opportunities for intentional pause, reflection and dialogue in order to build shared understanding and take innovative action.
• This belief was inspired by the book ‘Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society’, which teaches that personal change must come before we can change organisations or society. By changing our own behaviour and actions, we can create opportunities that resonate with others
• At the same time, we’re moving toward an age of augmented work and network economy, where curiosity, creativity, empathy, passion, and lifelong learning will be key. PTL is designed to bring together people from informal as well as structured work environments, doing goal-oriented (collaborative) as well as opportunity-driven (cooperative) work to seek, make sense and share knowledge and lessons learned through work teams, communities of practice and social network
• It is more than just a community of practice to address the “messy middle” of career challenges — It is designed as a space for co-creation and conversations about larger societal challenges that may require a long time to commit towards — For PTL, this is about quality education.
• It’ll be lifelong learning journey — therefore keep asking ourselves:
  - Are we doing appropriate things now?
  - What is missing from the things we are doing now?
  - What should be our learning edge?
• As future roadmap, PTL is looking to enable people create similar program in bringing people together (junior and senior professionals) to address wicked problem that they are personally interested to work on as part of their lifelong learning
• Question to the cohort: How can you help? What are the things that you’d like to work on (esp in the larger scheme of things)?

Open Space Marketplace

Based on sharing, cohorts are invited to have dyad (pair) conversation on what’s emerging as Open Space topics. Six topics are proposed which are then narrowed down to three final topics:

• What structure can facilitate remote dialogue openly, safely & effectively
• How did you get over your self-limiting beliefs?
• How would you spend time with your mentor and get the most out of it? how do you (or if you should) address the knowledge and experience gap between you?

Open Space Session

Topic: How would you spend time with your mentor and get the most out of it? how do you (or if you should) address the knowledge and experience gap between you?

Background and questions for this topic

• One-way Q&A mentoring sessions, where the mentee prepares questions and receives answers from the mentor may feel less engaging. How to make a mentoring session more fruitful for both mentor and mentees? Underlying fear of wasting valuable mentor’s time
• How do we deal with the situation when knowledge and experience gaps make it hard to relate to each other?

Discussions and Insights

• A lot of us feel the same
• Do pre-mentoring session, get to know each other, ask the mentor if he/she has any framework, set definition of success of mentorship session
• Frame questions into sharing personal challenges, feelings and approach for mentor to offer his/her perspective — it’s up to mentee to decide how to take & what to do on advice given
• Share with the mentor when we unsure about what the mentor may feel rather than keeping it ourselves
• There’s always a real possibility of failure in mentorship — it’s not just the matter of skill, but also the matter of expectation, personality, etc. Mentor is not always perfect.
• Consider that mentor as someone that has walked a path towards a destination; he/she may be aware of some challenges and pitfalls to share with the mentee — Mentee need not to walk the same path.
• A good mentor could help mentee explore alternatives and offer insights to ideas that mentee already have inside. They know what they want from the conversation with the mentee and what the mentee needs. They will not give too much advice and make mentees do something they don’t want to do. A good mentor can distinguish the following approaches: teaching (impart knowledge), coaching (focus on you), facilitating and mentoring (provide support).
• A good mentee would know own fears and challenges that he/she want the mentor to help with
• Mentor — mentee relationship is different from consulting, coaching, or teaching relationship — it should be about enjoying working together
• From the book “The little star that so wanted to shine” : We are not shining to compete with other stars, we are doing it to brighten up those people’s lives. When they saw us shining, we made them happy. Think about that the next time you try to shine.

Summary and Insights from 2 other sessions

• How you get over self-limiting beliefs: Lead with openness and curiosity, make it into something you can control, take a crack at that challenge and take comfort in the progress you make
• Skills density & social challenges — which part of it do I want to play a role in? What’s next? : Gaining awareness of the problem — importance, resources, difference between geographical location (urban vs rural). Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know — therefore build empathy on the ground, relationships with different people and communities to uncover needs and opportunities to work together

Debrief and Checkout with W3 format

This debrief used the W³ (What, So What, Now What?) tool from the liberating structures to help groups move from understanding a problem to taking action to address it.

• What happened? What did you notice, what facts or observations stood out?
  - Good vibes, relatable conversation
  - Closer relationships foster inspiration and the drive to help others
  - Make more efforts to match people so trust can be formed
• So what? Why is that important? What patterns or conclusions are emerging? What hypothesis can I make?
  - Be prepared to be surprised
  - People might appreciate difficult topic given the opportunity to navigate safely
  - Improve ways to organise opportunities so that people can meet those who they can best relate to
• Now what? What next actions make sense?
  - Accept discomfort, use it to relate to others
  - Know your story and experience to share
  - Be present in the moment

Attributions

This is a summary notes for Product Tonic Labs 2022 that is taking place from June — December 2022

Product Tonic Lab is open source
This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0). This work is derivative of Prime/OS, Theory U concepts, #ProductBeer, #ProductTonic and The Collab Folks (TCF) “The Learning Circle v1-v3” and “TCF v1-v5.5”.

Materials in Product Tonic Meetups

This work is based on “The Collab Folks”, Cactus team and many sources.