Christopher Avery’s blog on Responsibility Redefined

Watch this video of parenting expert Mark Todhunter and then read below about my upcoming interview with Mark.

Every time I speak about the Responsibility Process™ and your 3 Keys to Responsibility™ men and women approach me afterwords and ask “Christopher, when are you going to have the products and services for me to use with my family to study Responsibility?” I like being asked that question, especially since most of these speeches are to corporate leaders. The truth is that any of the books, special reports, audio programs, or other of my products will help you learn plenty about how to study, demonstrate, ask for, and teach (the these are the 4 steps to teaching or coaching responsibility) responsibility to anyone. And, as the subtitle of my recent 12CD set says, you’ll “master your own life in the process.”

Well, since I started the Ask Christopher Avery monthly tele-seminars the word is out that I’m interested and willing to tell the world about Responsibility Redefined™ via teleseminars and web conferences. So last week I got a call from Mark Todhunter, the parenting expert who hosts the Tame Your Teenager series, asking to interview me. And I jumped at the opportunity.

I’ve been a parent to two boys now ages 16 and 11 since first being introduced to the Responsibility Redefined™ studies a year before my older son was born. That means they’ve grown up with a dad interested in teaching them about how responsibility works in their minds, and how they can tap into this amazing information to overcome challenges and live the life of their dreams. So I’ve learned a little about what works and what doesn’t work. I look forward to sharing it.

Mark your calendar for Wednesday, August 20, 2008 @ 9pm Eastern / 6pm Pacific. Go to Mark’s website for the interview series and ask him to keep you informed about the upcoming interview. You might also want to see more if Mark Todhunter’s video’s about climbing Mt Whitney.

Then, if you have a question about raising responsible kids you’d like Mark to ask me during the interview, leave it here as a comment. Okay? Thanks.

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If you care about personal, team, and organizational agility, run—don’t walk—to buy Agile Adoption Patterns: A Roadmap to Organizational Success. Author Amr Elssamadisy has a rich background helping companies adopt agile practices. Amr has worked with Thoughtworks and Valtech (where I first met him), and is now a partner with Gemba Systems whose three partners I know, like, trust, and enjoy working with.

Gemba Systems believes strongly that developing products is based in personal interactions. To that end they study and promote Responsibility Redefined™. Indeed, much of the second chapter of Amr’s book is devoted to personal agility a la Responsibility Redefined™. Here’s a snippet from that chapter:

“Self-directed teams aligned to a clear goal are the essence of agile behavior and the engine behind the stunning results that some teams claim for Agile. We believe that individual responsibility, as defined by Avery, is a prerequisite to such agile interactions. That is, responsibility, as defined by the Responsibility Process™ model, is necessary (but not sufficient) for successful Agile software development.” (Page 18, Chapter 2 Personal Agility for Potent Agile Adoption, Agile Adoption Patterns: A Roadmap to Organizational Success)

You can read a sample chapter Amr published at the Agile Journal site.

You can get a free download of an earlier version of this work if you would like to try before you buy.

And you can find reviews on Amazon, and at Peripatetic Axiom and Frazzled Dad.

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This is an update to my earlier blog post about speaking at QCon in San Francisco. We now know the date is Wednesday, November 19. Here’s the line-up. See you in San Francisco in November.

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On yesterday’s every-second-Tuesday-of-the-month no-cost Ask Christopher Avery tele-training I answered 8 insightful questions selected from dozens submitted by you the call-in audience. Most questions give me an opportunity to demonstrate how Responsibility Redefined™ actually redefines (i.e., shifts the paradigm of, changes the conversation about, or confronts our mental models of) responsibility. Here’s a fun example:

Q: Christopher, how can we use the Responsibility Process™ in the Federal Government?

This question comes from a serious student of Responsibility Redefined™ who is employed in the Federal Government, and I’ve had a number of similar questions recently (more about that below), so I addressed it. I answered:

A: You already are (using the Responsibility Process in the Federal Government).

Think about it.

The Responsibility Process is inside you and everyone, even workers in the Federal Government. It regulates how we each choose (generally unconsciously) to avoid or take responsibility for our lives and situations. So you can’t not use it every moment, unless everything in your life is always perfect.

The Responsibility Process is a relatively recent discovery (follow the links to learn more about the Responsibility Process) about how we respond to mistakes, upsets, and issues in our world. We are just learning how to direct and apply the power of the Responsibility Process. So far, we’ve had amazing results using Responsibility Redefined as the central organizing principle in a team leadership skill-building curriculum, as a self-leadership practice, and as a culture-shaping tool. We’ve also discovered quite a bit about how to teach people about their own Responsibility Process.

So, about the Federal Government, consider why someone would ask about using the Responsibility Process in a specific industry sector. What’s the underlying assumption? Slow to change? Poor working conditions? Bureaucratic? Poor leadership? Stultifying management? Un-enjoyable workplace? Dis-engaged workers?

I can only speculate. Two weeks ago I was visiting the Federal Government of a neighboring country (to the USA) introducing Responsibility Redefined to 7 top officials. They loved the concept, were very interested, and posed a similar question. One said: “I suppose this is much more likely to be effective when introduced in the private sector?”

To which I answered: I can imagine leaders in the private sector may be quicker to want to learn about Responsibility Redefined™, but that does not mean the Responsibility Process is any less operative in the public sector. In fact, the assumption that the public sector is a place where people can not be expected to be interested in taking ownership shows that the Responsibility Process is sorely at work… if you know what I mean ( i.e., cultural conditioning toward Denial, Lay Blame, Justify, Shame, Obligation, and especially Quit).

So back to my answer to the Ask Christopher Avery question. I said that since the Responsibility Process is already at work everywhere, then the questioner might consider his or her workplace to be prime real estate for developing awareness of Responsibility Redefined. I reminded that Responsibility Redefined is not a management tool. Rather it is a self-leadership tool that invites others to follow you. I suggested the questioner could teach it to peers, and could start a leadership study group.

And lastly, I suggested the questioner could procure an invitation for me to introduce Responsibility Redefined™ at a government leaders conference. It is interesting that I’ve had audiences in two national governments in the last year, neither of which has been the USA.

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Last Thursday evening I enjoyed a rare opportunity to talk with a group of about 120 students and faculty at Universidad Regiomontana in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico. The advertised title of my talk was “How to Build a Culture of Agility and Responsibility” but I choose to change my actual presentation to “Who Wants Better Results?”. This isn’t listed as a keynote topic on my site. Do you think it should be? (-:

I also shed the suit and tie (after three days of suit-and-tie workshops and presentations — the business culture in Mexico is often more formal than in the United States) and showed up jeans. Both choices turned out to be good moves.

My CutterLA colleague Cuitláhuac Osorio was in a blue suit and we kidded as we entered the auditorium that the audience probably thought Cuitláhuac was the speaker. By the way, if you are wondering how to pronounce “Cuitláhuac,” it is Kwit-lau’-ick.

A journalism major at the university named Victor Soto interviewed me earlier in the day and covered the talk. You can read his article online. If you don’t read Spanish you can try a web page translator like Babelfish.

I was very impressed with the connection I was able to establish with the students. They spoke English quite well and I worked without a translator (I’d had simultaneous translators earlier in the week at a 2-day workshop). They listened —not just politely, but intently. And they laughed at all the right places and asked a few astute questions. I told them I was very impressed with them. I confessed that when I was in college, I probably would not have invested my Thursday evening going to a talk about Responsibility. They laughed at that too.

I have another college presentation coming up in a few months. I’ll post about that later, but I wanted to mention here that I’d love to spend more time on the college lecture circuit teaching Responsibility Redefined™ to college students.

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