Practice of Practice Resources

This is a collection of activities for teams. They put relationship first to provide opportunities for shared learning, gaining empathy, and common grounding.

Practice of Practice is a way to provide a social architecture that supports connective labor between teams and team members. Solidifying this layer of relationships is key to nourishing resilience in any organization. It does this through a tripod of supportive and interconnected parts:

1. A Practice of Practice regimen forms a community of practice that reflects ambient values: the types of learning that happen there are useful elsewhere, driving a culture surrounding these values.
2. The norms and rituals provided by Practice of Practice come about because the organization sanctions and supports the time and effort that goes into making space in peoples' schedules to become part of the community of practice.
3. This all requires a dedicated leader who makes sure the time and resources exist for connection and empathy. They learn to facilitate and run the gameplay and discover new things about the system along with other community members. They are the champion of this discipline at the org.

What you will find below come in all sorts: physical card games, exercises for remote teams, big activities, small exercises, et al. This is not meant to be extensive or exclusive, only a place to collect them together.

Exercises

1. Incident Lunch describes in full detail an exercise the team at Slack created with Blackrock 3 Partners based on their "Lunch Break exercise". Slack's version adds ambiguity and surprise by throwing in a set of Chaos Cards that are occassionally played throughout. "Folks are invited to a two-hour incident training exercise at lunchtime, and told that lunch will be provided. When they arrive, everybody gets a 15 minute refresher on our incident process, and then we drop the bomb: the lunch order fell through, so their exercise now is to obtain lunch for everybody in the room, subject to a few constraints."
2. Create a Decision Requirements Table together as a team by choosing a topic and asking each person: "What is the most difficult decision you have to make while doing this?"
3. Spin the Wheel of Expertise to uncover opportunities for experts to share knowledge. This game is characterized by: spreading more understanding of the system to more people, witnessing real work not just talking about hypotheticals, building empathy and reciprocity in and across teams, sharing mental models through the act of play and discovery. Whether your exercise deploys a physical wheel or not, it is meant to be a catalyst for conversation. It is a useful way to break the ice and get people talking about things that they may not normally think about on a regular basis, or (even better) have opinions to share about how it works.
4. The SRECon 2024 resilience tabletop is an expansion of the research and presentation run by Dr. Laura Maguire and Courtney Nash at SRECon 2024 titled Hard Choices, Tight Timelines: A Closer Look at Skip-Level Tradeoff Decisions during Incidents. The discussion used a vignette written with some extra help from Fred Hebert, and following feedback from the presentation and study participants, the exercise has slowly turned into a tabletop exercise.

Games with Cards

1. Backdoors & Breaches is a Security Incident Response game (from Black Hills Information Security and Active Countermeasures) that contains 52 unique cards (with several expansion packs) to help you conduct incident response tabletop exercises and learn attack tactics, tools, and methods.

Apps

1. Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes simulates a complex bomb that one person must diffuse with help from the other players, none of whom can see the bomb. "You’re alone in a room with a bomb. Your friends, the “Experts”, have the manual needed to defuse it. But there’s a catch: the Experts can’t see the bomb, so everyone will need to talk it out – fast!"

Books

Some of these are about and/or contain games and exercises, others are on topics around practice and teamwork.

1. Bailey, Derek. Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music. The source of the term "Practice of Practice". Archive.org, Google Books
2. Pugh, Alison. The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World. To read more about the elements of Social Architecture that support Connective Labor, including the three necessary elements listed above. Google Books
3. Schmitt, John F (Major, USMCR). Mastering Tactics: A Tactical Decision Games Workbook. Writings and exercises for "Tactical Decision Games" (TDGs) that are used by Marines to learn how to make decisions during combat. Marine Corps Association Google Books

Webpages

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_practice
2. https://github.com/lorin/resilience-engineering

Practice of Practice Charter

To build group intuition through a discipline of iterative socio-technical coordination and collaboration.

These words have a heritage in music.

In any type of activity, especially where expertise is seen, there are two forms of practice:

1. The skill we obtain, that of our craft. The Practice Room. The Laboratory. The Gym. QA. Theory of Practice.
2. The experience we absorb when we practice our craft. Real life. Improvisation. Production. Incidents. Practice of Practice.

Those final two terms - Theory of Practice and Practice of Practice - are lifted from Derek Bailey's writing in Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music. He refers eponymously to musicologist Ella Zonis as she describes in Classical Persian Music how the performances do not match theoretical descriptions of how to perform. Bailey says this is what the book is mainly about:

"wherein the dictates of traditional procedures [theory of practice] are integrated with ... immediate mood and emotional needs [practice of practice]".

In other words, it is the emergent blend of craft with intuition. Rote learning with field action. It is where our entire team deals with surprises at the edges of system boundaries, where we share in the activity of taking what we know closer to the ambiguous and unknown.

These sessions should be fun. They should feel like a small band or a jazz ensemble getting together to play and learning how to improvise as a group. They are informal, not stressful, and the ultimate goal is that we learn how to collaborate together and gain common grounding.

So these words also keep the spirit of music with them.

Note on the word Practice

Consider that Practice has two phases that are closely interconencted and yet separate activities: declaritive study, Theory of Practice, and interactive application, Practice of Practice.

A Theory of Practice is like sophia: the learned skill of performing a role. Declarative knowledge that can be learned through observation and study, connected strongly to intellectual activity.

By contrast, Practice of Practice finds its germination in non-intellectual activity. Mindfulness. Instincts. Intuitions. Insights. It lies closer to phronesis: practical knowledge that is more like navigating complexity than following procedures. Learned through experience.

Deliberate Practice contains both of these. It takes deliberate practice to become skillful through theories of the technique, it takes deliberate practice to work in concert with a group of humans. Put another way, a group of experts is not automatically an expert team. So blending the phases of Practice is necessary for overall collaboration, communication, and coordination.