Summary: Play Now: This episode is sponsored by The Agile PrepCast for The PMI-ACP Exam: This interview with Anne Pauker Kreitzberg was recorded at the PMI Global Congress 2013 North America in New Orleans. In this interview with Anne Pauker (http://www.agilecriticalthinking.com/) we introduce you to the Agile Critical Thinking framework. We discuss approaches and examples of this techniques and how you can use to influence stakeholders, clarify project definition, urgency, risk and impact — particularly when working on a cross-functional or virtual team. And of course Anne alsol tells us how to apply some of the tools to our everyday projects. Below are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only. Podcast Introduction Cornelius Fichtner: Welcome back everybody to the PMI Global Congress here in New Orleans. I'm sitting here with Anne Pauker Kreitzberg. Podcast Interview Cornelius Fichtner: Hello Anne! Anne Pauker: Hello! Cornelius Fichtner: So we met over lunch of all places. This is unscheduled interview and we talked about the fact that you were a presenter and you said: "Well, the topic of my presentation was Agile Critical Thinking - New Approaches and Tools to Empower Project Teams." I said: "Wow! What a great topic! Would you like to do an interview?" Here we are already talking about it. I have no idea what we're going to be talking about. But let's first talk about your presentation from yesterday. How did it go? Anne Pauker: Well, it was great. I was really, really happy about that because I suppose we had about 200 people in the room and as a presenter you always get a little nervous when you see a couple of people sneaking out the back way. But I was reassured by others that they only have signed up for 2 sessions. So I was really happy because I saw everybody was very engaged, taking notes and I couldn’t be more happy really. Cornelius Fichtner: Alright! So tell me about the new approaches and tools to empower project teams? What is it all about? Anne Pauker: Okay! Well, I'm glad you asked because we are very pragmatic at our company and in terms of overdoing. What we notice is that teams of any kind especially when they are cross-functional teams, global teams, virtual teams, teams that are working on, even very, very complex systems or even the simplest items are inherently fraught with conflict. I'd like to think about it as conflict because of course that’s very uncomfortable. But the reality is that perceptions are very different from the very start about what this project is all about, why are we doing it, how are we making decisions, how will my time be spent, that sort of thing. And so a number of years ago, Charlie and I, Charlie who is my husband and business partner and also a computer scientist and cognitive psychologist by training and I started talking a lot about the problems that he was having working with diverse project teams and all the personality problems that were coming up. And I said: "No problem! I know how to deal with those. You just need an organizational effectiveness expert and we can fix these things." And sure enough that's really what we did. We came up with this notion of Agile thinking which at its core about learning the techniques of critical thinking whether they apply to decision making, strategic thinking, collaboration or creative thinking. Cornelius Fichtner: Let me just interject here. When you say 'Agile thinking' does it have anything to do with the Agile movement in project management or is it just agility in your thought process? Anne Pauker: That's great question. I sort of opened up with that yesterday because I know this audience is very aware of the Agile software development cycle. And so, we definitely borrowed the terminology from Agile thinking. I think it was a momentary glib. Cornelius Fichtner: Yeah, okay. Anne Pauker: So let me just put that together so you can edit it better. Okay. So we know
