Hi guys, in this post I want to bring you some techniques that can be used, for example, in retrospectives. Using these exercises will help you to make sure that everyone will be “heard”. Sometimes teams consist of shy members that usually do not express their opinions that much. With the help of these exercises, they can express themselves without going out from their comfort zone. Some of these exercises were already known to me, others I learned with Lyssa and Michael

Consent Check
This exercise is to be used when the facilitator knows that the group is in an agreement or the stakes are low. This exercise will serve to make sure that everyone´s opinion is the same. The facilitator can ask “Does anyone object to ? After this, just confirm that everyone is aligned.

Roman Vote
The facilitator makes a statement, on the count of 3 people hold up their thumbs up,down or sideways. Let the team see each other´s opinions. After that, invite the ones with thumbs down or sideways to talk.

Vote with your feet
This exercise is a bit similar to the one explained here. The facilitator makes a statement: “How successful this iteration was”. People imagine a line on the floor where the left side means: “not successful at all” and the right side means: “a complete success”. People will move themselves according to their opinion. If there is a big difference between opinions, invite people to discuss about it.

Consensus Check
You can use planning poker cards for this exercise, but you have dozens of different options. The facilitator makes a statement and on the count of 3 people will show their cards. Higher the score of the cards, higher they agree with the statement. Lower the score, less they agree with the statement. As in a normal estimation meeting, if the scores are too different, invite people for a discussion.

These are small exercises that can be done in order to help everyone to be listened… Hope it was useful for you.

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Thanks guys,
Luis

Hi guys, this time I want to share a simple exercise that I learned last week in the Management 3.0 workshop given by Jurgen Appelo and Mads Troels Hansen. I highly recommend this training! At the end of the training you will go back with a bunch of nice exercises that you can apply right next day at your work.

The exercise is called “Moving Motivators”. To do this exercise, you need a set of cards like these ones. The game is simple, you spread the cards on a horizontal row putting the most important values on the left and the least important ones on the right. After that you think about a change that is happening inside of your organisation and you move the cards up or down depending how the change will impact your values. When you finish, you will have a visual picture how the change will impact you and your values. Below you can find an example.

I believe this exercise can be extremely useful to use with anyone within an organisation that is being affected by changes. I imagine this exercise to be used on a daily basis for Agile Coaches. There are several people, especially middle managers, who are strongly affected when a company goes agile (more about this topic can be found here), performing this game with them can reveal their needs and their fears allowing a coach to work together with them to minimize a negative impact on the work.

Was it useful for you? Leave me your comments and suggestions :)

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Thanks guys,
Luis

Hi guys, in my last post, I spoke about Shu Ha Ri as a tool for agile Coaches and how it can help them to identify at which level of Shu Ha Ri their teams are. In this blog, I will explain what type of coaching should you apply depending on the level of your team. On the picture below you can see different kind of coaching styles for each different level (the original model can be seen in this post).

Teaching - A the name shows, at this stage you must teach the rules. The teams that are at this level they have a really basic knowledge of agile values/principles/practices. They need to have someone to guide them. Examples from Lyssa Adkins:

“Follow these rules. I have followed them before, and I know they will give you what you want. So, for now, just follow.”
“The rules work. Anything else is an impediment.”
“Everything you could need is right here, in this simple framework, so look here for your answers first.”
“Here is how this works”

Coaching - Is the next step. Here, teams have a good understanding of agile values/principles/practices, they start to interiorise them from their past experiences. They start to understand how they can use different approaches to achieve the same end result. At this stage, teams can come up with their own solutions, they just need a coach to help them finding different ways to achieve what they need. Examples from Lyssa Adkins:

“Why does this way of working work?”
“What kills it? What renews it? What feeds it?”

Advising - The last stage. In this stage, the team has fully internalized the values, principles and practices. Everything runs quite well, the role of the coach works as an advisor. For example:

“May I offer an observation?”
“That could work. Try it”
“I do not know. What do you think?”

One important thing, each successive stage contains the others. For example if a team is in “Ha” but you want to introduce a new practice or idea, remember to use a “teaching” approach because they are new to that practice so they will be in Shu for that idea. This is important because most probably you will be changing coaching styles depending on the practice or idea that you want to feed into the team.

Do you think it will help you?

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I am trying to improve these blog posts with a help from professional designers and editors to give you even more valuable content. If you want to support me on this effort, feel free to contribute with any amount of money that you think it´s fair.

Thanks guys,
Luis

Hi guys, this week I want to introduce you an old Japanese martial art concept that describes the stages of learning to mastery - Shuhari. Shuhari is roughly translated to “first learn, then detach, and finally transcend.” I got familiar with this concept during a training I took with Lyssa Adkins. In this post, I want to present this concept applied to agile teams and use it as a tool to help agile coaches to identify in which stage their teams are.

As an agile coach you must understand in which stage your team is in order to help the team to perform in more efficient way. As Lyssa said, if people in a team are in the “Shu” phase they are quite immature in agile and they just follow rules. If they are more mature they will be in the “Ha”, where they can break the rules safely. The last stage is the “Ri” phase where people are so mature that they can create their own rules. Below I will show you some behaviors that help you to see where the team is on the Shu Ha Ri scale. At this point I will quote Lyssa Adkins notes.

Is the team new to agile or to one another? If so, they are at Shu.

Has the team changed or dropped agile practices and lost the intention behind them? Have they mashed up agile with something else so that their practices are not even clear to them? Do they look at you cockeyed when you bring up the agile manifesto? If any of these are true, the team may have progressed to Ha too early. They are truly at Shu and need you to guide them to practice at Shu.

Does the team live by ideals in the agile manifesto? In all they do, do they stand on the side of individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and responding to change? Do they have the basic practices working well and producing new insights that let them improve each sprint? Do they pause - really pause - to consider the ramifications before they alter, drop, or adda an agile practice? Do they face the consequences of these changes squarely? If these are true, your team is at Ha and needs you to coach them to deeper expression of agile.

Has the team altered their practice of agile and done so consciously, keeping the values and the principles of agile alive? Have they broken through walls of dysfunction in their company so that their practice of agile leads to progressively better and faster delivery and higher satisfaction? Have they imbibed the skills and mind-sets necessary to be truly self-monitoring and self-correcting? If these are true, the team is at Ri and needs you to let them go.

I will explain what kind of coaching styles you should apply to each different stage in my next post. I hope this was useful for you guys.

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Thanks guys,
Luis

Hi guys, this time I want to share an exercise for your new project ramp up. I think this activity is extremely important, because as Lyssa Adkins says “Throwing people in a room or holding a “kick off” is different than a good team start up”. Usually, when a team is formed, people do not know each others, so it´s always a good idea to create some activities that allow team members to get to know each other. The “Tribes” exercise is quite easy yet quite powerful, let´s see how it works…

You must have a big open area with enough space where people can walk around without a problem. After that, ask team members to share some ideas on the topics they are interested in loudly, so that everyone in the room can hear them. People that share same interests on the same topic join the person in the center of the room; this will form a small “tribe”. Ask other individuals to do the same and observe how “tribes” are formed and reformed around the new individual/interest. This is a great exercise that can be used as an ice-breaker activity. It´s always very interesting to observe people´s expressions when they realize that there are many people with the same interests. As a result, the group will understand the other´s appreciations better.

If you want to go deeper in the exercise, you can, for example,ask people to do the same with Agile Best Practices, so that all team members familiarize themselves with different agile skills of their team members. Below you can find few examples, you can create hundreds of them.

* All my tribe members that appreciate pair programming, join me
* All my tribe members that are specialists in TDD, join me
* All my tribe members that love Cucumber, join me
* All my tribe members that think retrospectives are a fundamental part of our project, join me.

I believe, using this exercise will create some kind of bonds among team members and will help them to understand where they position themselves, on personal level and/or on the technical level.

What do you think about it? Let me know whether you use it…

Did you like this post? Do you want to get more in the future? Subscribe my newsletter below and follow me on twitter: @lgoncalves1979.

I am trying to improve these blog posts with a help from professional designers and editors to give you even more valuable content. If you want to support me on this effort, feel free to contribute with any amount of money that you think it´s fair.

Thanks guys,
Luis