Blog Archives - Agile Training - Evolve through Agility

Personal Agility – Bringing kindness to oneself

October 17, 2019December 10, 2019
by Vispi Shroff

One of the things I’ve always been aware of is that I can be quite self-deprecating and critical of myself. If I had 15 things to do, and I got 13 of them done, my focus would be on the two things I did not complete. I would have given myself a hard time about it. However, after a few weeks of applying personal agility and with the help of my accountability partner Torsten Hansen, I started to unlearn this behaviour.

Personal Agility – How I got started

September 30, 2019December 10, 2019
by Vispi Shroff

As Scrum Masters or Agile-Lean leaders, we sometimes like to bring our work home, or so we think. What if we visualised the work we needed to get done at home every week? We’ve probably experimented with kanban boards on our kitchen walls/fridges, to-do lists for things to do around the house, in the garden and so on. I’ve tried it, successfully many times, but I could never sustain it. Read more “Personal Agility – How I got started” →

The power of co-facilitation

June 18, 2019June 20, 2019
by Torsten Hansen

A few weeks ago, I was helping a colleague design and run a session with 20+ participants. The goal was to update a large physical roadmap holding information for many teams and many large stories for the next release.

In a traditional meeting roadmap workshop format, such a discussion can take a very long time with few decisions being made and people leaving frustrated and drained of energy. To avoid this, we decided to experiment with an activity packed half hour format, heavily inspired by techniques described in “Training from the BACK of the Room”. We deliberately used a space with no chairs or tables, we had plenty of sticky notes available and the roadmap was on the wall. Read more “The power of co-facilitation” →

Retrospectives and Spheres of Influence

May 18, 2019June 18, 2019
by Vispi Shroff

Ever find that at retrospectives, the team are talking about things that happen outside of the team that affect them?

I once worked with a team, for whom, retrospective after retrospective, the problems the team wanted to highlight or talk about were how other people/teams/the organisation were causing the problems they faced. Of course, because all these problems were due to ‘external’ factors’, there appeared to be very little we could do as a team. This situation occurred time and time again turned into a vicious circle for the team.

An overview of the Integral Agile Framework

April 8, 2019April 8, 2019
by Torsten & Vispi

The Integral Agile Framework has its roots in Integral Theory, a theory of everything as espoused by Ken Wilber. As part of this theory, Wilber postulates that everything can be viewed from 4 different perspectives. These are perspectives along the line of viewing things from within and from outside, and from an individual and a collective perspective. Viewing things, situations, systems, people, events or anything from these different perspectives provides us with a deeper understanding and appreciation of the matter.

Wilber positions this as a grid.
Read more “An overview of the Integral Agile Framework” →

A thought (or two) on coaching

December 11, 2018April 8, 2019
by Torsten & Vispi

Torsten

I first learned about coaching around the year 2000. It was explained as not offering a solution but instead asking questions to help a colleague come up with the answer.

I kind of forgot about coaching until I came across Lyssa Adkins book coaching agile teams in 2014 and was lucky to attend an Agile Coach Bootcamp. At the bootcamp I learned that coaching is a lot more than asking questions, it is also about remaining neutral, letting go of intent, mastering powerful questions, gently guiding a conversation, but I felt that I was still just scratching the surface. Read more “A thought (or two) on coaching” →

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