National Answer The Phone Like Buddy The Elf Day
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Coach's Challenge - Conduct a Black Hat Review
In the last post, I challenged you to start seeing mistakes as opportunities for your team to improve and grow. This week our coaching challenge is designed to help your team improve its psychological safety by making it "ok" (or even normal ) to share ideas or perspectives that may be counter to what the rest of the group is thinking. The concept of "Black Hat Teams" is simple - it challenges teams to look at decisions and solutions from different perspectives. It also helps to encourage team members to share ideas and perspectives that may be "counter" to a direction the team may organically be headed in. The Black Hat Review activity can be incorporated into backlog refinement or roadmap development, and can go a long way to helping create an environment of psychological safety for your team. IF you have any questions, or would like any support, don’t hesitate to reach out to a coach, scrum master, o...
Coach's challenge! - Schedule a "Mistakes Meeting"
Schedule your very own Mistakes Meeting! Creating a culture within (and across) a team that encourages people to live and breath the agile values and principles requires trust, and that takes being transparent, having a growth mindset and looking to continuously improve! One way to encourage an agile team culture is to start treating mistakes like what they are…. opportunities to learn and improve! The following activity is borrowed from http://www.workplacestrategiesformentalhealth.com and can be incorporated into one of your existing team meetings or retrospectives, or can be a stand-alone event. By making this activity a recurring exercise – you help to build a culture where transparency and growth are reinforced (not to mention coming up with some really good ways to continuously improve the way your team works!) IF you have any questions, or would like any support, don’t hesitate to reach out to a coach or your scrum master. That's what they are there for! Go out...
An agile survival guide for 2021 and beyond
Of the many lessons that 2020 has taught us, I think we can all agree that the most important take away is the importance of being open minded and flexible. It's hard to imagine a plan or a goal, personal or business related, that was set at the beginning of this year that wasn't somehow impacted by the unprecedented challenges 2020 brought us. (Unless, of course your goal was to avoid face-to-face contact with people this year. In that case you're probably pretty on track! ) As I continue to reflect on the many lessons of this year... changes in our country, our company, communities, families and friends... I think my main take-aways are two fold; always challenge assumptions, always stay grounded in what matters. The Agile Manifesto was originally crafted in 2001 by a group of thought leaders from the software development world. After much discussion, this group came to realize that regardless of their individual perspective on the steps they should take to complete the...
Agile doesn't make teams better, people do.
Fair warning - Coach Dan is feisty today! Wherever I get in front of a group of people who are newer to the concept of agile and agility, I like to ask them what they think agile is all about. The responses I get are pretty predictable... "Agile is about going faster." "Agile makes teams more efficient." "Agile is about speed." Agile is about sprints." "Agile is about being flexible." "Agile is about Metrics." I very rarely, if ever hear someone suggest, "agile is a way of reorganizing our teams around delivering customer value, rather than around artificial organizational boundaries." I hardly ever hear someone say, "Agile means empowering teams to self-organize around the work that they are doing to drive value, rather than organizing around job title." And I never hear people say, "Agile means teams can decide to improve the way they work together, becoming more effective, eff...
