Last weekend I went to the AgileCoachCamp Norway 2011 (#accn) which I organised with Sergey Dmitriev, Geir Amsjø and a few others… We made it happen. It was amazing. I wrote about the first day of the unconference here.

AgileCoachCamp Norway

Open Space—Continued…

The morning started after a short night’s sleep with an awesome breakfast—are all Norwegian hotels that good? Or is the Agile community just lucky in choosing the best ones? Anyway, we started with the last round of sessions. Before lunch, there were two slots…

Our Awesome OpenSpace Agenda

Coaching Organisations

Ken Power—whom I already had had the pleasure of delving into the topic of Coaching Coaches with the day before—raised the stakes and we tackled the interesting questions of how to make an organisation agile. How do we ensure an Agile transition is successful? What can we do to support that? We quickly agreed that management buy-in and support is a must. But how do we get that? How can we get managers to learn that the old style of management, forged a century ago by Taylor, Ford and others, is not suitable any more for the conceptual age of the 21st century? Step by step, was my lesson learned. We can’t go in there and say, “well, you built up this great company here for the last 30 years and now I’ll tell you what you did wrong all the time”… But we can, occasionally, ask good questions and get them thinking.

A story from my own experience: I was discussing tool functions for resource management with a department head. He said he wanted to see what his people were doing, and what my advice was on planning techniques and reports. I asked, “what is your goal, what are you aiming at?” And he answered, “I want that every one is working to full capacity.” Upon which I said, “ok, let me rephrase that in my own words. You lead a service organisation with quite a few customers. What you’re telling me, is that when one of your customers calls with problem, you want to make sure that none of your staff is free to solve her problem?” Upon which he looked at me, astonished. Then we started to talk and found out together what the true goal was.

The session was a lively discussion which Ken Power facilitated in that very calm and assuring way he has. Additionally, he took notes, so that I expect him to post the sessions results in more detail than I currently can, from memory.

StrategicPlay—Take-away from the event

This was my second session with Lego, and the second time I did an OpenSpace session with this topic (I had done it at XP2010 in Trondheim, see the post on Day 1). As in the first session, we warmed up by building bridges:

Bridge with an Interesting Path

As you can see, the outcome was quite diverse… As I asked the builders to bring their own view of the community at the conference and a personal bit into it.

The second exercise—designed to give hesitant participants confidence in their building skills—was the ever-so-lovable turtle, which this time we changed into our ideal peer coach. This turtle parade is the outcome:

Turtle Parade of Ideal Peer Coaches

The actual exercise then was, as promised: “Build what you take away from this conference.” I liked this model a lot, which depicts the stair path the builder is progressing on and shows that after continuous improvement on a round on the stairs you get to the same place as before, but have reached a new level.

Take-Away Stairs

As promised, I’ll cover the science and mechanics behind StrategicPlay in a later post, until then, watch this prezi for an overview.

Closing and Feedback

After these two sessions, the Open Space was closed and we had an amazing feedback session with lots of reported learning and some good improvement suggestions. We all were quite sure that this first AgileCoachCamp Norway has not been the last one! See how happy our facilitator smiles:

The Agile Coach Facilitating

After an amazing lunch, people started to leave. I was requested to run another Lego session, which started after a short break and will be covered in another post (have to save a few pictures). Our flight was not due until late afternoon, so we could take our time to continue a few discussions until we left and went home.

What a weekend! Count me in again for the next one!

Just arrived home from the AgileCoachCamp Norway 2011 (#accn). Full of inspirations, connections, ideas… I think there is no better way to spend a weekend than an AgileCoachCamp. That’s why Sergey Dmitriev and I started working on the idea of a Norwegian CoachCamp after the XP2010 conference in Trondheim. A few friends and colleagues joined us, and over a few months… We made it happen. It was amazing.

AgileCoachCamp Norway

Introductions

The only flight from Berlin was late at night, so I arrived on Friday night a bit after midnight… Missing introductions, and a surprise visit by UncleBob. Ivana Gancheva suggested an introduction expanding on the superpowers in the positioning papers we had for registration:

• What have you done to gain and further develop your superpower since you were born?
• What are you planning to do about it during this camp?
• How can we help you to accomplishing your goal?

As I was too late to take part in this, I’ll share my answers here. The superpower I put into the position paper reads: “I can lure or seduce people to do the things they really want to do.” Some weeks later, having thought and talked about this a lot, I rephrase my superpower as follows:

“I am the TeamhEARo. I can listen to the things people don’t say. I can make them do things they don’t yet know they want to do.” This obviously carries the danger with it of manipulating people, which I obviously do not want to do, so my answers are:

• Listen. Listen. Try to keep my mouth shut, wait, and continue to listen.
• Make an educated guess…
• Give me honest feedback when I don’t. (A special thanks goes to Jon Jagger for very honestly doing that without me actually having asked for it!)

To things were funny right from the beginning: Although I hadn’t met most of the participants before, most of them knew me! That’s one of the amazing things Twitter does for me… And although I hadn’t had a chance to give my “introduction”, I got honest feedback in the very first session:

Coaching Dojo

We started the Saturday with an Agile Coaching Dojo. We gathered in groups of five. The “seeker” posed a problem she wanted help with. Two coaches had 12 min time to gain insight into the problem and assist the seeker in finding a solution, or a path to a possible solution. Two (in our group three) “observers” took notes during that time. In a short reflection the seeker and coaches expressed their learning in the exercise, followed by feedback from the observers… Then the roles rotate and the next seeker starts the next round, until everyone has been the seeker and everyone played every role.

As I was quite energetic that morning plus we had this time constraint (and wanted to produce a result…), we totally sucked in the first round. I was one of the coaches… We did an extensive reflection and decided to just try again, turning back time by 20 minutes and beginning with the seeker stating his problem. The second try was much better:-) Due to our extended reflection and our slight change of the rules we only managed to do four rounds. But we had decided to go for quality instead of quantity—and I can safely say I’ve seldom learned that much in such a short amount of time.

Open Space

After lunch we started the Open Space. Sergey facilitated single-handedly in a way I truely admired. The first session was hosted by Ivana, on the topic “Collaboration vs. Zero-Sum Game”. The central question was, how do we induce a change in mindset, so that clients and suppliers can collaborate based on trust, instead of trying to cheat one another. How do we create a win-win situation instead of a zero-sum game? A lot of people contributed intensely on the subject. Ken Power took notes (and was so nice to share them), so that Ivana and I will soon create a seperate post on that topic.

Tired, yet happy coaches closing the Open Space

Retrospectives

Next was a session on Restrospective techniques, hosted by (if I remember correctly) Nils Haugen @nchaugen. Interesting, continuously relevant topic. From discussing different types of retrospectives and their respective frequency we arrived at talking in depth about sprint and release cycle lengths and the benefits of frequent or continuous integration. (So we basically switched from Retro techniques to Retro topics…) To be honest, I don’t see a point in that discussion – we know continuous integration is good. Ideal lengths of sprints and release cycles are highly context dependent, and not at all times the issue needing your most attention. The simple rule is: the shorter,the better. Few things in Agile are more important than getting better feedback faster.

StrategicPlay

I had proposed a session for the last slot of the OS on Sunday: Model with Lego your personal take-away from the conference using a method I use called StrategicPlay (the exercise is desribed in my XP2010 post).

New Year's Challenges might be tricky...

Due to high demand (I only had Lego for 10 with me) I did another one on the first day, where I gave more background on the cognitive science background of the method. We modelled that morning’s Coaching Dojo exercise’s design, which was insightful and good fun! There even was a third Lego session after the Open Space, after lunch on Sunday. Will cover what we did, how and why that works and lots of pictures in another post.

Coaching Coaches

Coaches recharging their Batteries

In a session hosted by Ken Power – whom I had met in Trondheim and came to truely admire and appreciate this weekend – we dived into the topic of Coaching Coaches. How to establish Communities of practice inside a bigger enterprise, and how to establish a Coaching Circle, are the topics that still stick in my mind. A Coaching Circle is like a glade in the wood for the super-powered Agile coach. Meeting other coaches, taking our capes off and shutting down our coaching habits, we can open up and be our true selves in a safe environment and re-charge our batteries.

I’ve been part of a Coaching Circle during the last months, and without realising at first I came to value it dearly. Topic for yet another post, later…

Lean Procrastination

Later. That’s a word really busying my mind lately. My friend Marc Bless and I’ve been working over the last weeks on a concept we call Lean Procrastination. I won’t cover it here to not deviate from the conference: it’s great fun with a serious core which we’re digging for. I proposed my third session on LeanProcrastination for the late night slot, rather with the idea of reserving my own time for it than with the expectation of attracting much attention… But, wonders of Open Space: whoever comes are the right people, and they were a lot. So I printed a few copies of what I’d written so far and we got into good discussions… Which cleared my view on some details and gave me the honest feeling that we need to fully redesign our workshop concept. Stay tuned for more… Later.

Dojos, Katas and Funny Games

There was a lot going on in the space of coding: Katas, dojos, kata/dojo site design… As always, I opted out of those topics due to higher prioritisation of people-centric ones… But I’m resolved to change that. I hearby promise that on the next (un)conference with a coding session, I’m in. However embarrassing that may turn out to be. Emily Bache, Johannes Brodwall and Jon Jagger impressed and inspired me greatly with their enthusiasm!

At night, after dinner, Ivana and I hosted a session on Funny Games and started by playing Bibbedi-Bibbedi-Bob. That’s a very funny game to get a group from bored to laughing-out-loud within less 10 minutes. We learned it at the AgileCoachCamp Germany and at XP2010 from the amazing fun monger Mike Sutton. We had a lot of fun with this and other games, which made for a nice transition to the ensuing session on Lean Procrastination, which I have already told you about. Earlier:-)

This is my first go at Day 1 of the amazing AgileCoachCamp Norway. I will update it with pictures, and there will be more… So stay tuned and take care!