A facilitation technique to make the purpose of your work as a Scrum Team clear.
Mickael Ruau's insight:
Steps to use this Liberating Structure
Ask participants to get in pairs. Invite them to look at their current activities and slowly dig deeper to reveal the deepest reason for the group to work together. To get this started, participants will have to decide who is going to be the interviewer and who’s going to be the interviewee in the first round.
The interviewer then asks the interviewee to make a short list of the most important things they do in their daily work to help the team make progress. This can include things like “Making the UI of product xy more accessible,” “setting up Docker containers,” or “fixing broken laptops.” 1 minute
The interviewer then helps the interviewee find a deeper purpose behind these activities by repeatedly asking questions with why like “Why is that important to you?”, “Why is that important to our customers?” and “Why is it important to our society?” The participants switch roles after five minutes.
The pairs get into groups of four and share their insights for five minutes.
The whole group shares their discoveries. Participants pay attention to an emerging group purpose.
There is often significant overlap between the individual purposes that emerge. Invite the group to craft a purpose statement that begins with “We exist to start…” or “We exist to stop…” if possible. The most important part, however, is that the group feels like their statement rings true and creates excitement.
A conflict in an Agile team, usually indicates that the members are actively involved in the team. They either try to drive a change accordingly or raise an issue against the actions of other team members. Conflicts help the teams become more mature and effective.
Mickael Ruau's insight:
This conflict resolution technique consists of four steps.
Step 1- Set the scene.
Initially, you need to identify the recurrent conflict patterns within the team. Guide a team to make them understand that conflict is a common problem and it can be solved by using an assertive approach rather than being aggressive.
Step 2- Gather Information.
Secondly, listen to others’ point of view and always respect their decisions. Gather information from the team, understand the conflict deeply and try to find a solution.
Step 3- Brainstorm to find out a solution.
Arrange spontaneous group discussions to share the ideas on any tasks.
Step 4- Confer a solution.
This is the last stage in conflict resolution. Through this step, the hurdles may be removed. Follow the “Be calm, be patient, have respect” principle throughout.
Conclusion:
Conflicts in an Agile team are considered as the sign of a group of people working in collaboration. Sometimes conflicts are destructive if not handled properly. Positive and assertive approaches help resolve a conflict peacefully, with non-confrontational discussions. Generally, conflicts are resolved effectively when team members try to explore issues and possible solutions and listen carefully to the other members in the team.
Liberating Structures are 33 easy-to-use structures for interaction in groups of any size. They enhance relational coordination and trust, foster lively participation and give everyone the…
The role of a Scrum Master is one of many stances and diversity. A great Scrum Master is aware of them and knows when and how to apply them, depending on situation and context. Everything with the purpose of helping people understand and apply the Scrum framework better.
Mickael Ruau's insight:
What great facilitation of the Scrum events looks like
Every Scrum event has a specific purpose that answers the question "Why do we do this meeting, anyway?" A great facilitator should ensure the goal of every event is clear, a lightweight structure is offered and the team achieves the purpose of the event. The earlier described goals of the Scrum events are still relevant, but via great facilitation the Scrum Master succeeds in getting more value out of every event.
Characteristics of well-facilitated Scrum events are:
The daily Scrum contains an atmosphere where healthy peer pressure occurs on delivery quality, commitment and addressing impediments;
The Sprint Planning is all about collaboration between the Product Owner and the Development team and has a strong focus on delivering business value. All team members understand the work and jointly agree to achieve the sprint goal;
The Sprint Review is an energising event in which the Scrum team, sponsors and stakeholders together inspect the product increment and backlog. But also retrospect their collaboration and how this can be improved. They act as one team with the same purpose, there are no barriers between 'client' and 'supplier';
The Retrospective is done in a safe atmosphere in which 'the elephant in the room' is addressed, discussed and turned into actionable improvements that the team members agree upon realising in the next sprint.
l'atelier collaboratif est un site conçu pour les managers, chefs de projets, scrum master ou toutes les personnes désirant préparer et animer un atelier d'intelligence collective
If a scrum master can find effective ways to coach a team in better transparency and openness, they’re adopting a valuable stance. One impediment to openness in a team is ineffective communication…
Mickael Ruau's insight:
Facilitation Instructions — Total time (40–45 mins)
This is best run in a group of 8 or more. Recommend around 12 to ensure that you have a distribution of responses.
You’ll also need copies of the two pdfs to support the exercise (feel free to contact me and I can send you those!)
Set-up the exercise (5 mins)
Remember, it’s just for fun! We’re going to be completing a survey about communication styles. The facilitator can also participate, but it might make facilitation a little more tricky. Maybe answer the questions beforehand if you want to join in. Distribute a printout of the survey pdf to all participants and ensure everyone has a pen and space to choose their answers.
Survey (5–10 mins)
The survey is 14 questions, and for each question, you need to choose an answer from one column (A, B, C or D) that suits you best. Give respondents enough time to answer all questions silently, but help out with coaching if there are any questions or clarifications needed. Walk the room while they are answering. Ask for hands when finished.
Ask respondents to tally their answers (5 mins)
Once you start seeing a few hands, ask people to add up their column scores. We all need four totals, one per column. Ask respondents to choose the column with the highest total. If there is more than one column with the same total, ask the respondent to look at the two answer sets, and go with their gut feeling. Which one do they like better? (This isn’t an exact science!)
Group the respondents by Column (3 mins)
Ask for hands: who had their highest total in column A? These participants should be invited to stand and group together in one corner. If you want to add a little flourish, you can give them a red lego piece each, but that’s optional!
Explain to the reds why they are grouped together (3 mins)
They all have similar communication styles. They all like to communicate in a certain way. They have given strengths, and weaknesses. If you want to communicate with reds, there is a bunch of stuff you should do. At this point, you can read some of the info from the second pdf, and give a copy to each of the reds.
A bit of discussion might start in the room at this point. If so, that’s great! No need to interrupt. Allow the room to settle naturally before moving on.
Explain to the blues, greens and yellows (3+3+3=9mins)
Repeat for the three remaining colours, explaining the communication style each prefers as you go, and distribute the pdf printouts and optional Lego bricks. Again, allow the groups to chat if they are doing so. The whole point of this is to generate discussion.
Explain the conclusions (5 mins):
This exercise is about self-awareness, and awareness of others. To communicate more effectively, remember to communicate with others not as you require, but as they require. The second pdf gives you some guidelines and things to watch out for for your own dominant colour, and for the others too!
Also, an effective team is balanced. And just like the team, each person in the group will have a mix of colours as well as a dominant one.
Optional Extra:
Put all the lego pieces together to show the distribution of colours in the whole team in one place. There may be a dominant colour. There may be an even distribution among all four colours. There may be some colours missing… All of this can be discussed.
Followup:
Ask respondents to write their names on their answer sheets, and collect the responses. Put the totals into charts in excel, and send to the team.
To recap, helping a team be more transparent with themselves can help with more effective communication. Improving communication in a group can only remove impediments. The Simon Workshop exercise can improve self-awareness of individuals inside a team, but also help a team build their own sense of identity.
Design Kit is IDEO.org's platform to learn human-centered design, a creative approach to solving the world's most difficult problems.
Mickael Ruau's insight:
Human-centered design is a practical, repeatable approach to arriving at innovative solutions. Think of these Methods as a step-by-step guide to unleashing your creativity, putting the people you serve at the center of your design process to come up with new answers to difficult problems.
This is a resource for anyone who wants to do things more creatively and collaboratively in their team or organization. It’s a collection of methods and activities, based on Hyper Island’s methodology, that you can start using today.
Mickael Ruau's insight:
Welcome to the Hyper Island toolbox
A resource kit you can use to apply creative collaboration and unleash potential in your team or organization.
move the room with energizers
Tools to inject energy into the process, get people moving, and have fun.
unlock insight and innovation
Tools to unleash creativity, discover valuable insights, and develop new products and services.
grow your self-leadership
Tools for personal development, reflection, self-awareness and how to integrate learning and grow.
make change through action
Tools focused on implementation, and driving and supporting change in organizations.
build a strong team
Tools to build effective teams - foster trust and openness for better collaboration.
Si le leadership participatif était un feu, une bonne question serait l’allumette ou l’étincelle qui l’allume. En effet, une question peut avoir un impact significatif sur le succès d’une conversation; elle peut provoquer un partage dynamique ou, au contraire, carrément bloquer les apprentissages collectifs.
Il y a tellement de façons d’améliorer les questions, en-voici quelques-unes pour stimuler vos réflexions:
Mickael Ruau's insight:
Astuces
Il ne s’agit pas juste d’assembler des mots dans une syntaxe significative. Poser des bonnes question est une posture et une attitude, l’art de vivre une véritable curiosité et de croire que le groupe peut mettre au centre du savoir auquel on ne pourrait pas accéder tout seul.
Résistez à la tentation de vouloir tout régler trop rapidement. Certaines questions se doivent de ne pas avoir de réponse en 20 minutes ou 1 heure. Certaines devraient prendre plus longtemps. C’est acceptable de lancer une question pour une durée déterminée, mais soyez transparent dans la façon dont vous le dîtes. C’est bien pire si les gens remarquent collectivement que vous avez fait semblant de régler l’enjeu.
Remarquez qu’il y a un choix important au niveau de la formulation – qu’elle soit formulée avec « vous » ou « nous ». Souvent, au début, formuler avec le « nous » du groupe peut être paralysant. Commencez avec des questions avec « vous » pour faire émerger l’expérience des interlocuteurs. Par exemple, « Selon vous, qu’est-ce qui est possible ici? ». Ceci est différent que de demander aux gens ce que « nous » croyons qui est difficile. Quand tout le monde parle personnellement, un sentiment collectif perceptible émerge, ce qui prépare le groupe pour des questions avec « nous ».
D’un côté, la question que vous posez est très importante alors préparez-la avec toute votre attention. D’un autre, sachez que plusieurs questions sont interconnectées. Même si vous ne posez pas la question parfaite, sachez que la question créera probablement un point d’entrée pour accéder à d’autres questions importantes.
Pour découvrir une activité qui aide à développer des questions puissantes, lisez ce billet de blogue.
Si les KPI semblent trop unidimensionnels, exécutez le scénario Objectifs, signaux et mesures pour obtenir une vision globale de la réussite.
Mickael Ruau's insight:
Signaux (15 min)
Considérez les trois objectifs sur lesquels vous vous êtes mis d'accord et recherchez les « signaux » qui vous prouveront que vous êtes sur la bonne voie – même principe que pour les KPI. Pour chaque objectif, réfléchissez pendant 5 minutes.
Demandez-vous quels signaux seront réellement pertinents et permettront à votre équipe de prendre les bonnes décisions et d'agir de manière adéquate.
Vous vous souvenez du corps de rêve que vous voulez vous sculpter ? Ainsi, si penser à « Aller à la salle de sport trois fois par semaine » n'est pas une manière constructive d'envisager l'objectif en soi, vos entraînements réguliers peuvent vous indiquer que vous êtes sur la bonne voie. Et donc, voici ce qu'on obtient…
Objectif
Se pavaner en maillot de bain sur la Côte d'Azur l'été prochain
Signaux
Je m'entraîne (genre, je transpire vraiment) plus de trois jours par semaine
Je mange trois repas nourrissants par jour et j'évite de grignoter
In this post, we explain one of the more complicated Liberating Structures called Ecocycle Planning. It helps to bring clarity in your activities as an individual or as a group of people and to identify where your energy and time you should go.
Mickael Ruau's insight:
Ecocycle Planning is remarkably useful for any group of people. But we’ve used them with Scrum Teams for the following:
Cleaning up a Product Backlog or an entire portfolio of products together with a representation (or everyone) involved with the product(s);
Personal development and coaching;
Plotting the activities that Scrum Teams do and to discover what they should spend more time on. And most importantly, what to let go of;
Helping Scrum Masters and Product Owners develop themselves. What are they spending a lot of time on that isn’t delivering value?;
Plotting all kinds of meetings that people have to attend and weeding out what isn’t helpful and investing in what is;
Combine the creating of a stakeholder-map with an Eco-cycle. What are the relationships we should invest in more or let go off?
TRIZ is a facilitation technique to stop counterproductive activities and make space for innovation.
Mickael Ruau's insight:
We’ve used ‘Min Specs’ in Scrum for the following purposes:
TRIZ makes for a wonderful format for Sprint Retrospectives in Scrum;
Use TRIZ at the start of a Scrum implementation to identify behaviors and activities that limit effectiveness, and help the group finds ways to stop them. For the first round, ask “What should we do to completely fail our implementation of Scrum”;
Use TRIZ with a focus on delivering a “Done”-increment. For the first round, ask “What can we do to deliver the most un-done Increment imaginable?”;
The Hapiness radar activity activity is very useful for opening a retrospectively. It helps by narrowing down the retrospective context. It establishes a sequence for the retrospective so it first hear about people feelings (on happiness) before going into a data gathering activit
Liberating Structures are 33 microstructures that allow you to unleash and involve everyone in a group – from extroverted to introverted and from leaders to followers. In this series of posts, we show how Liberating Structures can be used to spice up your Scrum events. Move away from the stickies and the whiteboards for a moment, and explore these novel facilitation techniques.
Mickael Ruau's insight:
1-2-4-All is one of the most applied facilitation techniques from the Liberating Structure collection. Within 12 minutes you can engage everyone simultaneously in generating questions, ideas, and suggestions. Regardless of how large the group is you’ll engage every individual in searching for answers. We’ve used this technique for our trainings with 12 participants, but also during seminars with 100+ people. It unfolds open conversations and sifts ideas and solutions in rapid fashion. Most importantly, participants own the ideas, so follow-up and implementation is simplified.
As an Agile Coach, you frequently encounter situations which demand quick thinking to get things moving in the right direction. Over time I have found few techniques which come out handy and always keep these in my playbook in case need arise. This is the fourth part in the series of tools that I have found useful in my role as Agile Coach – Effective Facilitation.
liberating structures, social invention.net, microstructures, disruptive innovation, behavior change, collaboration, social invention, diffusion of innovation, strategy, transformation, heuristics, complexity science, emergence
Mickael Ruau's insight:
When you feel included and engaged, do you do a better job? Do you think teams in which people work well together produce much better results? Have you noticed the best ideas often come from unexpected sources? Do you want to work at the top of your intelligence and give the same opportunity to others?
If YES, we have found this is the kind of organization and community that people want to be part of. AND, Liberating Structures help make it happen.
On PARLE beaucoup d'Intelligence collective, de facilitation, de coaching, de facilitateur... Mais quand il s'agit de le FAIRE, c'est tout de suite une autre affaire ! Je vous propose ici de vous glisser dans la peau d'un facilitateur pour découvrir quelques clés bien utiles pour vos réflexion
Les effets de ces accords sont réellement impressionnants dès lors que nous les mettons en place. Prise de recul dans les situations où notre égo est mis à mal, fin des ruminations infinies dues aux suppositions… La “première fois” procure un effet grisant ! Même si tout n’est pas pour autant sous contrôle. La parole impeccable a en effet un coût après toutes ces années d’habitudes néfastes !
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