Engaging ways to learn agile

Just to comment, one of the reasons my actual work place hired me is to help the company to implement Agile at all levels and business components. The company tried several methods like you mentioned no matter I do not agree with some of them. At the end, the only thing that worked was to help people to be aware about how the behave and thinking in real work life and real work situations, which was my proposal due to I am tennis coach then I use the model tennis coaches use to help players to unlearn and relearn,

My intent with a game would be to introduce everyone to some very basic understanding of agile concepts. I agree that coaching in real world situations will be a much bigger part of the transition to agile.

Andrew,

I just checked out the TBR website, and I also read a snipet of the book on Amazon. Do you think reading the book (and not attending one of their training sessions) is valuable?

Maura

Sure, I understood. Just I put here my personal experience only. Just in case you will try with games my recommendation is searching for those that will help people to unlearn and relearn because it is what usually you can see in teams that are going to agile. For example, in my personal experience, trust is the key ingredient to create agile environments. Search for situational games in that sense. "The office" TV show is a good tool to see and analyze. The other thing I believe is critical to take into account is. Agile is a matter of whole enteprise, not a team only. I mean, suposse you take that trust is a key ingredient and you will work on that just in case you detect it what the team need but, Is the organization an enabler to generate the necessary environments?

Sergio,

I really appreciate your input. If you have any specific recommendations on situational games you have found useful, it would be great if you would share. I would also be very interested in a little more information about how you have used "The Office" as a training tool. I am an adjunct faculty member at our local college, and I am hoping to be involved in designing a new class about agile project management or agile software development.

Thank you,
Maura

Maura - while the term and outcome of value can be a subjective one, anytime we read about and learn something new, I would certainly call that valuable.

I'd assume the goal here is to help others to understand the what and why's around agile in your organization. The delivery and mechanism of that message and the content vehicle used can be significantly impactful in how much of it truly resonates with the audience. So why not think about that delivery mechanism differently than a more traditional approach.

Kudos to you to already thinking outside the box in these areas. TBR is simply another and different way to think about training and audience engagement, absorption, and resonation.

Long-winded answer to go for it :) Good Luck!

Sure. I will try to explain in the best english I can. There are two "versions" of "The Office", one from USA and the other British. I took both to get examples to be used in both continents plus Latin America because some situations are valid for Latin America culture too. It was a hard work I made myself and then I validated with HR and Change Management divisions. I did that trying to put in practice the same I used as tennis coach. I used the TV series with two purposes: 1-show the team things they do in they daily work life without put them in evidence. it was funny the comments they did while watch the scenes and when they take into account the situation maps they current work life the silence they did. Obviously at the end I facilitate an evaluation session but always taking without saying thing like "hey, is what you do each day" 2-take some games you can see in the series, replicate it with the team, but to show what not to do. I mean, the game in the series is to be used to get an objective that you can see is not achieved. I used it to replicate the same and to analyze the reason. Something I did not write before: just in case you are trying to learn an specific method of framework (Scrum for example) then you can find games into the internet. The same for techniques like Design Thinking or Responsive Working. But in my personal experience, learn Agile is not about to learn a method.

Thank you very much Sergio. I really appreciate you taking the time to explain. It's great that you have been able to take your experience in coaching tennis and apply it in the business world. I hadn't really specifically thought about unlearning - I will think about this moving forward.

Thanks again Andrew for sharing your thoughts and for the encouragement.