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Learn to walk as a Coach

22. October 2012

vinylbaustein Coaching Agile Coach, Agile Mindset, Co-Active Coaching, CTI, passion, Professional Coaching, Team, Vision 1 Comment

Antecendent

I started with team coaching in 2008, without having any experience in coaching. The only advantage, I’ve already had a deep knowledge of human nature. My approach was to change the complete development framework of a software-development team towards agile.

At that time I was not aware that I was doing team coaching, I experienced this later.

In 2009 I get more and more in contact with the term coaching itself as I started to go to agile conferences and become active in agile communities. It is usual in the agile community to work with coaches.

I was very interested in learning, practicing and experiencing professional coaching skills. But not only for becoming a professional Coach – it was also important for me to experience the role of a Coachee and experience how powerful coaching can be.

Reality

In the beginning of 2010 I started working with a professional Coach. I was coached on a regular basis and was able to help the Coach working with other teams as she was hired as an internal Coach for the company I was working for at that time.

Now as I experienced the magic of coaching to the full, it became more and more clear to me that I’d like to do a vocational training on coaching. But wehre shall I learn all these skills and tools, there are so many coaching institutes out there, lot’s of them say they are the best… hm, somehow this didn’t sound serious to me. In addition, I knew that there are also lot’s of bad coaches out there and I wanted to make sure that I get the best education I could get.

After some investigation on the web, I was able to take a step further. I discovered the ICF Code of Ethics.

The ICF – the International Coaching Federation – founded in 1995, is the leading global coaching organization and it’s core purpose is to advance the art, science, and praqctice of professional coaching.

Looking for a training on coaching which is accredited by the ICF decreases the relevant coaching institutes to an overlooking amount of addresses.

At the same time I received the recommendation from my Coach that a training on Co-Active^® coaching could be a great next step for me. Ok, normally Coaches don’t provide any recommendations, but in my case it was ok and I asked for it.

The next step

In 2011 my plans became more concrete, by investigating on Co-Active^® coaching I found out, that Co-Active^® coaching is a registered method of CTI^® – the Coaching Training Institute. And, what a surprise, I already knew some Coaches who finished the Co-Active^® coaching training. So it was easy for me to follow their footsteps for a while and learn the skills I need for becoming a better Coach – and, last but not least, to start feeling comfortable by calling myself a Coach!

I discovered that there is a Co-Active^® coaching Intermediate programme which could fit my needs perfectly. This programme contains 5 modules and is not really cheap. In addition, my employer, even if he profits from me doing this training, was not willing to pay for that training. So, I’d have to invest ap. € 7.000,–, lots of money, so how can I make sure that this is really what I want to do and to keep the risk as low as possible not to invest money in something wasteful?

Luckily, CTI^® had a really great solution for me! The first module out of 5 is ‘Fundamentals‘ and this is the only module of that programme which can be booked separately! What does that mean? I was able to attend the Fundamentals module without booking the full course. This reduced my costs to a minimum and I was able to find out if this programme is really the right one for me.

Part of the Fundamentals-training is the Co-Active^® model. There are 4 cornerstones in that model, I don’t want to go to much into detail – this is part of the programme – but I want to mention them shortly:

people are naturally creative, resourceful and whole
dance in this moment
focus on the whole person
evoke transformation

These 4 cornerstones are carried by 5 areas – listening, curiosity, intuition (yes, even men have intuition!), self-management and deepen/forward. The core of the whole model are fulfillment, balance and process.

Beside getting a deep understanding for the Co-Active^® model and it’s requirements, the fundamentals training also contains an introduction into coaching, the core competencies of coaching, differentiating between being and doing as well as the three levels of listening. Beside learning all these stuff on a theoretical level the training contained also lots of time for practicing.

For me this already sounded very promising so that I was sure, ok – investing in 3 days of fundamentals coaching training is a good decision. Whether I continue the programme or not.
And, it turned out that it was worth the investment and after these 3 days I was sure that I’d like to continue with the full programme.

After 5 month I finished the whole Co-Active^® Intermediate course, packed with lots of tools and experience – during the whole training course you will perform as a Coach as well as a Coachee. This means as an attendee I profit two times – I learned and experienced professional Coaching skills. In addition, I was coached by other attendees.

Coaching Experiment Time

If you want to find out if coaching is the right way for you or if you are passionate about coaching and want to find out how to take the next step – I can highly recommend the Co-Active^® approach – even if you find out after the Fundamentals that coaching is not the right way for you – it’s worth the effort!

Agile Golf

7. January 2012

vinylbaustein Empirical Experience, Retrospectives Agile Golf, blue sky thinking, Empirical Experience, inspect & adapt, meeting, Retrospective, Scrum, Sprint, Strategic Meetings, Team 2 Comments

Time: ~ 90 min

Requirements: StickyNotes, IndexCards and felt-pens and hour-glasses

For continuing the ‘Agile Olympics’, I created Agile Golf. You can use this exercise for Retrospectives, ‘blue sky thinking’-sessions and strategic meetings.

Agile Golf drawing

Basics

A golf course contains normally a track of 9 or 18 holes. In this exercise of ‘Agile Golf’ we played for 6 holes, but you can vary and take more if you have enough time!

Please feel free to adapt this exercise to your own needs!

Preperation

An ‘Agile Golf’-hole represents a topic you want to improve or perfect. In this exercise we used the following topics as golf holes:

Materials
Equipment
Environment
Management
People
Process

First, prepare the wall with your ‘golf holes’. Make sure there is enough space below the topic to post IndexCards. In addition, make sure there is enough space between all topics as there will be also StickyNotes posted.

Hide all topics with a white sheet of paper so that nobody can see what comes first and will be the next topics – this is important for participants to concentrate exactly on one topic at a time – the one you’re trying to ‘hit’.

Room Preperation

Make IndexCards available for the team and reveal the first ‘Golf hole’-topic. In our exercise it’s ‘Materials’. Set a timebox of 1 minute and ask participants what should we do to perfect the materials we’re aroking with? Each participant should create 5 topics at least!

arrange topics

After one minute, let participants post their topics below the ‘Golf hole’. Let them remoce doubles and make a dot voting on the topics. Find out what are the ‘top 3′ and remove all other topics from the wall.

Reveal the next topic and repeat the process of creating improvements until you have found out the ‘top 3′ improvement for every single topic.

You can see the three topics of each ‘Golf hole’ as a challenge you need to tackle in order to perfect that ‘Golf hole’-topic. You have now prepared Agile Golf Course! This should be handled within 30 minutes.

In the next step, you introduce the golf clubs on StickyNotes to the team, there are 3 available. The colours you are using are important as each colour represents a special golf club!

Golf Clubs

Every patricipant has these 3 ‘golf clubs’ available. These are called ‘company’, ‘team’ and ‘personal’. After introducing these golf clubs you can start the Agile Golf Tournament.

You start at the first ‘golf hole’. Provide the coloured StickyNotes. Each participant need to have enough StickyNotes of the three golf club colours.

Again, you set a timebox of 1 minute. Now the challenge is that each participant need to create as much solution-combinations as possible. For each improvement a valid solution-combination means to have used all three golf clubs for providing a valid proposal. For example, for improving a topic, I could/should do… (green StickyNote for persoanl), the team could/should do… (orange StickyNote for the team) and the company could/should do… (pink StickyNote for the company).

As a variation you can use more than three golf clubs – just use additional colours for additional roles like Management, Sales, Marketing… Feel free to adapt as it’s useful for you!

Agile Golf Tournament Let participants post their solution-combinations of StickyNotes diretcly beside the relevant topic of the golf hole improvement as you can see it on the right picture! As you can see, there is just one valid solution-combination for the first improvement, non valid for the second and 4 valid solution-combinations for the third.

That does not mean that the non valid solution-combinations make no sense, absolutely not – perhaps I don’t need an action from one of the roles to solve/improve a topic. On the other side of the coin, this exercise has the intention to involve all roles represented as golf clubs!

Each participant should now explain her solution-combinations shortly – no discussion about it at this point!

As a ‘little motivator’ you can give candies for each valid solution-combination.

Repeat this for each single ‘Golf hole’. At the end you’ll have a wall full of improvements, possbile solutions and roles of people need to be involved in order to improve/perfect a special topic. It’s now up to you and the participants what you’ll do with that outcome. You can ask each participant to take responsibility for one single topic, let them decide by their own which one. You can keep the outcome for more discussions or futher improvements. …

Feedback from participants

great to have golf clubs representing roles in the company
awesome structure for generating creative ideas
candies
results are concrete actions
little time for thinking
tough timeboxing
creates spontanous outcome

Variation

Use as much roles as possible and don’t take care of valid solution-combinations to find out which roles need to be involved to improve/perfect a special topic…

Creating a Vision for ALE – the ALEnetwork with StrategicPlay®

9. November 2011

vinylbaustein Empirical Experience, StrategicPlay® Agile, ALE, ALE2011, ALEnetwork, Empirical Experience, FUN, Lean, LEGO, LEGO SeriousPlay, passion, StrategicPlay, Team, Vision, XP days Madrid 1 Comment

ALE logo In April this year, Olaf Lewitz asked me if I would like to facilitate an envisioning Session with xp madrid logo StrategicPlay^® for the ALEnetwork at XP days in Madrid in May 2011. Primary, Olaf wanted to facilitate this Session by his own, but as Olaf is beside Jurgen Appelo one of the original Drivers for creating the ALEnetwork, several people asked Olaf to participate the envisioning Session and add his Ideas to a Vision for the Agile & Lean network Europe – the ALEnetwork. Thus he would not be able to facilitate it by his own. As Olaf knew, I’m also a Certified StrategicPlay^® Facilitator and knew that I’m passionate about the techniques of LEGO SeriousPlay^® he decided to ask me.

I was very delighted to be asked. Not only that I really love to facilitate Sessions using StrategicPlay^®, it was a challenge for me. I was already experienced in facilitating, but what was special and new for me was to facilitate a Session for an audience of experienced Agile Coaches and Facilitators. Wow! I accepted without even procrastinating for a second.

StrategicPlay^®, based on LEGO^® SeriousPlay is a 3D visual thinking tool based on the power of hand-knowledge. It was the perfect tool for creating a vision for the ALEnetwork. About 40 Participants from 17 countrys all over europe attended the envisioning Session and every single person had some unique ideas to add for creating a pan-European open network for people passionate about Agile and Lean practice and thinking. All together, we created the vision for the ALEnetwork!

After some basic but necessary warm up exercises, I asked the participants to create their personal vision for a perfect Agile network.

A very important step by using StrategicPlay^® is storytelling. As we started with several Teams, each participant has to share his personal vision with the Team.

After some additional steps, each Team was asked to build a shared vision. Afterwards, each Team had to do a storytolling for their shared vision and present it to the other Teams.

After all Teams presented their individual model to all other participants, we started to build a shared model out of all Team models.

At the end we finished the session by having a shared model of all participants, the vision for the ALEnetwork.

Have a look at the following video, we taped the storytelling of our vision for ALE, a network for collaboration of Agile & Lean thinkers and activists across europe!

special thanks to Ralph Miarka for co-facilitating the session

Striving for Excellence in an Agile environment

19. October 2011

vinylbaustein Agile Mindset Agile, Agile Coach, inspect & adapt, ProductOwner, Retrospectives, Scrum, ScrumMaster, Team Leave a comment

Doing Retrospectives and following the ‘inspect and adapt’ mechanism is one of the most important and effective tools and outcome of being Agile, following Agile rules or doing Scrum.
What kind of Retrospectives do you know? Most people think of Sprint Retrospectives, Kaizen or Lessons Learned after doing or finishing a Project or in a medical context.
I want to concentrate on Retrospectives in an Agile environment, especially doing a Sprint Retrospective in Scrum. I think this is the most familiar kind of Retrospectives in an Agile context. It help Teams to improve constantly on their performance and behaviour.

But how do ScrumMasters and ProductOwners or even Agile Coaches improve their work and behaviour?

It make sense to ask for Feedback after every Meeting. This is a kind of short-termed improvement what really make sense. In addition, I recommend to do Retrospectives for ScrumMasters and ProductOwners on a regular base. You do Retrospectives with your Team after each Sprint what give Teams the Chance to look back, inspect and adapt – the core mechanism of change to strive for excellence.

If you are a ScrumMaster or ProductOwner, or even an Agile Coach, you should use the same machanism for your own improvement and striving for excellence. You don’t have to do that after each Sprint. But you can do a Retrospective regular on a three-month period. All what you need is a Facilitator so that you can participate the Retrospective by your own. You can ask a ScrumMaster of another Team to run such a Retrospective. The core Topic should be something like ‘how to improve the skills of our ScrumMaster/ProductOwner/Coach’ or something similar according to your experiences of the last quarter.

This does not only give you the possiblity to particpate a Retrospective by your own. It is a great chance to receive Feedback from your Team or other invited Stakeholders on a differnt level than getting Feedback for facilitating just a meeting! It is the chance for yourself to look back, inspect and adapt and improve your personal work, skills, behaviour and MindSet!

Agile Wall Street

14. July 2011

vinylbaustein Empirical Experience, Retrospectives Agile, Agile Wall Street, Empirical Experience, inspect & adapt, meeting, Retrospective, Scrum, Scrum Team, Sprint, Team Leave a comment

Time: 60 minutes for 5 people

Requirements: a stopwatch, sticky notes and flip-chart paper

Agile Wall Street preperation

Introduction

This Game is inspired by the ‘Give- and Take Matrix’ mentioned in the book ‘Game Storming’ and was initially inspired by techniques used in engineering, chemistry and design.
Agile Wall Street works for TeamBuilding, motivation, diagnostic of flow and energizing your Team.

I adapted it a little bit to my requirements and it can be used for TeamBuilding, Motivation in Teams and also for Retrospectives. I just call it ‘Agile Wall Street’. It is a diagnostic tool and helps players explore value flows through the Team or a Group.

Creating the Matrix

Create a Matrix as shown in the following Picture. Make sure you have the same count of rows and columns – one row and one column for each Participant.

Let every Participant write down her Name on a large StickyNote, two times and put them on the Matrix as shown. Make sure to post the Names vertical and horizontal in the same order!

Agile Wall Street - the Matrix

Write down the personal Motivation

Now, ask all Participants to write down their Motivation of beeing in the current Team on a large StickyNote, take a new colour for that.

Let Participants post their Motivation-Note along the diagonal, where every Individual intersect with themselves.
In addition, call the vertical ‘Give’ and the horizontal ‘Take’.

Agile Wall Street - the Matrix - motivation

Open the Agile Wall Street

Give Participants a short moment to choose the first TeamColleague they want to start with. Each Participant can start with any other TeamColleague she would like to start.

Ask the Participants to write down a short statement about the Person they have choosen regarding the question: ‘what could I contribute to this Person, how could I support her or what could I offer to her?’

Give a Timebox of 5 minutes!

After finishing for the first TeamMember, ask the Participants to continue with the next TeamColleague, answering the same question on a StickyNote. Again provide a TimeBox of 5 minutes. Let Participants repeat until everybody has an personal offer for all other TeamMembers.

Let Participants put their StickNote-offers on the Matrix, everybody puts her notes in a horizontal row at the intersection according to the names:

Agile Wall Street - the full Matrix

The Stock Exchange

When the Matrix is completed ask Participants to have a seat.

Now you start to facilitate the ‘Wall Street’ offers. Start with the first TeamMember from the horizontal. This Person should listen carefully what her TeamColleagues want to offer, without commenting. Ask all other Participants, one after another, what they want to offer to this Person and let them shortly explain what they have written down.

After all offers are explained to a Person, ask her how she feels right now. Probably this Person will have a smile on her face and just feels good.

Repeat this until all TeamMembers have introduced and explained what they would like to offer to their TeamColleagues.

After this exercise the whole Team will be enrgized and TeamMembers will follow up to the offers they received self organized. If the Team agrees you can put the Matrix somewhere in the Team room.

Agile Speed Dating

4. July 2011

vinylbaustein Empirical Experience, Retrospectives Agile, Agile Speed Dating, Empirical Experience, inspect & adapt, meeting, Retrospective, Scrum, Scrum Team, ScrumMaster, Sprint, Team 1 Comment

Time: 70 minutes for 6 participants

Requirements: IndexCards, felt-pens and a flip-chart

First, all Participants need a Topic they would like to improve or a Problem which need to be solved, their personal improvement Topic for this Retrospective.

Give Participants 5 Minutes to write down up to 5 KeyWords/Sentences on an IndexCard which helps them describing their Topic they want to improve or Problem to be solved. (5 min)

Afterwards you ask Participants to flip the IndexCard and give them again 5 Minutes to draw a Picture, a Metaphor, for their Topic which helps them describing their Topic in a best way. No prizes for Artwork and nobody else will see their Picture, it’s just a reminder for themselves. (5 min)

Start the amazing Speed Dating

After this first exercise, which takes about 10 Minutes, you have all Participants in the right flow and mood for a discussion about their Topic. You have activated both sides of their brain, the left side for rational thinking by writing down the 5 KeyWords/Sentences. And the right side of their brain, the creative part, by drawing a Picture. This is the best starting Point for what is coming next.

Let Participants pair and give them a strict TimeBox. Every Pair has exactly 10 Minutes. First 5 Minutes to discuss the Topic of Person A and finding possible Solutions or Improvements – write them down on your IndexCard – if needed take a new Card.

After 5 Minutes the Pairs change, what means that now Person B will discuss her Topic and write down possible Solutions or Improvements.

After 10 Minutes you build new Pairs and start the exercise again, first Person has 5 Minutes and Person B has 5 Minutes as well. Build new Pairs and repeat until every Participant has talken exactly once to all other Participants!

Debriefing

how does it felt, how do you feel right now?

what was different?

what outcome have you created?

can we improve this Process?

Action Planning

After the Debriefing we start the Action Planning. Every Participant should have at least one IndexCard with possible Solutions or Improvements for her personal Topic.

Ask every Participant to choose just one Action she would like to adress in the next Sprint, choose the most powerful Action and write them down on a FlipChart – Topic, Responsible and due Date.

Variations

If you have an odd count of Participants just invite another Stakeholder or a TeamMember of a different Team. This Person has no own Topic to discuss but can contribute, comment and add Value from a complete neutral point of view!

Instead of doing Speed Dating with pairs you can also ‘pair’ with three people if you have some more participants. In that case you can call the exercise ‘Agile Swinger Dating’… lol

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