The post explains a systems thinking approach for team learning, emphasizing mental models, curiosity over knowledge accumulation, and the importance of actionability. It introduces a technique involving a series of steps to foster collective understanding and address the blind spots inherent in any team environment. These steps guide a team to identify factors affecting their performance, analyze cause and effect relationships, identify dominant causes and effects, and ultimately make informed decisions to improve productivity and tackle challenging work. The method values facilitation, engagement, and the realization that learning is a continuous, shared process within a team’s system.
Decide how you decide
Effective team decisions depend on how they’re made and should foster unity post-choice. Not pre-setting decision procedures can cause confusion and frustration. Methods like consensus, majority vote, or leader decides, each suit different contexts, but clarity on the approach is crucial. Agile coaching can help establish these decision-making norms to prevent misunderstandings and improve long-term effectiveness.
Distributed Agile Simulation
Simulations reveal ones default behavior. I have learned a lot about myself and my default settings when I have participated in simulations. Shout out to AYE conference, PSL workshops and may other excellent learning opportunities that have immersed me in...
Kanban Exercise
Kanban at its essence is a signaling device that instructs the moving or creating in a "pull" based system. Kanban when applied within a system enables synchronization between the rhythm of demand (customer) and rhythm of production...
CPR Technique for Impediments
CPR - Categorize, Prioritize, Resolve: Impediments This is simple mnemonic that aids me to be methodical in my approach towards uncovering and resolving issues that impede progress. Categorize: How do you view your world? Lack of any impedence means your team is in a...
Virtual Parkbench
For large distributed retrospectives, where participants in the retrospective are in different cities, I have created a variation of popular group discussion technique called as “Park Bench”. Some Background: I was coaching within a large organization with different...