A blog about people, culture, organisations and teams.
Last week, I ran a workshop at Agile Cambridge, building on top of my popular blog post Quick icebreakers for online meetings (that don’t suck).
The workshop examined why we use icebreakers, what a good and bad icebreaker looks like and how to select the right ones for specific scenarios. This post summarises that workshop.
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I recently led a leadership training session for a client. During the planning, the evergreen question of “how do we make decisions” came up; this post talks about the framework I introduced to help answer that question.
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People often struggle to describe who does what. Getting it wrong can mean that things fall through the cracks, or it becomes so descriptive that it hinders work.
Articulating roles and responsibilities, especially in the 4Ds format, can clarify decision-making, help set expectations within and outside of the team, and foster better collaboration.
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I have been working with leadership teams for a while and have used this workshop to help them align around and articulate their purpose. This exercise allows them to identify opportunities to improve, focus their efforts and better communicate what they do with the rest of the organisation. This post shares the workshop format and a Miroboard that can be downloaded.
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A few months back, I worked with a client to design their away day. Working with Jamie, Paul and the programme team, we blended team updates with a new board game about planning to make a brilliant day.
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Agile (and other) teams are made up of people with different capabilities together into one multidisciplinary team, collaborating daily towards a common goal.
This workshop is a game that helps people play at creating multidisciplinary teams while thinking about capability needs, learning opportunities and constraints.
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In my last post, A framework for thinking about team memory, joining up and serendipity in hybrid organisations, I introduced a framework for thinking about Team Memory.
I have now turned this into a Miro board template for a workshop, which is available on the Miroverse.
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Update Oct 2024. I have now added this retrospective to the Miroverse for anyone to use here.
This week, I designed a short retrospective to close a phase of work. The team was handing the work over to an ongoing client team, so it was a perfect time for reflection and a chance to collate advice for the future.
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A Miro workshop, created with Jamie Arnold, that takes you from vision to measures, identifying your outcomes along the way.
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******Updated 26th Jan 2024******
In my recent post, Why Can’t we all get Along, I discussed the value of overlapping roles in multi/inter/transdisciplinary teams and referred to using the broken comb shape to describe skills and capabilities. In this post, I’ll expand on that theory and add an approach for using it to help teams build empathy, understanding and opportunities for contributions.
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In a previous post, I wrote about Quick icebreakers for online meetings, (that don’t suck). In that post, I mentioned that I love using the Think Links game created by Edward de Bono to get people to think creatively and get the ice broken.
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This week I ran a short retrospective to close a two-year-long project; I had limited time and ten willing participants. This post covers the approach I used to create space for reflection.
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Icebreakers seem to have lots of people squirming in their seats, me included. There are a lot of benefits to running them well and downsides when they are not. This post covers why I do them and shares some that have gone well for me in the past.
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This post is about something important, which is why it’s taken some time to put together.
Earlier this year I was fortunate to work with Doteveryone. We created a new agile event that frames team conversation about the potential wider consequences of what they are building.
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**Post updated Feb 2025**
In a recent talk that I gave at Agile testing days and Lean Agile Scotland called “Whole Team Responsibility”, I mentioned the team manual as a way of growing empathy in teams. Here is a quick write-up with a little more detail on how to use it.
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I recently put a workshop together to take a new team through to help describe some important agile concepts including the benefits of working collaboratively and swarming on tasks; the value of communication; how to self-organise; how limiting work in progress achieves more value and what we mean by T-shaped teams.
The workshop itself was a lot of fun and left us with a bunch of balloons and sweets to share with our colleagues(which can’t be a bad thing), as well as a good grasp of the concepts above.
Continue readingI’ve run a fair few workshops over the years, and they tend to include many sticky notes and have learnt a few tricks along the way. Here are my top tips for professional sticky note handling.
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Getting busy people in a room together to workshop is hard and a challenge I came across last week. I’m currently working at the wonderful ustwo as an Agile coach (who are currently hiring for Agile coach/PMs in case you were wondering). One thing that I was asked to help out with is a refresh of the guidelines around how to kick off a new project. As we had so much knowledge in the team, I wanted to make sure that everyone had a chance to help build any proposed solution, but the biggest challenge that we had was that the team is so busy with their respective projects, getting them all in a room together at the same time for a workshop session was going to be near impossible.
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During a recent project we wanted to get input from a range of people on a set of principles that had been produced. As there were 6 to get through the challenge was to get a broad range of input in a short amount of time and come out with some consensus.
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We were invited by Kevin O’Malley from Connecting Bristol to run a session about agile development at the BBC, Digital Bristol Week; a series of talks, workshops and events to introduce new ways of working and best practice to the creative industries of the South West.
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