At Agile 2011, I was very fortunate to attend David Chilcott’s session on NonViolent Commuication (NVC) for Agile Coaches. NVC is a very powerful communication toolkit that has already helped me. I wonder how I ever managed without it.Read More
Barbara Fredrickson gave a great Keynote at Agile 2011 – Why care about positive emotions?
The essential message is that we can create positive environments and emotions to create an upward spiral of openness, resilience, and better performance.Read More
Pierluigi Pugliese and Yves Hanoulle gave a great session on Soft Skills Essentials for anyone working in a team (hint: everyone). The session covered three communication models: Status Games, Solution Focus and Transactional Analysis (see diagram below).Read More
A friend and fellow Agile coach – Jason Cheong-Kee-You – told me about this approach to get more out of books. It is one of those little nuggets that help make every day life go better. Thanks also to Allister McKinnell for starting the chain reaction. Read More
At DeepAgile in Boston, I played Yellow Brick Road: Fresh InsightsThrough Peer Coaching. The game was led by it’s inventor – Portia Tung who did a great job even with a very large group. If you haven’t played this, I suggest you make the time. Read More
At Scrum Gathering Orlando, I ran an experiential workshop titled Improve your communication through non-verbal rapport. The session turned out really well so thanks to everyone who participated. My only tools were a flip chart and some markers, so the purpose of this post is to provide details for attendees as well as provide visibility to anyone interested in better communication.Read More
One important book that has been in my communication toolkit for years is Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler. I am mentioning it now since I shared some of these elements in my Scrum Gathering workshop Improve your communication through non-verbal rapport. I’ll blog on this shortly; back to the book. Read More
The workshop was nothing short of amazing. Lee Devin took a group of us through a 5 hour deep-dive into the key skills used by actors to create and collaborate. What Lee calls Artful Making (see book for more). This is 100% applicable for Agile teams and this has immediately become part of my toolkit for fostering creativity and much more. Read More
One of my goals is to make a mindmap of every book that I read. I figure if I can take the time to read it, I may as well take a little time to synthesize the content of the book into a mindmap so I can remember it later. Seems like a good idea, and this is the first one in what I hope will be a long and informative series.Read More
Mike Cohn placed a challenge on his blog for people to describe a Waterfallacy – “A waterfallacy is a mistaken belief about agile that has been caused by prolonged exposure to the waterfall process.” This is to promote his new book – Succeeding with Agile. I have found it very useful in my Agile work and would like you to consider ordering it now to succeed with Agile 😉Read More
