Finally, the last in my series of visual notes from Agile 2009. Not my best, but I wanted to share my thoughts about the session.

Lyssa Adkins and Tobias Mayer gave a practical and experiential session at the end of Agile 2009. Lyssa has written more about this on her blog. The original name for the session was Human-Centred coaching.

One useful trick (unrelated to the topic) is to raise one’s hand and wait for everyone else to raise their hands as a soft and effective way to get people’s attention.

Powerful Questions

  • Are open rather than closed
  • Draw out hidden information
  • Lead people to new perspectives
  • Driven by curiousity
  • Give people time to respond

To get good at them you can write some new ones on cards every week and use them where they make sense. The book Co-Active Coaching has a section that discusses powerful questions. It is partly related to the NLP practice of using the Meta-Model to ask questions to reveal hidden assumptions.

Human Centered Coaching

Powerful requests

Some tips are written in light blue above.  This is similar to the core protocol Ask for Help.