Agile Coaches in Containers

 In Agile, we always attribute unsolvable problems of teams/ leadership to "Mindset change". However, Mindset get developed through systematic thinking, collaboration, and the common vision.

Recently I had a chance to attend "Temenos Effect Gathering" at Bangalore, India. The Temenos Effect? process provides for developing a learning mindset within the organization.

Before I talk more about the experience of Gathering let us look at the definition of:

CONTAINER

What is the most authentic thing about humans?

Even though we are substantially so alike, but the things we persuade are highly contrasting. The métiers of life; the hard-learned lessons of discernment and ingenuity shape the very architecture of our being. Which eventually leads us to the distinctive paths that cast our lives into the whirls of true realism, self-affirmation and the discovery of a compelling shared goal.

Coming to the main question, what is a container?

The container is the sum of relationships between individuals of specific network/group/system. It means, the individuals are in a context-aware and context-sensitive space, which is playing the part of a mediator to experience one another’s earnestness, ethics, grace, and comfort.

In the Temenos language, we name this vision as “container creation (Containeering)”.

What is Temenos?

Temenos is a Greek word that means “container” - The virtual space we create for providing a capacity for self-discovery and personal mastery through an intentional combination of cognitive and emotional intelligence, resulting in a learning organization.

Before going further, I would also like to mention “Influence Map (TM)”, a whole new tool that does wonders. It holds visuals as the key method of facilitating, sharing and learning in the containers. Astonishingly, before going to Temenos Gathering, I never knew that visuals can be so powerful to generate a collective seeing and awareness.

Personal Mythology

During the sessions, we, Agile coaches were in the groups of 6-7 other coaches.

We followed a storytelling approach to introspect, visualize and articulate. We visualized our past journey in terms of containers and sketched our influence points that have shaped us.

Each coach narrated their stories from their drawings. Other coaches were kind of getting into the shoes of the storyteller (coach describing his/her story) and asked powerful questions to get the intent of the decisions at that point in time. These questions proved to be very thought provoking for all.

Figure 1 Personal Mythology

 Clean Slate:

Next phase of the workshop was to look at the same container stories (which we took in session 1) and now picturize them with these following questions:

1.    How have I failed the container?

2.    How has the container failed me?

3.    How have I enabled the container?

4.    How has the container enabled me?

5.    How do I overcome my failures as an Agile coach?

This self-questioning activity completely changed the game for each one of us by making us to do a deep introspection, retrospection (i.e. looking from different angles, which we never did while taking those decisions in the past).

Figure 2 Clean Slate

Each one of us presented our own stories. Other coaches kept asking many powerful questions that gave the new freedom in the thoughts and helped us to solve the problems. In few cases, it also helped us to remove the long-term denials and the negative behaviors; we had nested in our minds.

 True Personal Vision:

Finally, the last stage of exercise leading us to our own vision for both personal/ professional life.

 Figure 3 True Personal Vision

These 3 days of gathering gave us the containers (our new groups) with whom we were very open, trusting, fearless and bold enough to share out failures/ success and roadmaps. And I firmly believe, this new-founding Temenos tool is very powerful in re-shaping one's life and vision.

 My key takeaways from this gathering:

1) Trust – creates required safety net within the container very quickly which is essential for sharing personal victories/ failures.

2) Powerful Questions- as a Coach, asking right kind of powerful questions helps to get the path/ thought process. Agile coaches use it very often in their daily professional life.

3) Compelling Vision - vision is very important to drive everything in right direction.

4) Storytelling through pictures - is a very powerful technique to represent our journeys/ thoughts. As said picture speaks 1000 words/ picture remains in memory.

I found this workshop very important in the journey of any coach to define their own vision and can be the powerful tool to coach leaders, team members about shared vision.

 References:

1.    https://www.visiontemenos.com/gatherings

2.    Article “A Reliable Vehicle for Organizational Transformation”- By Siraj Sirajuddin - Copyright ? Siraj Sirajuddin and Temenos LLC