From Paris, Kyiv and Gurugram
I've just returned from an intensive training circuit and would like to share some experience and learning. My business, Amelior Services, specialises in helping people to achieve better results in the development of innovative products and services. I have been blending lean and agile thinking with collaborative frameworks in my training and coaching to help people, especially those working with large companies, to transform to effectively compete with small and lean startups.
What do startups have that large companies tend to lack? An ability to experiment, to fail quickly and learn from these failures, to collaborate closely with customers and with each other, to innovate and test new ideas faster than others, and to really have fun while doing this!
The more I train, and the more feedback I request and receive, the more I realize that people learn better by doing, trying, collaborating and solving problems innovatively... and so the less I lecture, focus on slides or try to explain. Instead, I try to provide just enough information and motivation to create a dynamic co-learning environment. I help to facilitate the creation of small, cohesive teams - feature teams are a common element to most approaches to scaling agile - who are able to directly and intimately interact with customers (this capability is further developed with the use of innovation games).
I had the chance on this recent trip to work with a very experienced Scrum trainer, Alexey Krivitsky, in Kyiv - we co-trained together a group of 16 experienced software product developers for three days at the end of April. Among other things, Alexey is known for having innovated the use of Lego for Scrum. I consider him to be a friend, a co-creator and an inspiration for me in improving my teaching and facilitating style.
Alexey and I began working together last fall at Flixbus, where we collaborated to facilitate a transformation kick-off with a large group in Berlin. We had great results with a large group of ~150 people, helping them to self-organize into a new organisational design that balances autonomy, mastery and purpose (a la Dan Pink), and we were joined briefly by Jurgen Appelo, author of Management 3.0, and great inspiration to people seeking fresh ideas about management.
In Kyiv, we were fortunate to have beautiful, early Spring weather, putting everyone in a good mood. A well-balanced combination of Innovation Games (thanks to Luke Hohmann and Conteneo for the great collaboration frameworks!), Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) scaling frameworks (thanks to Craig Larman and Bas Vodde from LeSS.Works), and techniques for listening, team building and communicating shared by many experienced trainer/coach class participants led us to a very energetic and positive experience. We began by deep listening to one another, then formed teams, and simulated the development of a new product, with idea generation, selection, analysis and market testing, using very short cycles and lots of collaboration.
We're planning another session soon in Kyiv, and in the meantime, you can participate in a session in another city where I'm teaching or bring a session to a city near you.
I'm excited to get the opportunity to continue to offer and to continuously improve my training and workshop facilitation services, and I am grateful to the people who I have had the chance to work with and to learn from.
I have upcoming public courses for Large Scale Scrum with Innovation Games in:
- Sunnyvale, California, June 6-8, 2017 with Conteneo
- Amsterdam, Netherlands, June 21-23, 2017 with Xebia Holland
- Paris, France, July 10-12, 2017 with Xebia Training France
Please let me know if you would like to come to one of these sessions or would like to help me to bring a session to another city near you, or if you are interested in a private session, and we can discuss. I'm looking forward to it!
Best,
Greg
@scaleagile