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These are samples of the types of workshops I have facilitated in the past to engage audiences, share useful content, and make learning fun!

Agile Leadership Deep Dive - Making Decisions

    We started a series of deep dive sessions with upper management.  As Agile Coaches, we were not teaching anyone how to be a leader. This tactic is not effective at driving change.  We wanted to facilitate discussions among the leaders themselves so they could begin to shape how a leader behaves in our organization.  In one of these sessions, we discussed delegation and its importance.  For more information on Delegation Poker, you can visit the Management 3.0 website.  During that session, one of the managers talked about his desire to delegate more but sometimes his teams would come to him to make a decision because they were not able to reach a consensus on their own.  

    I had recently gone to the Agile Lean Europe 2022 conference in Toulouse.  I attended one of the pre-event workshops facilitated by Manuel Küblböck from Celebrate Company.  The session, Making Decisions in a Way that Creates Commitment, provided useful information to help teams become more self-organized.  I decided I could share what I learned from Manuel to enable our leaders to involve their teams because involvement creates commitment.  One effective way to arrive at a decision that everyone can commit to is through group consent.  I walked the participants through the steps in this technique: 

1.  Present proposal

2.  Clarifying questions

3.  Quick reactions

4. Consent and objections

5.  Integrate objections

6.  Announce and celebrate

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For more information on each step, you can view the PDF that was used during our deep dive session above.

Trash or Treasure?

    In this fun activity, we typed out various behaviors, observations and practices on individual papers.  Participants categorized them into Trash or Treasure (things we want to see and should be doing versus things we need to stop or do not want to see).  Then people could place a dot on the papers if they disagreed with where it was placed.  The discussions that followed were truly engaging and fruitful.

Leadership Workshop

    My colleague and I were challenged to create an engaging and powerful workshop to encourage our leaders to think differently and, ultimately, act differently.  We started with the Villains and Superheroes icebreaker.  This was fun!  Then we had each participant create their own leadership crest to describe the values, beliefs and ideas of a great leader with 4 quadrants: leadership skills, values that help influence others, recent accomplishments and what they like most about their current work.  We moved on to describe the several different types of leaders and famous people who exhibit each leadership style.  As an energizer, we used the 60 Paces Activity to demonstrate how leaders should create a shared vision/goal but then allow employees to complete the task themselves.  Using breakout sessions, we asked participants to discuss what they think makes a "good" leaders and what makes a "bad" leader.  Sticky notes were used to separate the characteristics of a good or bad leader.  With dot voting, we narrowed down the top leadership traits and qualities we wanted to see in our leadership to create a picture of the perfect leader.  We had a round robin discussion for people to share what actions they plan to take to get closer to the perfect leader they just described.  Lastly, we had everyone imagine we were one year into the future and draw a new leadership crest for themselves after they have implemented their action points.

User Stories and Acceptance Criteria

    This workshop was designed along with a colleague of mine to help participants learn how to write good user stories that contain a Who, What, and Why.  We talked about how to create good Acceptance Criteria and explained the INVEST criteria.  We have all heard of "code smell."  Well, User Stories can stink too!  We made a fun activity with concrete examples of stinky User Stories.  You can click on the PDF below to see the Cheat Sheet we gave to participants after the workshop.

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