Yesterday evening I was conducting a 90 minutes agile training. It has been the first for a while now. It has been a practice oriented training, and it has been very comprehensive and demanding, but I have learned a lot. That’s why I want to tell a bit about my experience.
Good Preparation – I had prepared myself upfront to be able to catch up with the subject and the speed of exercises. It turned out to be very beneficial, as I was able to keep focus for almost the whole 90 minutes.
Experienced Moderation – the trainer has been an experienced guy with a lot of knowledge on the subject matter. He gave an introduction and told us about the objectives of the session. He did this in a very concise way, so we all felt like we know what to do.
Aligned Roles – based on skills and status we agreed on who would focus on which parts of the exercises. While the trainer set the frame, we arranged ourselves on a more detailed level. This gave us confidence to be able to help each other.
Focused Actions – from the first minute of the practical session we have been asked to be focused and fight for our objective. Thereby every decision and every action became a special meaning for achieving success. We knew that we had to concentrate on every detail to be ahead of the objectives.
Continuous Feedback – almost every action got immediate feedback, irrespective if it has been a great move that had been honored, open critics, that one could do better, or constructive feedback, what to do the next time. Even the tone was getting a bit harsh because of the speed of exercises, no one felt offended. Everyone experienced the feedback as helpful and motivating.
Permanent Change – I guess there are very few setups, where you will experience more change than in this session. In this short time we’ve got trained to accept, that only few thing work as planned in reality. Change was part of the game and thereby has been accepted.
Accept Failure – due to the speed in the session, we accepted failure as part of the game. Moreover, we used them to learn from them and adapt to the challenges. We changed approaches and tactics to become more robust in a very timely manner.
Team Work – finally we came up with a setup, where we have been supporting each other.
Celebrate Success – we have been a team of 15 people, and at the end of the agile training we had won a football match by 8:2, which is a quite impressive result.
The training I am referring to was the first match of a new season for my football team. To me, it was amazing to see how good people work together in an extremely agile environment. All of this is happening completely voluntary and self-organized – just for the sake of having fun. If we will be able to accept that our job can work the same way, we can make a change and come up with a extremely satisfying working environment. That’s what I understand from free agile!
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