Justin Kotze

Mumbling on stuff

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Agile Coach Retreat 2012 - Robertson - Systemic Constellations - part 9 of 12

The last session of the day. I enjoyed this one. I facilitated this session.

Systemic constellations are traditionally used in family therapy to sort out family kak.

Our coaching circle used this technique over the past couple of months to help us sort out work kak and decided that it is worthwhile to demo and do a couple of scenarios with the participants

Summary of this as follows:

get role players and allocate them names that reminds you of players in scenario

mould and place their body into position that best represents current scenario

give them a moment to feel their current positions

ask each person how they feel

ask scenario owner to try to mould and place the people into differant positions to try to fix the scenario

rinse and repeat

at end ask participants if the want to move and place themselves in the ideal spots

audience members can also suggest certain positions

It was really good to see everyone interacting, learning and having fun.

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My last day of movember. herewith the Mo'ny Mo' Mo'ods of today. 

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Agile Coach Retreat 2012 - Robertson - Injecting Life Into Your Team - part 8 of 12

Last of my distributed time slot sessions.

Conversation was about how to make your team be more agile.

Question was posed that what if my team is delivering good shit every sprint and just doing scrum. They don't really understand it and not worried about it. It just the means to the end.

Some notes i made are as follows:

why care? as they are delivering

are you the problem

inspect and adapt

walk the journey with em

talk with them

they are just doing agile, not being agile

share your outlook

get buy in

have one on ones

read coaching agile teams

SM is a ever morphing role. once the team has the basics right, coach them further

ask for help

facilitate a session on team growth

It was a good session where a lot of people shared real world examples of problems that they faced and how the overcame it.

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29 movember

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Agile Coach Retreat 2012 - Robertson - Value Stream Mapping - part 7 of 12

Caught 5 minutes of this in my distributed time slot. 

Wikipedia explains this as:Value stream mapping is a lean manufacturing technique used to analyze and design the flow of materials and information required to bring a product or service to a consumer. At Toyota, where the technique originated, it is known as "material and information flow mapping". It can be applied to nearly any value chain.

Participants were asked to draw out a system that takes up time and they will then evaluate how to optimise it.

It was interesting to see this in action and how, by doing this exercise you could shorter some cycles and throw out other to optimise the performance. A quick example that one person had was to bath his two kids and the whole system around that, from running tap water, to getting the kids etc. We then went through the process and saw where it could be optimised.

Not a great example though as i imaging this is quality time spent with the children, so you don't necessarily would want to shorten it.

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28 movember

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Agile Coach Retreat 2012 - Robertson - Bodystorming - part 6 of 12

For this time slot in the open space I was a butterfly I think?

I hopped around 3 of the for sessions in this time slot. I only took small bite size bit out of each session, but that worked for me as well.

The body storming was an interesting concept.

It's a play on brainstorming. instead of brainstorming something, you could try bodystorming it.

So you would act out a whole bunch of scenarios to see if your solution works.

It looked like it worked well. It's a concept that I never thought of and look forward to trying it in practice one day.

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27 movember

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Agile Coach Retreat 2012 - Robertson - Systems Thinking - part 5 of 12

Session After Lunch

I facilitated this session, not that i am a master in the field or anything. just thought it would be an interesting topic.

Instead of having it at it's original venue, i opted to have it under a tree.

Die Boeing was net oor, so dit was nie n baie lang sessie nie.

We started by looking at the system that caused everyone to be late for the start of the session.

Then we looked at bigger systems, i.e. how politics relates to crime, and how it related to education etc. Eventually we ended up with a passive systems diagram, with feedback loops.

I posed the question how it relates to agile. We touch on the fact the feedback looks are suppose to be short in agile.  By keeping cycles short, we can inspect and adapt easily.

My feeling is that this session was to heavy after lunch and would have been better suited on another time.

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day 26 movember

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Agile Coach Retreat 2012 - Robertson - Neuroscience of change - part 4 of 12

Session before lunch

And boy, what a session it was. I admit that I haven't had exposure to this topic before so a lot was said that I did not fully understand. This isn't such a bad thing as some of it is still sinking in today. This is a summary of what i took out of it, and not all that was said.

It started out as how the mind works when the mind works and learns. Understanding, retrieving, Decision making, thought blocking, inhibiting. Prioritising uses all the above at once.

Our brain has limited CPU power

We then touched on our different layers of the brain. 

At the lowest level you have a lizard reptile brain, on top of it we have a mammalian brain, and wrapped around it we have our neocortex.

The lizard brain is what we typically use in high school - for sex drugs and rock and roll, i think. this is the brain we share with birds and reptile.

Next up we have the mammalian brain. It takes care of our mood and memories, we share this brain with other mammals like horses or mice. It gives us ability to interact.

The last one is our neocortex. The thin piece that wraps around everything. As I understand thus far, it's the piece that makes us human. Thanks to this piece we can have complex social interactions and higher functions.

Sometimes the lizard brain takes over, thus - You cant teach a hungry child. 

We learned about how the brains have gonads, or was that balls?

When we are stressed we release cortisol. Maintaining a high level of stress for an extended period eats into our memory and learning. With this it's narrowing our vision of things to only focus on the job at hand and cut out everything else. Even affecting your short term memory. This is of course a bad thing. 

Even positive change could be stressful

Tell people, it's okay to feel stressed.

We also had a argument about how Maslow is KAK and false. Apparently it should be a circular diagram and not a triangle. this conversation was marked to be taken offline. 

This session was really interesting for me. I found the book Head Case by Dennis Cass that i am currently reading and signed up for a coursera course about the brain and drugs to get more insights to the brain.

There was a lot of videos and books that everyone referenced, unfortunately I didn't get all the names. 

Thanks again to everyone that shared their knowledge in this session

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day 25 movember

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Agile Coach Retreat 2012 - Robertson - Invent A Game - part 3 of 12

I elected the "invent a game" session as my first session to attend. It was facilitated by sam.

The session was simple and instructions clear. Any game should have an objective.

The participants split into 4 groups and each group created their own games. I cant recall the correct names, so here's by interpretation of each:

Group 1, scrum hop game. throw dice, jump around and get asked a question

Group 2, 5 dysfunctional balloons. lots of mouth action went on here, along with hugs.

Group 3 had interesting conversations and built some kind of tower. I am not sure what they invented unfortunately, as i was too involved in creating my own game.

Group 4, Me, Team Jenga. It's a rendition of a drinking game we sometimes play. I had this game in my head for a while now and the main reason i chose to attend this session was to test the concept and get it on paper.

Games are a fun way to get people to interact. I know some reckon that games are not for everyone, my advice: stop being an old fart.

See pictures and instructions on my game below. it's suppose to be wooden block and not paper block.

other posts in this series:

Part 1 intro

Part 2 check in

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day 24 movember

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Agile Coach Retreat 2012 - Robertson - Open Space Check-In and Agenda Creation - part 2 of 12

Every wall is a door. - Ralph Waldo Emerson 

The open-space meeting or open space meeting is a generic term describing a wide variety of different styles of meeting in which participants define the agenda with a relatively rigorous process, and may adjust it as the meeting proceeds.

Cara facilitated opening the open space. We started with a Check-In exercise.

Find 6 people you don't know too well, and find 1 thing you have in common and 1 thing you don't. It was a good exercise to get everyone moving around talking. The coolest the by far that anyone had in common was that two awesome guys both watched this is spinal tap. Unfortunately they did not get any recognition for this except in this post.

Cara then explained what open space is about and we all were given the opportunity to right down our ideas for the agenda. We then had to pitch our topics to the rest of the participants and place it in a time slot. 

When all our topics was in slots on the board everyone checked and negotiated certain moves on the wall to get the sessions that you want to attend not to clash.

Part 1 on this series here:

Agile Coach Retreat 2012 - Robertson - Part 1 of 12

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day 23 movember. Almost done

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day 22 movermber - i am Vegeta!