Late summer I was lucky enough to join the Scrum Alliance agile coaching retreat at the stunning Elissa Lifestyle Resort in Rhodes. There, in a luxurious setting I met and collaborated with enterprise coaches and leaders from around the world to inspire improvement to our agile coaching tools and methods, to ultimately drive improvement into coaching frameworks.
The Power of Visual Facilitation
Opening with amazing visual facilitation with Stuart Young served as a reminder of how powerful and simple visuals can be in facilitating impactful outcomes.
AI and Agile
Several breakout sessions were proposed, including topics on AI and Agile. With the World Economic Forum forecasting a 30% disruption in global employment, one approach to applying agile responsibly and ethically to embrace AI could be by understanding how to improve agile coaching competencies. Can AI drive more value from the coaching wheel, and how can it do that? This might have downstream impacts into several business areas. I'm looking forward to branching off on this subject in the coming months. I was humbled to meet and work with individuals such as Barbora Pender, a global GEN AI speaker, and passionate individuals like Eduardo Cerdas, Enterprise Architect, and expert agilist Siegfried Segers. Thanks to everyone for their input in these breakouts.
Discovery through story telling
I was delighted to hear that like-minded leaders put emphasis on the importance of structuring storytelling or building narratives, which are often underestimated as discovery tools or means of breaking down barriers at various stages of agility, teams, and organizations. I'm looking forward to contributing towards this—great job Rob Cooper, Pelumi Whole (Lockheed Martin), and Paulo Dias (JP Morgan).
Supervision framework
Other topics included coaching supervision by the inspirational Ash Tiwari—(By the way, thanks for the evening chat on team and process!) He is an Enterprise Agile & Leadership Coach and demonstrated the wealth of competence in the room by developing a supervision framework that already looks like a running product.
Other outstanding breakouts included advisory and presentations on awareness. At the heart of the weekend, these seemed, at least for me, to reconfirm the areas that most need our time and development.
Conclusion
Rob Coopers session on story telling and the reminder on concious coaching stances by Paulo Dias helps to build momentum in my research over the last months in driving awareness through assesment to build narratives.
In taking requirements or objectives do we challenge our clients enough ? Are they concious to all the success parameters and outcomes and possible risks to why it may succeed or fail. Do we check the full story before going ahead?
Tools like Comparative Agile and the work by The Art Of Service bring a scientific approach to creating a narrative through industry benchmarking and assesments.
Creating narratives through assesment and coaching to co-create our goals and provide advice in a structure like supervision will ensure that coaches, change leaders, and transformation engineers have the tools and support to drive business improvement.
And finally - Agile Aid
On that note, I want to say special thanks to Harris Christopoulos (Athens) and Angelina Dimova, and all the other volunteers for doing an amazing job in organizing this event.
The acknowledgment of the recent fires and destruction from recent floods during their breakout session proved to be a catalyst for Agile Aid, a movement aimed at helping struggling aid workers, such as rescue and firefighters, with support to prepare, respond, and react.
This application of agility demonstrates ethical responsibility towards our community and future. Im looking forward to dig further into these subjects.