Saturday, February 27, 2016
Sunday, February 14, 2016
Wednesday, February 3, 2016
Session facilitation tips
A facilitator is literally defined as “one who helps others learn or who helps make things easy.” A business facilitator helps participants to collaborate as they explore a topic or issue. The goal is to encourage participants to think productively and ultimately to articulate key ideas, to ask vital questions, to uncover variables, to find solutions, and/or to identify productive actions.
“The World Café”
The World Café is a whole group interaction method focused on conversations. A Café Conversation is a creative process for leading collaborative dialogue, sharing knowledge and creating possibilities for action in groups of all sizes. The environment is set up like a café, with paper-covered tables for four supplied with refreshments. People sit four to a table and hold a series of conversational rounds lasting from 20 to 45 minutes about one or more questions which are personally meaningful to them. At the end of each round, one person remains at each table as the host, while the other three travels to separate tables. Table hosts welcome newcomers to their tables and share the essence of that table's conversation so far. The newcomers relate any conversational threads they are carrying -- and then the conversation continues, deepening as the round progresses.
Agile contracts
Contracting for agile software development is fundamentally different from traditional project contracting.
The purpose of this Roojoom is to collect references to agile contracting to support organizations to change their contracting models, reduce risk and get more benefits out of adopting Agile development.
The purpose of this Roojoom is to collect references to agile contracting to support organizations to change their contracting models, reduce risk and get more benefits out of adopting Agile development.
Monday, February 1, 2016
Failing is Part of it: How to Succeed in Making Mistakes?
**Taken from from The Coaching Booster Book
When I have autonomy I grow. Yes, and mainly when I have room for experimentation and making mistakes.
“The only way to never fail is to never try” or “we learn from our mistakes” – these are sentences we believe many of us hear again and again since our childhood. Making room for trying and making mistakes is one of the things we believe in the most. After all, we all make mistakes, all the time. The question is do we learn from our mistakes? Meaning: do we truly learn? And the more important question is do we know how to make mistakes in order to learn?
Don’t avoid making mistakes. Really, don’t. We even recommend you feel free to make mistakes. Don’t stop trying even if it means making mistakes.
The idea is to know how to fail well.
Shirly’s son for instance, he’s a champion in computer games. The kind that have levels, adventures, where the main player gains power and knowledge … . And he didn’t start playing from the highest level and become a champ without making mistakes, right? He kept failing, correcting, repeating, re-experiencing, getting better, failing gain. And in the end he feels on top of the world. Why? Because it’s OK to fail and correct. Because he has the space, the legitimacy and autonomy to fail. His feeling of uccess comes from his ability to correct and make progress. There’s nothing like small failures and small successes as part of an experience to make us feel capable and successful.
Same goes with ourselves and our coachee. Our ability to grow derives from our experiences. But not just any experience – it’s our ability to fail, to correct, try again and get better … . We don’t have to get frightened and shy away every time we make a mistake. We do have to be brave, take a good look at our mistake and work to improve on it.
So how to succeed in making mistakes?
1. Don’t be afraid to try.
How do people become master sportsmen? How does someone become a master at any field? By trying. A lot. Trying that comes from the ability to learn and get better. Fear is one of the most powerful inhibitors to learning new things – use it.
2. By making small steps,
our mistakes will also be smaller, more digestible and easier to fix. They will also increase our sense of autonomy to make mistakes. Just like in a computer game. Small mistakes are more controllable, they teach us more. They are also less scary, less noisy and surely less harmful.
3. Inspecting our experiences and our mistakes is another important part of knowing how to make mistakes.
After all, we wouldn’t want to make the same mistake twice, would we?! Our mistakes are vital for our continuous improvement. They are great learning tools, because they provide us with a perfect picture of our actual reality, rather than what our reality should theoretically be. This is why looking at our mistakes and asking what we have learned from them, what we should stop doing and what we should start doing differently is a good and brave way to learn. Cooking can be a good example for this. Is a recipe perfect the first time we try it? Or do we need to retry and refine it several times until we find just the right ingredients for our palette, until we discover the “right mix” for us?
4. Sometimes we’ll make small, controlled experiments, so we can test how reality responds to the change we want to make.
But this will be a small experiment, so if we fail we can learn, correct and try to make it better. Small mistakes which entail some preliminary probing of the reality that awaits us, are both controllable and helpful to our learning.
5. From big mistakes – which regrettably will happen – we also ought to learn.
We won’t punish ourselves for our past mistakes. It’s important for us to look back at the past, take from it what helped us get past difficult times and learn what not to repeat.
6. By making mistakes we learn how to avoid some of them in the future.
And… Don’t forget to enjoy the journey.
So…Fail fast, fail often
References and further reading: Failing Better, Mike Langlois¹
When I have autonomy I grow. Yes, and mainly when I have room for experimentation and making mistakes.
“The only way to never fail is to never try” or “we learn from our mistakes” – these are sentences we believe many of us hear again and again since our childhood. Making room for trying and making mistakes is one of the things we believe in the most. After all, we all make mistakes, all the time. The question is do we learn from our mistakes? Meaning: do we truly learn? And the more important question is do we know how to make mistakes in order to learn?
Don’t avoid making mistakes. Really, don’t. We even recommend you feel free to make mistakes. Don’t stop trying even if it means making mistakes.
The idea is to know how to fail well.
Shirly’s son for instance, he’s a champion in computer games. The kind that have levels, adventures, where the main player gains power and knowledge … . And he didn’t start playing from the highest level and become a champ without making mistakes, right? He kept failing, correcting, repeating, re-experiencing, getting better, failing gain. And in the end he feels on top of the world. Why? Because it’s OK to fail and correct. Because he has the space, the legitimacy and autonomy to fail. His feeling of uccess comes from his ability to correct and make progress. There’s nothing like small failures and small successes as part of an experience to make us feel capable and successful.
Same goes with ourselves and our coachee. Our ability to grow derives from our experiences. But not just any experience – it’s our ability to fail, to correct, try again and get better … . We don’t have to get frightened and shy away every time we make a mistake. We do have to be brave, take a good look at our mistake and work to improve on it.
So how to succeed in making mistakes?
1. Don’t be afraid to try.
How do people become master sportsmen? How does someone become a master at any field? By trying. A lot. Trying that comes from the ability to learn and get better. Fear is one of the most powerful inhibitors to learning new things – use it.
2. By making small steps,
our mistakes will also be smaller, more digestible and easier to fix. They will also increase our sense of autonomy to make mistakes. Just like in a computer game. Small mistakes are more controllable, they teach us more. They are also less scary, less noisy and surely less harmful.
3. Inspecting our experiences and our mistakes is another important part of knowing how to make mistakes.
After all, we wouldn’t want to make the same mistake twice, would we?! Our mistakes are vital for our continuous improvement. They are great learning tools, because they provide us with a perfect picture of our actual reality, rather than what our reality should theoretically be. This is why looking at our mistakes and asking what we have learned from them, what we should stop doing and what we should start doing differently is a good and brave way to learn. Cooking can be a good example for this. Is a recipe perfect the first time we try it? Or do we need to retry and refine it several times until we find just the right ingredients for our palette, until we discover the “right mix” for us?
4. Sometimes we’ll make small, controlled experiments, so we can test how reality responds to the change we want to make.
But this will be a small experiment, so if we fail we can learn, correct and try to make it better. Small mistakes which entail some preliminary probing of the reality that awaits us, are both controllable and helpful to our learning.
5. From big mistakes – which regrettably will happen – we also ought to learn.
We won’t punish ourselves for our past mistakes. It’s important for us to look back at the past, take from it what helped us get past difficult times and learn what not to repeat.
6. By making mistakes we learn how to avoid some of them in the future.
And… Don’t forget to enjoy the journey.
So…Fail fast, fail often
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/books/review-the-wright-brothers-by-david-mccullough.html?_r=0
References and further reading: Failing Better, Mike Langlois¹
What's the ROI/Impact of Agile Approaches? - Reading List
Organizations can use agile software development to increase the value of a project to its stakeholders and decrease the cost of creating software, thereby increasing ROI. In fact , they can make a lot more money using agile methods.
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