Harvesting Wisdom

Learn how to ask and answer icebreaker questions that help you build team cohesion and inspire your next team meeting.

Icebreaker questions are a great way to engage your team and get everyone to open up a bit. It can be difficult to find ideas for icebreaker questions that are inclusive, build personal context, and form a team culture. Learn how to do better icebreaker questions in this article that let people express themselves whilst promoting team-building to achieve better organizational goals.

Everything in the Scrum Framework enables and empowers the Development Team.

Scrum is teamwork, and and team that is trusted and empowered to self-organize, is best equipped to handle complex dynamic challenges. In this article Sjoerd Nijland explains in his own words and based on his own experience what the Scrum Guide explains regarding the Development Team. He dives into the reasoning behind the decisions and elaborates on the key elements of making great Scrum teams.

Things every Scrum Master can focus on to support their virtual teams.

As Scrum Masters working in virtual teams, it can be easy to spend most of our time facilitating meetings, jumping in to help the Product Owner and Developers with parts of their work. None of these things are wrong, however, be mindful of what your Scrum Team needs from you. Read this text to get a deeper insight on how to help your virtual Scrum team mitigate the challenges highlighted in the "Takeaways".

Creativity can be messy, and it needs discipline and management.

Innovation basically involves the exploration of uncertain and unknown terrains to come up with creative ideas for the continuing success of the organization. Creative cultures help pilot any organization towards innovation but they are hard to create. Gary Pisano reiterates that these cultures inhibit characteristics like tolerance for failure etc. that must be counterbalanced by tougher approaches such as No tolerance for incompetence, among others for them to exist. Read more about innovative cultures here about their characteristics (fun behaviors) and their corresponding frankly-less behaviors paramount for any innovative culture to thrive.

Learn what team agreements are, how to make them effective, and how to respond when they are broken - in a well animated and compact pill.

A clear and concise explanation of the basic elements of team agreements. Through the good use of animation and clear scripting, Tirrell Payton has managed to pack a lot of information into this short 3 minutes clip. In this video you will learn how agile team agreements work, how to make them effective, and how to respond when the agreements are broken. It is well worth a watch.

Physical meetings cannot be directly transferred to the virtual space, but we can still make online interactions successful & engaging.

In this useful and clear manual, Karl and Antonis outline 7 principles for the gamification of online meetings: clear goals, social interaction, phase changes, storytelling, winning atmosphere, minimization, and rewards. They talk about the challenges of online meetings and why they occur, and list out eleven tactics for success & joy online. The article concludes with a printable online-meeting checklist.

Exploring how groups can be managed to enable decision making (instead of avoiding them) through clear communication.

Julia Whitney, a Design Team Lead and a former BBC UK employee that also tapped into team coaching discusses how groups can be managed for quality decision-making in this podcast. Basing her vast experience managing large groups, she states that group decision-making results in resourceful and resilient teams and as well as enhances the possibility of delivering great output on the matter discussed as all members were in sync. It also provides a platform for the team members to express their opinions to the group leader.

This podcast will help you learn more about making decisions, managing groups, and how to improve your communication skills.

Harnessing the power of the team by influencing members to let go of certain behavior patterns and embracing new ones.

The Scrum Master’s role is to create a framework for the team to succeed and help everyone maintain focus on work. It includes protecting the sprint process and ensuring all rituals and ceremonies are adhered to; removing any impediments that get in the way of progress; helping with coordination among members of a team in order to avoid inefficient work; and facilitating communication with the team and making sure that they adhere to the scrum values. The Scrum Master is an agent of change that instills on the team courage, focus, commitment, respect, and openness.

A journey of a culturally diverse and distributed team that learned to uncover hidden impediments to create a better working environment for themselves.

Meet Alex Kanaan as he tells a real-life story of how he was able to help a team he was coaching improve working relations and collaborate toward delivering better outcomes. The Agile coach believes that working agreements can help align a team in terms of expectations. In the story, he explains how he was allowed to coach a culturally diverse and distributed team and finally helped them understand and respect each other through self-discovery and self-improvement. Read the article for more insights into how the team collaborated and developed working agreements that bound them together.

The art of getting your shit done.

GyShiDo, an acronym for "Get Shit Done", came as a brainchild from the authors most pronounced capability. The three came together with their razor sharp focus and the art & craft of simply getting things done, which soon became a movement. The site is an online resource describing their 4 principles: 1) Relentless focus; 2) Single task; 3) Boring consistency; 4) No bullshit; 5) No meetings; 6) Follow up; and 7) Don't be an asshole.

The nature of innovation is about serendipitous encounters and connections.

When we name our projects, we give our audience a frame of mind to which predict the essence of the job to be done. When a project is framed as "innovation", some expectations are created and pressures are introduced into the process - stifling creativity and making participants feel defensive. Sonja Blignaut shares how innovation often happens by accident - and cannot be mandated on the spot.

Test and enhance proposals, stories or ideas by subjecting them to challenges or positive alternatives.

Ritual dissent is a workshop technique designed to overcome taboos against publicly critiquing idea so the presenter can hear candid, useful feedback. During the workshop, the idea presenter shares his or her idea with a group that listens silently throughout the presentation; dialogue or questions allowed. Then, the presenter turns his or her back to the listeners, symbolizing having "left the room" and listens in while the group discusses either what they didn't like (ritual dissent) or what they liked (ritual assent) about the idea they heard. Large groups may break into several tables of "listeners", and presenters will then move from table to table to repeat their presentation. Between rounds, presenters are encouraged to consider the feedback they've heard so far and use it to improve their presentation in subsequent rounds.

Evidence-based insights and practical tips can help you improve your remote meetings.

Meeting effectiveness, already low to begin with, drops when it comes to remote gatherings. Experiencing a poor meeting can even result in meeting recovery syndrome, where employees lose additional time and productivity mentally recovering from a bad meeting. Steven G. Rogelberg presents research-based insights can improve your remote meetings and keep participants engaged.