Facilitating Work

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.

How teams can get clarity, engagement and alignment by collaboratively visualizing the nodes & links of any system to create a shared visual model.

When you draw the toast-making process, you will realize that there are links and nodes between the bread, the toaster, and the person. Tom Wujec loves asking people and teams to draw this process because it reveals unexpected truths about how we can solve our biggest, most complicated problems at work. Links and nodes can map out a complete system model, and this example draws the "toast-making" context. They also expose the complexity of the system by visualizing the number of nodes and connections. After many toast-making drawing exercises, Tom Wujec found out that people can produce a comprehensive system model when they unify their thoughts while working collaboratively. Watch the video to learn this exercise and hear Wujec’s surprising insights.

5 Shocking design mistakes you need to avoid - after all, it's not the program that sucks, it's you (the presenter).

PowerPoint is widely adopted across the globe for presentations. In fact, about 350 PowerPoint presentations are given every second in the world! However, approximately 99% of those presentations don't deliver the expected results. So what really attributes to this problem and how can we avoid it? Learn some of the shocking design mistakes made by presenters in this article and make your next PowerPoint slides interesting.

Key components for successful hybrid teams.

How does an organization collaboratively deal with its onsite and remote teams for successful delivery? Lissete Sutherland of collaboration superpowers talk about the key components of great hybrid teams stating that the path to hybrid meeting success is good design, infrastructure, and facilitation. Good equipment (infrastructure) makes it possible for everyone to be seen and heard in a hybrid meeting while facilitation makes sure the meeting stays focused on the agenda items and that everybody’s voice is heard.

A review of 3 of the 12 rules from the book "Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School" which relate directly to presenting.

Having read "Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School", Garr Reynolds shares what he sees as direct applications for improving presentations. By focusing on three of the twelve rules, the author explains why presentations should be entirely visual, with minimal words, and cause an emotional impact.

Collaborative bosses can use curiosity to escape the echo chamber of their own ideas.

David Marquet talks about how to enhance collaborative leadership in our organizations to build a good-decision making model. He notes that most leaders influence-decision making by the use of their power. They decide on what to be done, then seek validation from the board instead of letting the team play a part in the process as well. As a result, this promotes coercion rather than team collaboration. As a solution, he urges that leaders should be curious to know every board member's idea and ask them the right way for better collaboration. Let's go through seven common mistakes leaders make when asking questions and how they should phrase them instead.

Engage everyone in making sense of profound challenges.

The Conversation Café allows for an unlimited number of people to quickly share their thoughts about a specific subject and steers the group towards a shared understanding of the issue. It works best for complex, difficult, or painful situations as it lays the ground work for being able to move on. A single conversation café session takes from 35 minutes to one hour.

You can include and engage any number of people in making sense of confusing or shocking events and laying the ground for new strategies to emerge. The format of the Conversation Café helps people have calm and profound conversations in which there is less debating and arguing, and more listening. Sitting in a circle with a simple set of agreements and a talking object, small groups will engage in rounds of dialogue with little or no unproductive conflict. As the meaning of their challenge pops into focus, a consensual hunch is formed that will release their capacity for new action.

Share know-how gained from experience with a larger community.

The User Experience Fishbowl helps a large group of people to benefit from the experience of a few individuals by creating a comfortable environment where those with experience can have a "water cooler" conversation while having an audience participate. This creates an immediate "anything is possible" feeling to the session.

It is composed of a small group of people surrounded by observants. The inside circle is formed with people who made concrete progress on a challenge of interest to those in the outside circle. Those in the inner circle debate and share their experiences, while the observers are able to ask questions to spark conversation. The fishbowl design makes it easy for people in the inside circle to illuminate what they have done by sharing experiences while in conversation with each other.

The informality breaks down the barriers with direct communication between the two groups of people and facilitates questions and answers flowing back and forth. This creates the best conditions for people to learn from each other by discovering answers to their concerns themselves within the context of their working groups. You can stop imposing someone else’s practices!

Examining the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think.

Career analyst Daniel Pink makes a very interesting Ted Talk presentation on the dilemma that hovers above motivations in the business world stating that social scientists have the answer but managers don't. He uses the ''Candle problem'' to factually explain that traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think citing that if a task is a bit complex, they do more harm than motivate the team. Watch the Ted Talk to know more about the puzzle of motivation - why rewards work best in straightforward tasks, and why they restrict our possibility when handling complex tasks.

Gather and combine similar items (or ideas) in an iterative manner.

The affinity process is used when a team needs to sift through large volumes of data or when new patterns of thinking are to be encouraged. The process starts by collecting a large set of data (for example ideas, opinions or issues), often through brainstorming, and laying it out on an information radiator (a big visible board). The team then organizes the data by groups based on their natural relationships (collapsing many ideas/issues into clusters of big ideas), forming a more clear view of the different facets within each cluster. The groups can be thought of a collection of various points of views that relate to the same theme, bringing to light the root issues.

It doesn’t really matter how they decide this grouping, it’s enough that clusters are somewhat consistent. Once the clusters (the big ideas) are identified, a single sentence is formed that encompasses all the ideas/issues inside it. This helps in forming a single one-sentence prompt for each idea, that allows quick recall of the core and extent of the ideas/issues in the cluster. The result is a short list of the most important ideas/issues summarized into their most important points. It provides an "executive summary" (or a blue-sky view) of all what is important that was collected during the brainstorming phase.

The Affinity process is often used to group ideas generated by brainstorming, and it is a good way to get people to work on a creative level to address difficult issues. It may be used in situations that are unknown or unexplored by a team, or in circumstances that seem confusing or disorganized, such as when people with diverse experiences form a new team, or when members have incomplete knowledge of the area of analysis.

A deep-dive on project ownership, plus the guiding principles and go-to techniques that will make you a stellar project owner.

The article deeply examines the three roles involved in project development, (project ownership, project management, and project sponsorship) that lead to a project that was delivered on time and brings value to both the customers and the stakeholders. The author notes that among the three roles, project ownership is the cornerstone of creating such a project. However, what is the qualities of a good project owner? Let's read to find out plus guiding principles and go-to techniques that will boost your success as a project owner.

Illustrating why people resist to change, in order to empathize with their situation and help them overcome impediments.

Change requires effort, and people resist it because they don't or can't know the outcome. In this light-hearted animation, Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Ilan Eshkoli illustrate why a resonable and capable individual would resist overcoming a proposed change. The real question is: do people really resist, or are those proposing change simply not empathizing with the situation?

Easy-to-learn microstructures that enhance relational coordination and trust, fostering group participation and unleashing every participant.

Determine the next steps and actions required towards a desired outcome.

Starting from the present state it might be difficult for stakeholders to imagine next steps, when there is a lack of vision for the future. Going through this exercise might mobilize stakeholders and give a sense of direction for possible action and help stakeholders achieve the consensus about the vision for the future and to map out the steps that need to be taken to achieve the objective.