Day 2 of Agile Coaches Gathering was a beautiful sunny day. It was great to catch up with Liz Sedley. Although we've been writing an Agile Coaching book together, our last face-to-face meeting was back in March. It was also nice to catch up with old friends from XTC who sponsored the gathering along with Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance.
The first session I attended was run by Xavier Quesada Allue about "Effective Coaching Styles" (flipchart below). I'm writing up a some of the topics discussed to be included in the Agile Coaching book. One area was that Agile Coaching is aimed at effective teams unlike life coaching which can be purely focused on and direct by where the individual coachee wants to go.
After the break, I joined the session organized by Peter Camfield on the topic of "Why Do I Coach?" We headed out to the garden to sit in the glorious sunshine and soak up the historic atmosphere of Bletchley Park. People I remember contributing to the session were: Bob Marshall, Liz Keogh, Simon Kirk, and Sophie Johnson.
Peter focused the discussion around the creation of this mindmap (below). It was a frank discussion, we talked about what motivates us to be coaches ranging from social responsibility to some of the selfish reasons why we enjoy it. The session emphasized the importance of understanding our personal motivations to coach agile teams and how being more self-aware can improve our approach to coaching.
I briefly attended a talk by Joseph Pelrine about self-organizing teams but ironically had to leave to organize printing boarding passes!
In passing, David Harvey's session on Dilbert Considered Harmful, I was also blown away by Liz Keogh's beautiful mindmaps.
The highlight of the afternoon for me was the games session out on the lawn where we tried a number of teaching games. By that time I was feeling frazzled. The Point & Go game introduced by Tobias Mayer where person A points but doesn't move until person B says "Go!" was pretty mind-bending.
We closed the gathering with report backs from all the sessions and a short retrospective. What people liked was the location, weather, and the number of participants (40 people was a good group size). Next time around we may change a few things - such as evening meal arrangements and clustering of topics. Looking forward to the next one!
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