XP2009 Telling Your Stories Workshop

While I was at XP2009 conference, I participated in a workshop on "Telling Your Stories: Why Stories Are Important for Your Team" organized by Joh Hunt and Diana Larsen. The workshop explored story-telling and how this might be used by agile software teams.

Joh and Diana introduced us to using cards to prompt story-telling. Even although we didn't know the other workshop participants, making up stories around the picture cards felt very natural and we were soon smiling as we enjoyed making up fairy tales.

Next we shifted into telling stories from our own experience and picked one of these to develop into a sort of parable. This was harder as real experiences don't seem to fit as easily and don't always have neat endings.

Finally, we moved into discussion about how we might used story-telling with agile teams. Our group had two ideas:

1. A team could use story card images in a retrospective. Ask each team member to pick three images representing BEFORE, NOW, FORECAST.
2. A team could use the archetype cards to reflect on team behaviour as part of team appreciations.

You can view the photos from this session here.

My takeaways from the workshop are that most people know how to tell a story and that these skills might be leveraged by agile software teams in retrospectives because retrospectives create a shared team story. Reminded me of the David Snowden technique of looking at two possible futures success and failure and then imagining what events led up to these different outcomes. (Need to dig up refs from Cynefin training)

I'm looking forward to running this workshop with Joh in a condensed form in Chicago at Agile2009 conference.

You can order some Once Upon A Time story-telling cards from: http://www.atlas-games.com/onceuponatime/index.php - if you're interested in trying this yourself.