Balancing Act - Simple tools for Feedback, Courage and Communication

• Presenters: Marc Evers, Willem van den Ende, Nynke Fokma
• Type: experiential tutorial
• Duration: 180 minutes
• Audience: Anyone who wants to improve communication skills and who wants to learn how to cope with change more effectively

Abstract

The Agile Manifesto states: "we have come to value individuals and interactions over processes and tools". Tools and techniques are not enough for running your projects, you need 'people tools' as well. We all know that for instance developers and customers fighting abouth who did what wrong doesn't make our projects finish early, yet it is hard to stop doing it. Especially when the pressure is on. This session provides tools and processes for individuals and interactions, to help you take a step towards peaceful, effective projects.

This workshop is based on Virginia Satir's work. A shorter version has been run at the Agile Open conference

This session is meant for anyone who wants to become more effective through:

• awareness of how our way of communicating influences others and vice versa
• consciousness of the change processes in self, others and the context so that we can surf the waves of change, rather than drowning in the surf of the waves

Benefits of attending

After this workshop, you can:

• lose less time and energy due to fighting
• balance interaction between developers, management and customers
• develop a long-term trust relationship between developers, management and customers
• get your team into a state of flow, where the team delivers more value, while being more relaxed at the same time
• focus on problems - create an atmosphere where underlying problems surface themselves, so appropriate solutions can be devised.

What will the organisers learn

Get more experience in facilitating; be able to develop this session further towards a full-blown multi-day Satir workshop

Session Outline

this workshop is highly experiential. We use role play, games and discussion so that participants will experience the tools, rather than only hearing about them. The maximum number of participants is 20.

Timetable:

• Introduction (10 min)
• Congruent action (90 min)
  • Brief explanation of the self/other/context model as taught by Virginia Satir
  • Roleplay introduction, participants expiriment with various stances people choose in difficult situations.
  • Roleplay. We use a technique called 'Sculpting' to act out how the XP values or the values from the Agile Manifesto are present or not in work situations.
• Break (10 min)
• Changing the way we change (45 min)
  • Experiencing the Satir Change model and learn to embrace change
• Temperature reading - evaluation and closing of the workshop (25 min)