Book Circle as a Service – A Facilitated Book Circle for Your Organization

Together with wearemovement.se I’m proud to announce the concept Book Circle as a Service. You get a well prepared and facilitated book circle, backed by slides, workshops and my and the groups shared experience. Available both as public events and internal ones. You can check it out at wearemovement.

I love learning. I love reading. I love exploring theories and practical problems with other engaged people. Book circles are to me the perfect combination of those passions. Informal, low investment, great sharing opportunity, easy to tie to local context.

Yet, over time it has been super hard to sustain them, at least for me. Until I tried a new method: facilitated sessions with prepared slides. I wanted to grow a learning culture among my engineering managers, and where ready to make a fairly heavy up front investment to get book circles to work. One and a half years and three books later I think we had proven the concept to work. A vast majority found it highly valuable, and wanted to go on.

I now want to make the concept and a set of circles available to more people. There are currently three circles I can run:

Better meetings with the Core Protocols

Good meetings is very much about achieving deep collaboration. But collaboration is often hard. We go into meetings with different modes, intentions, and expectations. How can we make meetings both more fun and energetic? Surprisingly enough: maybe by being more formalized. Core Protocols Stack helps shaping better meetings. Here’s a workshop you can use to introduce Core Protocols to a team.

You can read more about it in this Crisp.se blogpost and get access to the presentation here.

Fluent@agile – visualizing your way of working

Help your team improve by visualizing their way working with the fluent@agile game. With the game you can help a team find out where it is on its agile journey and help it find new ways of both fine tuning and make leaps in their daily agile practices.

Me and Christian Vikström made the game together at Spotify during the spring 2014 when we were coaching and helping team to improve their agile skill sets and processes. We found the model “Agile Fluency™” developed and described by Diana Larsen and James Shore very useful. It’s based on their long experience of helping team grow agile and the different stages both teams and organizations (most) often will go through.

You can read more about it in this Crisp.se blog and get access to the Workshop instructions and game pdf.

The Pirate Ship – Growing a great crew: a workshop facilitation guide

The Pirate Ship is a workshop format that will help you grow amazing teams. It is “speed boat” on steroids. I have now been using it for a number of years, and it’s proven to be a useful and productive format.

You can read more about the format in this Crisp.se blogpost, and get access to the slides here.

The Agile Meetings Cube

Agile Meetings Cibe
Agile Meeting Cube

Agile facilitators, be aware, now you are about to be replaced – by a cube. Just kidding. But have you ever felt that your meetings are not on track? Or that you have a hard time doing the elevator pitch for that backlog grooming meeting you would like your team to have? Or do you meeting often ends in thin air? Comes your rescue: The Agile Meeting Cube.

Read more about the cube in this Crisp.se blogpost and download the cube here.

Facilitating the Elephant Carpaccio Exercise

One of the best exercises I know of on how to learn and practice User Story slicing techniques is the so called Elephant Carpaccio exercise. To help facilitate the workshop I put together these slides. You can read more about it in this Crisp.se blogpost and access the presentation here.

Let the User Story Flow

One of my biggest surprises when I first met the squads I where going to work with at Spotify was that none of them were using User Stories. At first I observed to see their alternative. Unfortunately there was none. I developed this workshop to try to introduce the concept. Read more and get the slides from Crisp.se

My Spotify tools

Last week i quit my assignment at Spotify. I was there to help and act as a stand-in for Joakim Sundén while he was on paternity leave.  I had the pleasure to work closely with the Agile Coach Christian Vikström on Spotify and together we have been coaching the Browse, Growth and Customer Support squads. A was also a member of the tribe management team, and together we did some new interesting stuff.

Spotify is shock full of super smart people, but many of them has not worked there for long, many of them has not worked long at all, teams have been newly formed and are under constant change. Simply put: even Spotify needs a lot of basic agile coaching.

Read more about the tools I used at Crisp.se