Agile Vitamins

This episode is an introduction to Visual Thinking techniques. I mainly talk about sketching and how it helped me, Anca, in interviewing candidates for Scrum Master, engineer or coach positions. I also give two examples of when visual thinking can help tremendously: when we give power point presentations and when we try to convey a clear message or illustrate a clear picture of a complex problem, organization, or challenge. I go through topics such as: sketching to help the candidates understand the organizational chart, team structure and dynamics and how using sketches in solving complex challenges can make us all collaborate more. Live-sketching as a fun technique to engage audiences is also something that inspired me in the past and I still recommend to people who want to make powerful presentations.

Check out the ressources below:

Books:

Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told Me About the Creative Life by Austin Kleon - > https://amzn.to/34nFvWE

Blah Blah Blah: What To Do When Words Don't Work by Dan Roam - > https://amzn.to/35qyjYP

Blogs and further inspiration:

http://www.xplaner.com

https://vizthink.de

We are in Berlin in 2020 and Covid-19 cases are spiking again in the city and all around the world. We are recording a podcast on a Friday evening at the beginning of October. Zuzana, Nina and I enjoy a plate of warm flammkuchen made by Nina. We have a nice atmosphere, so where should we begin? Zuzana is a close friend of Nina’s and, although she is open about her work experience, she asked us to keep her workplace unknown for now. But what we want to hear is how she and her teams embraced holacracy at the company she works for and how it feels for her and the people she works with to experiment with such a disruptive framework. Listen to her insightful thoughts, the complexity of the experiment with holacracy and how she has come to navigate it.

Resources

Follow Zuzana on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zuzana-benesova-81647577

Books

Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World by Brian J. Robertson - > https://amzn.to/3kDDkno

Blogs

https://www.holacracy.org

This time, we explored the effects of 'Courage - Open Floor and Art in Motion', a workshop facilitated by Tamara Romaniuk in Berlin. How do we express ourselves and how do we get comfortable in our own bodies? What is movement meditation? Arriving in a space and connecting to it, while giving yourself the time to explore it in your own way. Everything that you do has an impact on your environment and surroundings; we can overcome the fear of being vulnerable by connecting to each other and relying on each other. What to do when you don't know what to do with your body? Games for warming up that involve physical movement; thoughts on spaces and how they shape our experience. How do we encourage people to move more (while working with teams of professionals)? What is courage and how do we explore it in teams? Are we influenced (or limited) by the clothes that we wear? Exploring the courage to speak in front of others. The floor is a reflection of your life. 

How does courage strengthen agility and agile teams? We invite you to answer this question by listening to our thoughts, but also by exploring movement meditation yourself and learning a bit more about how being brave in your own body can make you a successful professional and ultimately a  happier human. 

In this episode, Nina and Anca talk about how mindfulness and agility work together to enable a healthy organizational way. Among other topics, you will hear about what mindfulness is, how it is embraced in organizations nowadays, how coaches embrace mindfulness and meditation techniques that help you be more mindful at work. Other ideas and concepts mentioned are: asking powerful questions, coaching versus consulting, mindulness as a means to an end, agility and mindfulness and how they influence each other, courage, ownership, looking the customer in the eye, the organization seen as a human body, teal organizations, being aware and choosing not to control, the RAIN technique, nurturing big and small problems, mindfulness for Scrum teams, retrospectives, Berlin life, icecream eating while being fearfully mindful (a term coined out of sheer entertainment that is not to be taken too seriously, wink wink). 

Materials:

https://www.yogapedia.com/rain-a-technique-for-mindfulness/2/9708

An episode in which we emphasize the importance of learning new skills from Agile, Lean Development, Design Thinking and more. The power lies in the hands of each and every one of us, no matter our status, area of expertise or responsibilities.

What are the Agile Vitamins? A short introduction about what the community stands for.