March Meeting: Powerful Activities with Damon Poole

"Powerful Activities" with Damon Poole

When: Thursday, March 11th, 2021

Where: Online (Meeting link will be emailed prior to event)

Time: 6:00 - 7:30 pm 

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"Powerful Activities" with Damon Poole

Powerful questions are a mainstay of coaching individuals. They stimulate the coachee’s thinking in a direction the coachee is already moving. Powerful questions can be expanded to teams by applying a Professional Coaching mindset to facilitated team activities. Just as with powerful questions, use powerful activities to stimulate the team’s thinking in directions of their own choosing. The power of the activities comes from choosing just the right activity based on the team’s context and current state of mind.

Powerful activities are valuable for helping the team to draw on their collective knowledge and talents, determine the goal of their conversation, discover and explore topics, come up with action items, and stimulate learning and growth. Thus, you can apply the same thinking behind powerful questions to teams. In this session we’ll explore the characteristics of an activity that make it a powerful activity as well as take a look at a couple of examples including Team With the Best Results Ever. As part of exploring Powerful Activities we will run a few of them in breakout rooms.

Agenda

6:00pm: Networking

6:10pm: Welcome and Intro

6:15pm: Speaker

7:25pm: Feedback & Wrap-up

7:30pm: Adjourn

About Damon Poole

Damon has coached and trained thousands of people at companies such as EMC, Capital One, Oanda, Ford, and Fidelity. He speaks frequently at Agile Alliance, Agile New England, Kentucky Fried Agile, Atlassian Summit, Agile and Beyond, Agile Toronto, and others. As a coach of coaches at Eliassen, Damon led the Agile Delivery team which grew to hundreds of Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches in the field. He created Eliassen's Agile Transformation approach and the training content across all aspects of Agile, and led the effort to provide opportunities for the coaches to advance in their coaching journey. This background gave Damon the opportunity to learn from hundreds of Agile Coaches in an enormous variety of client environments and from the wider international Agile community. Come find out what you and Damon can learn from each other!

February meeting: "The Agile Fluency Game" with Ahmed Avais

"The Agile Fluency Game" with Ahmed Avais

When: Thursday, February 11th, 2021

Where: Online (Meeting link will be emailed prior to event)

Time: 6:00 - 7:30 pm 

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"The Agile Fluency Game" with Ahmed Avais

“The highest form of research is essentially play” —N. V. Scarfe


The Agile Fluency® Suite created by James Shore and Diana Larsen is a purposeful body of work to help teams chart a path to high performance. The Agile Fluency Game is a fun way to explore these deeper concepts in a fun and relaxed setting. The game itself is designed to be played in-person since it is in a way a deep simulation. However, there are some mini-workshops and mini-games derived from the game that is suitable to be played remotely. We invite you to join us in an interactive experience that is equal parts fun and equal parts insightful for you. Bring your game face and thinking hat to make the most from this event. We will be using an online whiteboard tool, so be prepared to jump-in and play!

More on the Agile Fluency game here:
https://www.agilefluency.org/game.php 

Agenda

  6:00pm: Welcome and Intro

  6:15pm: Speaker

  7:15pm: Wrap-up and Raffle

  7:30pm: Adjourn

About Ahmed Avais

Ahmed Avais is an Agile Coach, focused on Business Agility. He brings his natural and insatiable curiosity to invite people into his teaching and learning. He uses a variety of tools and techniques, all focused on helping teams and businesses more clearly see their system, allowing them to unleash their potential. Ahmed is passionate about mastery, growth, complexity, agile games, and social responsibility.

 

JANUARY MEETING: Explore the intersection of Leadership, Management, and Organizational Agility by Jon Jorgensen

Explore the intersection of Leadership, Management, and Organizational Agility by Jon Jorgensen

When: Thursday, January 21st, 2021

Where: Online (Meeting link will be emailed prior to event)

Time: 6:00 - 7:30 pm 

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Explore the intersection of Leadership, Management, and Organizational Agility by Jon Jorgensen

From the comfort of wherever you are in the world, Jon will guide you through structured experiential learning, launching from a base of curiosity, fueled by speculation, to discover what's possible for organizations of every size in any domain, to make the most of what they've got, to get more of what they want.What would it be like for you, as a leader, to get what you really want?

What business outcomes do you want?  What are you willing to become and do to have them? Let's get that straight, now.
Then, select an approach. Get feedback.
 
This session will be highly engaging, interactive, cognitively demanding, and private. Sharpened rhetoric and rigor may happen.

The latest Zoom version and a computer that can access Mural.co are needed. An "always-on webcam" and activated mic in a quiet place are highly encourage to join the meeting.

Agenda

  6:00pm: Welcome and Intro

  6:15pm: Speaker

  7:15pm: Wrap-up and Raffle

  7:30pm: Adjourn

About Jon Jorgensen

Jon likes learning about everything: business, people, software development, languages, brain science, improv; pretty much whatever he runs into.

Jon spent 17 years working in Japan, learning to be Lean, Agile, and to flow with work. He won’t toe-dip. He dives in head-first and goes deep. He returns to the surface with ideas which are uncommon, unconventional, and simple, but just might work when nothing else will. (Think: MacGyver without the mullet.) Jon has literally won a competitive Japanese game show (The Magic Lamp, 1997) paired with his wife’s grandfather.

Coaching teams and leaders is a passion of Jon’s. He won’t fix or protect people, because they don’t need it. Instead he gets curious about them, and what they really care about. If they feel “stuck” he helps them find their way to break through. That’s Jon’s happy place; where people are being awesome and are acknowledged for their greatness.

He sees the irony in life, sees his mistakes, and relishes learning from both. He appreciates the counter-intuitive bits of work, and rolls with it. He feels he’s at his best amidst uncertainty.

 

NOVEMBER MEETING: Gaining Inspiration from Customers - Bring User Research to your Agile Teams! Cristine Cravens

Gaining Inspiration from Customers - Bring User Research to your Agile Teams! Cristine Cravens

When: November 12th, 2020 (Second Thursday) 

Where: Online

Time: 6:00 - 7:30 pm 

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Gaining Inspiration from Customers - Bring User Research to your Agile Teams!

When User Research works in tandem with agile it can reveal the unmet needs of your customers, inspire customer centric ideation. and deepen team collaboration while maintaining team velocity. This is enabled by investing in Research Ops, which builds the foundation needed to execute on research quickly, while improving quality. 

You'll come away from this talk with a deeper understanding of how to bring User Research to your agile team, while keeping your current pace, with proven principles and hands on techniques for ensuring your research is immediately actionable and improves your end product. 

Agenda

  6:00pm: Welcome and Intro

  6:15pm: Speaker

  7:15pm: Wrap-up and Raffle

  7:30pm: Adjourn

About Cristine Cravens

Cristine has been leading engaging, intuitive digital experiences for more than 20 years. She currently leads User Research at Kroger Technology & Digital, where she blends agile and user research to help teams collaboratively deepen customer empathy and understanding. Her past speaking engagements have included Midwest UX, American Marketing Association Ignite, and World IA Day Cincinnati. She is certified in Design Thinking.