Webinar Archives

Webinar: Dave Snowden on Digital Transformation

June 28, 2021/by agile42

June was all about "Digital Transformation". agile42 coach Martin von Weissenberg, alongside our special guest Dave Snowden, Founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Cognitive Edge, discussed the way agile and digitilisation are intertwined, and why it’s misleading to think of digitalisation as a one-time “transformation”

Martin got Part 1 underway with a video interview exploring what is a digital transformation and why it is necessary. Delving also into the organizational implications of a digital transformation.

In Part 2, the creator of the Cynefin framework and thought leader within complexity science and knowledge management, Dave Snowden, explained the role Agile plays in the context of a digital transformation & the organizational implications thereof. He also examined the social human impact of such changes.

On the 23rd of June we were treated to a thought-provoking webinar hosted by South African based agile42 coach, Peter Hundermark, along with Dave and Martin. The audience had the opportunity to ask their pressing questions in this Q&A-style panel discussion. Some of the questions covered included:

What is digital transformation?
Can agile enable digital transformation or the other way around? How do we see the connection/relationship between the two?
What is your opinion on digital transformation? Is it about technological risks? About literacy?
With many people now predominantly working from home, is this driving digital transformation or is there some sort of link?
How can we find the adjacent possible in a transformation based on attractions and systems tendency?

Webinar: What makes a great Product Owner?

May 28, 2021/by Amy Bridge

The theme for the month of May was Product Ownership. We had two of our agile42 coaches covering this topic, Daniel Lynn and Lothar Fischamnn. Daniel kicked off Part 1 with a video interview where he looked at what makes a great Product Owner, including how to handle a team looking for a list of tasks to complete as well as navigating those needy stakeholders.

In Part 2, Lothar looked at why having a Product Vision is so important for a Product Owner and what we can learn from “Shark Tank”.

This culminated in a webinar on the 26th May, where Daniel and Lothar shared their thoughts and experience in a Q&A style session. The audience certainly gave them some challenging questions!

Some of these included:

Do you coach/teach Product Owners to ruthlessly prioritize to drive better product/service focus?
There was a debate whether the Product Owner role is still required in Scrum. Any thoughts?
What would you say are the most important "watch-outs "or pit-falls as a Product Owner?
Can you be a PO across 2 teams working on multiple products or is that another role completely?

As always the hour flew by with many more discussions still to be had. This is why we have decided to launch a Lean Coffee event after each webinar where you can continue the conversation with two of our agile42 coaches. This provides an opportunity to address those remaining burning questions as well as meet like-minded people. Join our free agile42 Community to gain access to our monthly Lean Coffees as well as an array of other benefits. We hope to see you there!

If you missed out on the live session, don’t panic! We have the recording for you here - please feel free to share around with your network.

agile42 Community Launch

May 12, 2021/by Sofia Svanbäck

We’re excited to announce the launch of our new agile42 Community! Our coaches Regina Martins and Rochelle Roos shared what this is about in a live webinar on the 29th April.

We’ve trained and coached many people over the years that we’d like to continue supporting in their growth and development. One of them may have been you. Some of you have also been active in the PathToCSP Slack group and we’ve enjoyed interacting with you in that way. Many of you have also returned for more advanced training. But much more is needed to help you in your career as an agilist.

In order to take learnings beyond the classroom, we’ve created 2 membership options.

This is an inspiring new place where we want to continue supporting you in your growth and development as Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and Agile Coaches. Each month we will have a theme around which we’ll create events and activities, and stimulate discussions. The idea is that you learn from the community as well as get support from our agile42 coaches and trainers.

People who join communities, surrounded by other like-minded people, are more likely to get the results they want because they get the help they need when they need it. By learning more from other people in the community is a way to broaden your perspective.

We want to make this a safe space for everyone to participate in and thrive. As such, we’ve created a Code of Conduct that everyone needs to agree to; and it will be a moderated space.

The theme for May is Product Ownership. So, join us, and let’s get the ball rolling on your growth and development. You can already sign up for the next webinar on this topic.

Leading Remotely: Webinar

April 26, 2021/by Sofia Svanbäck

Our theme for April was Leading Remotely, where we teamed up with our trusted partner, Geoff Watts from Inspect & Adapt, who kicked off the month with a video interview. Geoff is the UK’s leading ORGANIC agility® leadership coach. In his interview, he shares his observations on how organisations have been impacted by COVID-19 and particularly how leadership has been affected by the shift to remote work. He also gives advice about what to focus on to better lead remotely.

In the second part of our "Leading Remotely" theme, ORGANIC agility® leadership coach Andrea Tomasini shares his insights of the effect the COVID-19 pandemic has had on organisations, addressing why some companies have fared better. He also gives tips on how leaders can increase effectiveness when working remotely whilst finding ways to reduce stress levels amongst employees.

To sum all of this up, we hosted a webinar on the 22 of April, which recapped the month and the general discussions, both on social media and also in our Community. Both Andrea and Geoff shared their thinking live, and the amount of people that joined us was fantastic.

Since the topic is very broad, we chose to have a poll in the beginning of the session, to see where we should start the conversation. The options were:

Trust
Well-being when working/leading remotely
Practices

The majority of people wanted us to talk about “Well-being when working/leading remotely” and that became the natural starting point of the discussion. However the conversation did cover all three points, as they do go hand in hand.

Leading remotely is a big topic, and our audience contributed with both good questions, as well as sharing their own valuable thinking and ideas on how they tackled this situation. The webinar was hosted more as a discussion this time around, and the engagement was great!

50 Ways to Wreck Collaboration and What to do About it

March 26, 2021/by Sofia Svanbäck

What do chickens, defensiveness and collaboration have in common? I think that was a question which certainly peaked our audiences interest. Our latest webinar on “50 Ways to Wreck Collaboration and What to do About it” was a great success. Regina Martins, Mariet Visser and myself, were so pleased to see so many join the session!

As you heard in the last webinar of this series, collaboration is not a team sport - initially! Effective collaboration is key to building strong relationships & navigating the working landscape. Let’s recap what collaboration is. Regina referenced researchers' Vreede, Briggs & Kolfschoten (2008) definition of collaboration as “collaboration is making joint effort towards a goal”. It sounds simple but it is deceptively so. In reality it is not so easy to get right.

Regina explains in her blogpost why she believes collaboration isn't just a learned skill, instead it requires an intimate knowledge of our own defensive behaviours. By being self-aware we can recognise when our behaviour is creating blockers to forming collaborative relationships. During her presentation, she tapped into 50 of these defensive behaviours. Regina ran a poll with the audience on some of these behaviours and it was interesting to learn which of these behaviours were the most common:

withdraw into deathly silence
sarcasm
high charge of energy in the body
fast breathing/heatbeat
wanting the last word

I think many of us can certainly relate to these.

As a guest in this webinar, Mariet delved into techniques & tips to improve collaboration. She mentions that collaboration is a skill we constantly need to work at and is something which evolves over time. As our context and the people with whom we work shifts, so does how we collaborate.

Our way of working together is not constant and is heavily influenced by our surroundings. For many of us over the past year, our surroundings have shifted from mostly in-person collaboration settings, to having to collaborate virtually. This has subsequently changed how many of our teams operate. - Mariet Visser

It is important to have a good collaborative environment, but how do we create one? Now more than ever before, Mariet thinks it comes down to being really explicit about how important collaboration is to the organization and to the team. These suggestions could act as a good starting point in creating a sound collaborative environment:

By creating transparency around what we do and what we want to achieve.
Having a shared vision, a shared goal, and collectively planning and executing the work that needs to happen in line with that goal.
Co-creating a working agreement with the team.
Frequently reflecting with the team on how we're working together to allow for continuous improvement.
Pairing on work where possible - this adds perspective & diversity.

You can read more tips and tricks from the blogpost & video of Mariet published prior to the webinar.

We shared some useful links with you during the live session, and I would like to share them again with you here in this post. Let’s start with our upcoming and past webinars, which you can find here on our website. Feel free to share around the recordings with friends/colleagues who missed the live sessions with us.

We also mentioned our ICAgile Team Facilitation Certification (ICP-ATF) training designed to equip you with the necessary skills to create environments of high collaboration, passionate engagement, and where self-organization thrives. Mariet will be running the next remote training in May - we hope to see you there!

Stay up to date with all things Agile by following us on LinkedIn and subscribing to our monthly newsletter (scroll to bottom of page to sign up). As mentioned during the webinar, we’re launching our free agile42 Community! Join over a thousand agilists from around the world with a huge diversity of experiences, backgrounds and culture. Expand your toolbox within this unique, remote learning community.

If you missed the live session, don't panic! The recording is available online.
Feel free to watch it again and share with your network. It is also available on YouTube.

Below you will find the slides. Please also feel free to share around.

50 ways to wreck collaboration from Regina Martins

We hope you enjoyed the session and that we see you in our upcoming webinars. If you have any questions at all, feel free to contact us at any time!

Validating Change in Small Increments

March 4, 2021/by Martin von Weissenberg

A couple of weeks ago, on Feb 17th, I held a webinar on ORGANIC agility Principle #4: Validating Change in Small Increments. As you may know, ORGANIC agility is our meta-process or framework that you can apply to any organization in order to make it more self-organizing, agile and resilient. Principle #4 is the key component concerned with how to design and run experiments in a structured and directional manner.

This webinar was one of the last in our ongoing series on how to naturally transform an organization into something that is more flexible and resilient, however you can look forward to at least one more webinar touching on Principle #5 — more about that later.

Many organizations try to take a “fail-safe” approach to change, by e.g. buying a big model from a consulting agency, marketing the concept internally, and setting milestones. There’s so much money, ego and expectations attached that the change project will simply not be allowed to fail. The outcome can be summed up as the operation was a success although the patient died. The organization becomes agile-in-name-only, the change project is celebrated as a good investment, and would everyone please shut up, you are now agile, just sort it out and do it.

With this 4th principle, we propose that organizational change should be addressed in an agile way. We create transparency, then inspect and adapt our way by the use of small safe-to-fail experiments — small changes that people propose themselves. We reduce the risks and side-effects by leveraging something called “the adjacent possible" and the predispositions of the organization.

This allows the organization to:

Work strategically. Set a strategic goal and nudge the organization in the right direction slowly but surely, choosing known interventions as well as more experimental ones.
Remove the burden and risk of maintaining several co-existing systems of work for long periods of time. Small changes are easily understood, quickly piloted and rapidly integrated, minimizing the uncertainty, confusion and loss of effectiveness inherent in change.
Anchor results in the organization, as champions ask for volunteers to help define and run the experiments. By involving everyone and asking people to pull improvement work, we get more perspectives, ideas and options. We also get more certainty about the applicability of the results, and a wider acceptance throughout the organization.
Increase transparency. Everyone hates it when an organizational change program is unexpectedly announced by top management. By having a common strategic goal and a public list of ongoing experiments, everyone — including leaders — can see what is happening and facilitate work in that direction.
Base the improvements on organizational reality. We validate assumptions and hypotheses in a safe-to-fail environment, by running small, quick and inexpensive experiments. We can quickly react to emergent patterns and either reinforce or dampen them.
Gain a deeper understanding of the organization by studying repeating emergent patterns. The conditions that led a group of volunteers to achieve success in an experiment can be replicated to catalyse change in other parts of the organization.

During the webinar, we explored the concepts behind this principle and looked at some practical tools for managing organizational change in an agile way, including the Agile Strategy Map as well as Dave Snowden’s Safe-To-Fail Experiment canvas.

If you would like to go into more detail with us regarding these topics, please get in touch with us to schedule a call. We also suggest you join our agile42 Community to stay in touch and receive helpful and interesting insights from the agile42 team.

You are also welcome to have a look at our book ORGANIC agility Foundations: Leadership and Organization

If you missed the live session, don't panic! The recording is available online.
Feel free to watch it again and share with your network. It is also available on YouTube.

Below you will find the slides, with some further content. Please also feel free to share the slides around.

20210217 Nordics Webinar: ORGANIC agility Principle 4 from Martin von Weissenberg

It was great to have you join our webinar, and see you at the next ones :)

Focus on Value Creation

February 25, 2021/by Sofia Svanbäck

Find out what your customers actually need and how to get it to them

Our coach Lasse Ziegler, continued on our ORGANIC agility webinar series by addressing Principle #3 - “Focus on Value Creation”. A successful organization must be good at delivering value to its customers. There are two sides to this equation.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Firstly, the organization needs to understand what value is. This is related to market dynamics and the identification of the target groups associated with a specific market segment. Identifying what is valuable to a target group is a process that requires validation, not an assumption to be made on the fly or within the organization's own echo chambers. So, what is value? And what do the customers describe as valuable? These are questions we need to ask ourselves as a company that wants to provide value to our customers. We can not assume that value to us means the same to the client.

Secondly, the organization needs to understand how to create value more effectively. Under high levels of uncertainty and volatility, the concept of value can shift significantly within a short timeframe. This is why delivering effectively and establishing fast feedback loops between the market and the organization is of vital importance.

Whilst Lasse was going through the topics, he briefly touched on some of the tools we use for discovering the value stream as well as how you can design an organization to deliver on a value stream. The ORGANIC agility Portfolio System Design is a package that aims at creating/designing a streamlined approach to value delivery. Both tools, Value Stream Discovery and the Competence Mapping, were presented during the webinar.

If you would like to take a closer look at the tools, please visit our website, or get in touch with us to schedule a call to discover more together! We are keen to explore how you can work towards creating better value for your customers.

Join our agile42 Community to stay in touch and receive helpful and interesting insights from the agile42 team.

To learn more about the topics touched in this webinar, and to get a more in-depth insight into ORGANIC agility®, we recommend attending the ORGANIC agility Foundations valid for CAL E + CAL T + CAL O training with us remotely!

For those that joined our series of webinars for the first time, we strongly recommend viewing the recordings from our past webinars if you want to get up to speed for the next sessions. Upcoming and past ORGANIC agility webinars are listed here, along with other recordings on Agile and Scrum topics, so feel free to take a look!

You are also welcome to have a look at our book ORGANIC agility Foundations: Leadership and Organization!

The recording is available online. Feel free to watch it again and share with your network. It is also available on YouTube.

Below you will find the slides, with some further content. Please also feel free to share the slides around.

Focus on Value Creation from Lasse Ziegler

It was great to have you join our webinar, and see you at the next ones :)

A decision making approach for resilience

November 23, 2020/by Giuseppe De Simone

Decision-making is an essential process in every organization and can be used as a proxy for the level of resilience and agility. There aren't any right or wrong ways to decide and there are trade-offs involved in each approach.

For example, centralized decision-making processes lead to more coherent decisions at the cost of longer information flows and synchronization delays. If decisions are distributed and frequent, the organization might instead be more autonomous and responsive at the cost of process coherence. In both cases the downsides can be partially offset, e.g. by deploying information systems or by increasing the cultural coherence.

In our latest webinar on November 16th, called “A decision making approach for resilience”, continuing the series on ORGANIC agility topics, we explored Principle #2 and how to use a common and transparent framework for decision-making processes which adapts to each specific context.

Using the Cynefin framework as a guide, we have created a specialized approach to decision-making based on the Cynefin domains, separating out two processes, which are both critical for resilience:

Situational analysis: this is how the people making the decision perceive the context in which the decision needs to be made.
Decision-making: how the actual decision-making is carried out, based on the situational analysis.

Both parts of the decision-making process are critical for resilience. In order to quickly recover from failure and adapt to changing circumstances, the organization must have the ability to manage the trade-off between speed, risk, and anticipated consequences.

We explored how a situational analysis can be done, through both individual and group sense-making, and we provided an overview of possible decision-making based on context:

When the problem at hand is self-evident and doesn’t require specific knowledge or expertise, the organization must have defined policies, processes or tools in place, so that every employee knows when such constraints apply, either because they are common sense or because they are explicitly taught as part of the organization's on-boarding process. The way to improve decision making in this context is to hold regular reviews of those policies and see if small changes can improve the quality of decisions.
When some sort of expertise or analysis is necessary to make a decision, then the approach to decision making is to identify the experts in the specific domain, allow them to provide options (vetted through peer review) and then decide based on those options. To improve decision quality, multiple experts can collaborate, facilitated by a non-expert who can introduce naive questions, avoiding the risk of analysis paralysis and a limited expert point of view. If the experts cannot decide between multiple coherent options within a reasonable amount of time, we might follow into the next scenario.
When it is impossible to analyze a situation given the high level of volatility and uncertainty, then the approach to decision making is to run multiple parallel probes, in the hope that certain patterns will emerge that will help decision making. Under such conditions expertise doesn’t play a role, and in fact can hinder if experts cannot see beyond the scope of their expertise, and instead of exploring potential patterns they see every new input through their pre-existing mental models (to an expert in hammers every problem will be a nail).
When in a true crisis, it is impossible to analyze the situation, because the volatility is so high that even experimentation won’t help. The only way to proceed is to make decisions with authority as fast as possible. A bad decision is better than no decision at all, as it will create some constraints that will allow patterns to emerge in the system. We recognize such situations as chaotic and very energy-draining, but the presence of constraints and creation of coherence will allow us to move back into a context where experimentation is possible.

Last we discussed how organizational Archetypes can influence the way these decision making patterns are implemented in practice.

If you want to know more, you are welcome to join one of our upcoming trainings OR GANIC agility Foundation valid for Certified Agile Leadership - Essentials, Teams & Organizations

08 - 11 February 2021
06 - 09 April 2021
There is a BLACK FRIDAY discount valid until 27.11.2020

You are also welcome to have a look at our book ORGANIC agility Foundations: Leadership and Organization!

The recording is available online. Feel free to watch it again and share with your network. It is also available on YouTube.

Below you will find the slides, with some further content. Please also feel free to share the slides around.

Webinar -A decision making approach for resilience from Giuseppe De Simone

Connect with us on social media, to stay updated with blogs, webinars, training and other events which support your learning journey :) We hope to see you in the webinar regarding Principle #3 in January.

From here you can check out post and upcoming webinars! The list is updated frequently.

Have a great week everyone!

Growing as a Scrum Master and Beyond

November 17, 2020/by Sofia Svanbäck

Last Wednesday, the 11th of November, we ran our webinar "Growing as a Scrum Master and Beyond"! This topic clearly resonated with many, as we set a new record number of participants. We spotted familiar names who have been following us over the years, and many new names we hope to see again. It makes us happy to see our webinar network growing!

We had the great honour of welcoming two guests on this webinar, Jelena Vucinic and Bob Stomp, who joined our CSP-SM training this fall. Together with agile42 trainers & coaches, Giuseppe De Simone and Niels Verdonk, we hope they provided you with the content you were after.

As the coaches mentioned early on in the webinar, being a Scrum Master in a company is much more than just attending a 2-day training to get certified. Whilst your role is to primarily coach the team, it is also to teach, give advice, be a mentor and role model of the Agile and Scrum values and principles. This is not always an easy task. The knowledge and skills you need as a Scrum Master will grow through education, perhaps some additional coaching and most of all the experience and support of other Scrum Masters in your organization and network.

As Jelena mentioned during the webinar, a typical day for a Scrum Master is not only to facilitate Scrum meetings, however a multitude of other undertakings. You observe the team, prepare for meetings, follow-up action points from meetings, handle impediments, have 1-on-1 meetings with the team members and stakeholders when needed and think about new ways in which you can help your team.

The webinar attendees were particularly interested in the ways you can grow as a Scrum Master, for which there are various paths. You can of course take the training provided on the Scrum Master growth path as visualised in the diagram below. Each training goes deeper into the content of the Scrum Master, and you will gain valuable new skills and learnings to add to your toolbox. The below diagram shows the steps to become a CSP-SM:

We recommended reading The Hitchhikers Guide to Agile Coaching and checking out the post on 5 books we believe every Scrum Master should read.

Other training we offer is the Advanced Team Coachi ng Course which we recommend for those who already have CSM certification. There is also the ICAgi le Team Facilitation Certification to support you as a Scrum Master. Furthermore you could consider coaching from one of our Agile coaches, for example, to grow you or your team of Scrum Masters.

Many of you listening asked us about the whole CSP path, how to grow skills and mindset as well as next steps after CSP-SM certification, and we feel that depends on what skills you wish to deepen. Below you can see examples of next steps, and our Mentoring programme can assist you on these paths. Mentoring is a long term commitment both from your side and the Mentors side, and this is a great opportunity to meet like-minded people, and to grow and learn together.

If you would like to explore next steps on your individual growth path and/or like to enquire about our Mentoring programme after the CSP-SM, please get in touch with us and we would be happy to help.

Our upcoming trainings can be found here - take the next step on your journey with us!

The recording is available online. Feel free to watch it again and share with your network. It is also available on YouTube.

Below you will find the slides, with some further content. Please also feel free to share the slides around.

Growing as a scrum master and beyond from Niels Verdonk

Connect with us on social media, to stay updated with blogs, webinars, training and other events which support your learning journey :)

Have a great weekend, and don't forget to check out post and upcoming webinars!

Achieving Flow in Remote Meetings

November 10, 2020/by Joanne Perold

Remote meetings can suffer from what we refer to as "traffic jam effects." Maybe someone's internet is dropping, and you keep having to repeat something, or maybe the general pace seems that much slower. These kinds of experiences impact our ability to collaborate remotely.

In our webinar, on the 6th of November, we looked at this problem from a few different angles. We began by looking at some high-level information on the trends of remote work, pre and post COVID. We briefly mentioned our 7 principles for remote facilitation and narrowed in on one, Enable Flow, which was the focus of this webinar.

Many things can happen in a remote meeting which contribute to the feeling of “stuckness”. For example; technical challenges can interrupt flow as the group waits while information needs to be repeated. Similarly people speaking at the same time or feeling like they can't speak up can create a sense of getting “stuck”.

If we look outside of meetings to better understand this experience, traffic jams provide a helpful analogy. Sometimes we can see the destination, but progress towards it is painfully slow, and when that happens, it can be super frustrating. It can cause us to feel like getting out of the car and just leaving it there in favour of walking to our destination. Maybe we get frustrated and angry; maybe our chest starts to tighten. It turns out that when we get stuck in remote meetings, our brain might be experiencing some of these same things.

Our brains are wired to make the experience of closing feedback loops rewarding: it feels good to reach resolutions/achieve “aha” moments. However, if something inhibits us from this closure, the opposite becomes true, frustration, disengagement and fatigue often creep in.

This is why it's so important to think about enabling flow in remote meetings. And what happens when we get stuck: we want to avoid conditions which lead to disengagement, fatigue, and frustration. We examined the 4 categories of stuckness, and gave some practical methods which can be used to achieve flow in remote meetings.

Technical

Agree on a back channel before hand
Co-create visual documentation
Troubleshoot e.g (maybe switching off camera works)

Ambiguity

Make agenda and session rules visible
Visible instructions
Visually validate outcomes
Root participants in the present

Comprehension

Allow people quiet time to think
Provide participation via writing
Make meeting artifacts visual
Pause and check understanding

Digital fatigue

Make space for breaks
Use energy queues
Consider async

Here you can find the slides from the presentation.

The recording is available on YouTube. Please feel free to share around with your network:)

In our Remote Facilitation Practitioner training kicking off on the 17th November 2020, we will deep dive into more of the principles for remote design and offer real practices that you can put to use immediately. The training includes practical sessions and feedback to help you improve. We look forward to seeing you there!

*Follow this link to view upcoming & past webinars on our website*

Webinar: Dave Snowden on Digital Transformation

Webinar: What makes a great Product Owner?

agile42 Community Launch

Free membership

Premium membership

Leading Remotely: Webinar

50 Ways to Wreck Collaboration and What to do About it

Validating Change in Small Increments

This allows the organization to:

Focus on Value Creation

Find out what your customers actually need and how to get it to them

A decision making approach for resilience

Growing as a Scrum Master and Beyond

Achieving Flow in Remote Meetings

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