This morning I facilitated a coaching workshop at XP2011 called, “What’s in your coaching backpack?” It was a four hour workshop, so lots of time to go into detail. I designed this workshop to focus more on depth than breadth for the four hours. After some introductions to the purpose and format of the workshop, I got everyone to move into groups and spend some time introducing themselves to each other. In these groups, we spent some time focusing on brainstorming various coaching tools, models and techniques and we came up with a huge variety. I’ll get around to writing each one of these up (there’s quite a lot of detail) so look out for them in future blog posts. Our coaching backpacks are now much fuller than what they were before.

After a break, we then reconvened and I asked people to focus on some case studies of some coaching situations where, in their groups, using the coaching tools to articulate how they’d approach each situation. There were some really great conversations and discussions, where I hope people got a better feeling trying to see how others might apply different techniques to the situation. Having been grounded in real world experience, people also wanted to know what did happen (even though there aren’t any correct answers to case studies).

I also had a quite mini retrospective, asking the questions, “What you enjoyed about the session?” and “Suggestions for improvement?” I had some great feedback and wanted to put it on line:

  • Like – Practices and real examples, discussion and division to groups, Scrum board or presentation agenda
  • Great format, loved the taskboard, posting on wall “backpacks”, case studies
  • Good group size, great group
  • Really well facilitated
  • Interesting content generated by the open conversations
  • Sitting in the sun was AWESOME!
  • Great opportunity to discuss different approaches to coaching and agile
  • Like the idea of showing progress of the workshop at the scrum board using tasks
  • Case studies/real life examples always interesting
  • Good, clear setup with backlog
  • This was the session I got more out for my work/myself than any other session 🙂
  • The workshop format
  • Working in small teams, all adding different perspectives
  • Sun
  • Nice with practices and your communications
  • Your excellent preparation and light-weight facilitation
  • Small groups
  • Interesting case studies
  • Exchange of ideas
  • Case study
  • Very well organised and structured
  • Good atmosphere, positive energy
  • The case study discussions
  • Living whiteboard agenda
  • Maybe switching up the teams between case studies might reduce effect of powerful personalities
  • Rotate members in tables to get more ideas?
  • Suggest you split groups with the knowledge spread more evenly – you asked experience and could have used that info
  • Same team all he time. Maybe we could have shuffled people in the middle of the session
  • Changing teams after a while (e.g. at lunchtime if in for whole day)
  • I could even have a whole day of doing this without being bored
  • More practises and making the descriptions of “methods” out from this
  • Produce example tool(s)
  • Put all coaches tool/methods together and have a global short discussion
  • Common discussion about the good practices
  • Would have liked to hear/learn more about coaching techniques
  • Would have been nice with an introduction to the methods/worksheet part to get the flowing associations
  • A conclusions panel to write the achieved results