At EdventureLabs, we were trying to teach kids age (5-7,) to represent numbers on the Abacus. First we created a small animation video with a little story line. We took help of a professional animation expert. However, we quickly realized that kids have very little attention span and if they are not able to interact with what they are seeing on the screen, they quickly (in less then 30 secs) zone-out. Also animation was expensive and had a huge turn-around time even if we wanted to make a small change. Clearly a bad strategy.

Inspired by lot of mobile games, we came up with a hypothesis that if we created inline instructions and used micro-simulations, then the kids would have a better retention power and hence be able to learn much better. We wanted to quickly test this hypothesis.

However we had not yet built an app, so building an app and creating a simulation would take us a few days. But we wanted to quickly test the simulation hypothesis to see its effectiveness. So we took a short-cut.

We quickly (in less than 10 mins) found a bunch of images on the net, created a presentation and added a bunch of transition to create an animation effect. Then we exported this presentation out as a movie.

Now the kids were able to watch this 10 second movie, like they would see a simulation/inline instruction in our app. Once the simulation showed how to represent a number, we would ask the kid to move the right beads on the abacus. Of course the beads would not move, but we would be able to test whether the kids tried to move the right beads and hence assert if they remembered how to represent number. If they could, we would ask them to represent other numbers which were not shown in the simulation to see if they can extrapolate what they just learned and apply the logic for other numbers. Most kids could do simple numbers, but were not able to do all the numbers. Another good learning from this experiment.

Anyway, here is the very first video we created to test our simulation hypothesis.

How do you measure or know the effectiveness of a Scrum Master?

IMHO on a given team, in less than 6 months, an effective Scrum Master will:

• make themselves redundant
• make process second-nature for the team

That would be the true test for their effectiveness.

In the mean time, I would look for:

• Has the SM been able to win the team’s trust and build credibility with the team? Does the team see the SM as an integral part of the team?
• Apart from effectively facilitating (not enforcing) the Scrum ceremonies, is the SM helping the team understand the rationale behind those ceremonies?
• Is the SM creating a culture of safe-fail experimentation where the team can experiment, learn and grow beyond the standard Scrum ceremonies? If the team is not evolving their practices and work culture, is the SM really doing their job?
• Does the SM encourage System’s Thinking and uses techniques like Value Stream Maps, Five Whys, A3, etc. to identify & highlighting bottlenecks in the team?
• Has the SM been successful at creating Self-Organized Empowered Team? Or is the team waiting for directions from the SM?
• Is the SM able to emerge as a leaders and be the voice of the team, shielding the team from external interferences, yet creating a healthy collaborative culture?
• Is the SM able to motivate the team and steer them towards excellence?
• Is the SM abel to put a framework in place for the team to record and surface important and relevant data about the team’s performance? Using techniques like information radiators to build informative workspaces. Basically enabling the team to get food for improvement.
• Is the SM proactive (instead of reactive) about resolving issues?
• Is the SM approachable? Believes in servant-leadership?
• Does your SM have first-hand experience working in Scrum teams? Extremely knowledgeable about processes?
• Is the SM up-to-date with the latest trends in the industry? Keen learner and open-minded?

To be successful in an agile environment, IMHO team members need to learn the following skills:

• Embracing uncertainty/change and finding effective ways to deal with it.
• Tight collaboration and communication with everyone involved.
• Collective Ownership, Drive and Discipline to getting things done.
• Eliminating Wasting: Mercilessly looking for waste and trying to eradicate it.
• Fail-fast: Breaking a large problem down into small safe-fail experiments and then willing to try & learn quickly.
• Systems thinking: Understanding how things influence one another within a whole system and avoiding local optimizations.
• Critical thinking: Reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do. In other words; thinking about thinking.
• Open to experimenting with radical ideas

Beyond dogma, beyond ceremony, beyond logical & rational bull-shit, detaching self from cutting edge agile practices to embrace, scale & sustain essential agility.

From Fail Safe experimentation to lots of Safe Fail experimentation.

From Objectivity to Subjectivity to Relativity to Uncertainty.

From Structure to Chaos.

From Illusions to Idealism to Realism.

Beginner’s Mind, here I come….

What do we, as agile Coaches, value? What is our value system?

I value:

• Respect and Trust
• Transparency and Open communication
  • This works both ways. As a coach you want to show them that its OK not to know something. You certainly don’t know everything. But you are willing to learn.
• Safe-fail experiments
• Being hands-on and in the groove 
  • Second-hand information and knowledge can only take you so far
• Down-to-earth, humble attitude
  • Being one amongst them.
• Joy of improving things one baby-step at a time
• Motivation and self driven
  • Lead by Example
• Continuous learning and putting ourselves out of our comfort zone
  • I care, I’m here to help make things better and learn in the process. I’m not here only for the money.
• And so on…

As a coach, my goal is to help people evolve their thinking to be more “agile/adaptive”. Building great software is only a part of it. Agile/Lean thinking applies and shows in lots of ways even outside software. And in lots of cases I’ve seen that when people start applying these values in other parts of their daily lives, they get a much broader and deeper understanding of this thinking process.

Few years ago, when I was a consultant at ThoughtWorks, people used to ask me, what was my job like. I would respond saying, “My job is to set up small ‘safe-fail‘ experiments for my team.” Learning from one’s mistake in a controlled, safe environment is the best form of learning according to me till date. It has a much long lasting impact. Almost always, this really helped me evolve my understanding of how agility can manifest itself.

When it comes to Coaching, there are different styles. What style you can use depends on:

• Your strengths and weaknesses. By your personality. 
• The team & individuals you are coaching.
• Whether you are going in as a coach or they (the team) is coming to you for coaching.
• The short-term and long-term needs of the team
• And so on….

Over and above all, to be effective at coaching, one needs to win the trust of the team. Trust is very important. If the team does not feel safe in your presence, then you can’t be effective at coaching. I strongly emphasize on building trust and gaining respect quickly. This in-fact would be my first goal as a coach.