"I love the people; I love my community. But it’s hearing new problems and understanding where they fit in the landscape of how people are trying to advance agility in their company. For me, that’s always the best part of the summit!" - Eric Willeke

The Berlin SAFe Summit brought most of the Shaping Agility community together in one place for the first time since we formed. We seized the opportunity to record a face-to-face podcast, which was, more truthfully, the beer club than the coffee club.

Eric started the conversation by asking Ali, Saahil, and Mark what we were most looking forward to about the Summit. Somehow, that detoured into the backstory of how Shaping Agility began and the journey we’d been on together for the last year.

A joke about how we’d emerged from ‘early access’ kicked us down the gaming path. We found ourselves discussing vintage pinball machines and using mame emulators to record ancient video games so young students would understand our metaphors.

It was truly a joy to sit around a table in an Airbnb with rugs draped on the walls to reduce the echo and podcast-in-person! Cast:

Eric Willeke

Mark Richards

Saahil Panikar

Ali Hajou

“What’s the moment when you can help people understand the cause of some pain they’re in and offer them something that’s going to help with the pain?” - Mark Richards

Rebecca’s back from Disneyworld! Mark’s discussion with two of his children about BDD triggers a fun exploration of our experiences with introducing it. We detour through Mark observing some people trying out Eric’s new PI Objective toolkit before life gets a little contentious.

Somehow, a chat about introducing tools and concepts ‘when people need them’ rather than ‘because you should’ triggers an exploration of motivation. Rebecca never strays too far from joy, Mark gets accused of being anti-joy, and Eric believes you don’t have to find joy in the workplace to be a great employee!

Cast:

Eric Willeke

Rebecca Davis

Mark Richards

Book References:

• The Cucumber Book – Mat Wynne, Aslak Hellesoy, Steve Tooke
• Specification by Example – Gojko Adzic

"First you sit in the moment, then you dance in the moment, if a little bit later." - Eric Willeke

Rebecca's in Disneyworld this week, so Eric and Mark are unsupervised again! We've both just finished our second draft of our talks for the Berlin SAFe Summit, so naturally, we start by sharing a little of that process. Talking about managing the timebox somehow leads to dancing in the moment, tap dancing, and journeying through the agenda mosh pit while facilitating.

With that, we're off – since we’re both passionate facilitators heavily influenced by Jean Tabaka! We chat a bit about the challenge of being a participant while poor facilitation happens. Then Eric takes us on a more positive spin as we share some moments where we've seen incredibly powerful facilitation from others.

We can't escape our Summit talk preparation, though. It's been an interesting process. Firstly, we co-created the first six episodes of our Lean Portfolio Management podcast between draft one and draft two, and it involved deep dives into some of the topics we're covering. Secondly, we've turned a happy accident into a deliberate approach by recognizing the obvious connections between our talks and those of Rebecca Davis and Harry Koehnemann. We riff on this for a bit before we head down the path of how AI and visual skills have changed our approach and some techniques we've figured out for telling real stories without breaking confidentiality.

Cast:

Eric Willeke

Mark Richards Show Notes

Book References:

Resonate - Duarte