What I learned today — 13 February 2018

Team Bootstrap

Today our whole team spent 6 hours in a bootstrap session. We felt this was necessary because of quite a few players that have changed, including our product owner. During this session we got to know everyone better by each person telling their story of how they got to today, and most of us were very open about personal events in their lives. This facilitated a lot more empathy because we now know a bit more about each one’s life, joys and struggles. Next we each discussed our values in a conversation guided by the facilitator and pitched around the question, “What needs to be in place for you to be engaged at work?” This led to much deeper understanding, and there was a lot of synergy between us. Lastly we did a very creative exercise to create a set of phrases that would serve as our team agreement. Some examples of what we came up with are: “The team is the hero”, “Play the ball, not the player”, “We are not afraid to ask for directions”, and my favourite: “We trust our creativity”.

This was a very good experience, exceeding my expectations. It was well facilitated, and I’d recommend it to any team.