I am a Design Thinking & Applied Improv Facilitator for Enterprise Organizations

My passion is empowering Scrum Teams in context of Agile Software Development with Improv Games and Design Thinking Exercises. I help teams to be harmonious, creative, collaborative, communicative, trusting and playful problem solvers. When work and play entangles, magic happens. When mind relaxes, creativity takes over.

"All creative acts are form of play."
S. Nachmanovitch
WHAT SERVICES DO I OFFER?
Contact me to discuss your goals and needs
  • TEAM BUILDING ACTIVITIES: Custom designed workshops for your team needs.
  • PROBLEM SOLVING WORKSHOPS: Custom made design thinking workshops for the problems you want to solve for a particular Persona in alignment with everyone on your team.
  • MEETING FACILITATION: In context of Agile Planning, Grooming, Retrospective and Daily Stand Up Meetings or other type of meetings.
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WHY MIGHT YOUR TEAM NEED MY HELP?
  • TO IMPROVE RELATIONSHIPS: To create harmonious, playful and collaborative team dynamics within the team and across departments. To align stakeholders with creative problem solving, to help prioritize requirements against timelines.
  • TO IMPROVE PROCESS: To better investigate the depth of each User Story, to improv task estimations, prioritize urgency, identify dependencies and timelines in Sprint Planning and Grooming meetings. To identify areas that need improvement and to be persistent with things that work well based on Retrospective findings. To have an energetic and inspired daily stand ups.
  • TO ACHIEVE GREAT RESULTS: To meet commits with joy and glory. To learn to celebrate mistakes and to recover quickly utilizing lessons learned.

WHAT TO EXPECT
  • Ice-Breakers. Be ready to move
  • Design Thinking Workshop. Be ready to discover, define problems, ideate, prototype and test.
  • Laughter. Be ready for lots of belly and cheek cramps.
  • Props. Be ready to be surprised.
  • Team Members might come to the workshop/meeting feeling overwhelmed and skeptical, but leave as Joyous Empowered Beings ready to rock their tasks! Be ready to have a new hat or two that you share with your new friends at work.
  • Snacks. Be ready to yum yum​

Showcase: Team Building

I started Let's Play Improvcon program as part of a new culture initiative in 2014 at Cisco Systems to teach improv games to Agile Teams. Agile software development was a new approach for the Services organization at the time. Teams needed a new way of keeping focus, while being imaginative, creative, trusting and collaborative. I helped them learning to trust one another, taking risks, learning to listen deeply, and learning to have a yes, and attitude with fun.

Showcase: Problem Solving 

Here is a testimonial video for a design thinking workshop I designed and lead facilitated for 35+ engineers from all around the world. The objective of this workshop was to help align stakeholders on their goal of transforming document-based deliverables to more dynamic, interactive and customizable, customer-relevant online deliverables. As a result of this alignment workshop:
“Our availability has easily increased ten-fold. There are no more outages, no more tickets to deal with, and no more coordinating fixes. As a result, we can now concentrate our resources toward more value-added tasks versus constant troubleshooting.”
- Cisco Systems

Showcase: Agile Sprint Planning

I facilitated a Sprint Planning Empowerment Extravaganza with a group of brilliant engineers in Renaissance. I helped the team with making assumptions for each User Story, identifying specific things that they need/want and dependencies that they need to manage with other teams. I encouraged them to think out loud and talk about their feelings. Feelings? "We talk about feelings at work?" I said, "Oh my yes, indeed! How does this user story make you feel based on the assumptions you made?" Some felt sunny, others partly cloudy, one yelled "Sky is falling!" We all laughed and asked a lot of "WHYs?" to get to the bottom of what was contributing the antigravity for the sky to fall. Turns out, this engineer was depended on someone in another team to finish his part of the task. Some uttered " Why don't you meet with so and so and so and so together, I know they are working on this piece and that piece and that could help you solve your jigsaw puzzle. " Sun came out. Eyes twinkled. Gravity restored. Sky was saved.
  • The big AHA moment one for the group was to share how one feels in front of EVERYBODY and let the team ask them a lot of WHY questions to get the support they need with their "stormy weather." Once people heard "I am feeling Sky is falling" all eyes with caring attention gifted him with ideas that can help solve the problem in the immediate future. Lesson learned: Bring your humanity and vulnerability to your group to get the caring support you need.
  • Second AHA moment was to think out loud about what one needs to get the task done. Turns out, when we articulate the things we need with sound, we can be more SPECIFIC and specificity helps estimate the tasks better. This way also helps dependencies to be articulated and discussed, before dependencies creep in further along the way in the Sprint. Lesson Learned: Think out loud in front of everybody to make better connections to the events that need to happen for you to get your task done with ease and joy.

Showcase: Agile Retrospective

Working with Renaissance's TIL & Trailblazers Teams to help them with building trust, harmonious collaboration and playful problem solving through improvisation and design thinking in their bi-weekly Retrospective meetings.
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Bite size action items team needs to work on to improve their Sprint experience are compiled on Santa's gift wall. Anyone can post their gifts on the wall to help a teammate out or be influenced by a previous "gift" to help unblock their tasks.
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These finger puppets come and play with us time to time in daily Stand-Up meetings :)
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We build a prototype to improve the cross communication challenge that kept coming up at Retrospectives. Solution was rather simple after we identified the core Team needs using design thinking activities and implemented the idea with a Yes, and attitude using our improv skills.