Day 10: Empowerment Comes From Vulnerability & Sharing The Challenges With Your Village

I facilitated a Sprint Planning Empowerment Extravaganza with a group of brilliant engineers in Fremont, CA today. 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.

Today's extravaganza was purely experiential in terms of how this would be received by the engineers. I am happy to report that experiment succeeded. Tasking was a breeze. Team ended on Sunny Blue Skies. Teach Healer can sleep soundly tonight knowing that she helped the team to be more harmonious, productive and playful. YAY

Techniques used: I created the Empowered Team Sprint Planning Extravaganza experience, utilizing and combining Empathy Map with Experience Mapping and Service Blueprints with a sprinkle of improv.

Long live DESIGN THINKING AND IMPROV. Once again, it is proven that when work and play tangles, magic happens.