11/3/16

Richard Lawrence

Talk: Growing Your Facilitation Skills

Whether you’re a ScrumMaster, Product Owner, leader, trainer, or coach, facilitation is a key part of your job. But few people have intentionally developed this skill. (Which is why so many backlog grooming sessions and sprint retrospectives are so painful.)

Do your meetings suffer from problems like these?

• Low energy
• Uneven participation (someone dominates the conversation, others check out)
• Rabbit trails
• No meaningful decisions or actions

Imagine…

• going into any meeting with the confidence that it will produce a valuable outcome
• having your team members and peers respect you as someone who can help a group collaborate more effectively
• everyone in your meetings contributing in a useful way
• leading focused, productive discussions that end on time without feeling rushed

You can spend a lifetime growing your facilitation skills. But as with so many things in life, the 80/20 rule applies. The essential skills and tools you need to avoid the most common issues can be learned in a remarkably short time.

In this session, you’ll learn and practice these essential skills and tools so you can facilitate more confidently and more effectively.

Come with a specific meeting in mind. What problems do you have facilitating it (or other meetings like it) today? How do you wish it looked different? Why does it matter for you, your team, your organization, and/or your customers?

Richard Lawrence is co-owner of Agile For All. He trains and coaches teams and organizations to become happier and more productive. He draws on a diverse background in software development, engineering, anthropology, and political science. Richard is a Scrum Alliance Certified Enterprise Coach and Certified Scrum Trainer, as well as a certified trainer of the accelerated learning method, Training from the Back of the Room. His book Behavior-Driven Development with Cucumber is due out from Addison-Wesley later this year.