Whether a team is brand-new or seasoned veterans at working together, explicitly defining and/or refining a team working agreement will help the team to align on how they will work together effectively to meet their common goal. In this fast-paced hands-on session, participants will go through the process of building a team working agreement using LEGO Serious Play (LSP).

Creating a team working agreement helps team members set the stage for effective communication and high performance by making assumptions about ‘what really matters to us’ and ‘how we will work together?’ explicit and negotiable.  Great working agreements address some difficult topics - what values do we share? how do we want to deal with conflict when it comes up? how will we handle problems within the team? - which are often challenging to discuss openly and honestly, especially when a team is first assembled.  

This session will show you how to use LEGO Serious Play to encourage a frank and fearless discussion in order to kickstart these discussions so that a team can quickly create a powerful set of simple guiding principles for working together.  Participants will learn about the importance of team working agreements in creating team cohesion and common understanding of shared values and operational guidelines, and experience hands-on how to use the LEGO Serious Play cycle of build-share-reflect to have a participatory discussion to identify shared values, explore reactions to conflict, and build a set of simple guiding principles.

Using play to build a better beginning through Agile Chartering

Better teams create better outcomes.  A liftoff (as described in the book Liftoff by Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies) at the outset of a new endeavour helps teams set the stage for betterness by cocreating a shared understanding of purpose, establishing alignment and understanding the context of the work they will do together.  While the activities to include in a Lift Off will vary according to team and context, the practice of Agile Chartering - collaboratively developing a lightweight yet effective roadmap for the project and the team - is key to aligning and inspiring people to do better work together.

The purpose of an Agile Chartering workshop is to give all stakeholders of a project a voice and the opportunity to co-create a common understanding of the project dynamics, its purpose and context. It creates co-ownership of the project within the project team and thereby higher commitment to the project goals.

In this workshop, we will explore the objectives of Agile Chartering and foster a playful approach to doing this work. We'll talk about what kinds of games can be used to cocreate Purpose, Alignment and Context with a team, and run at least one game that can be used for each of the elements of an Agile Charter

Generation after generation we humans devise and create what we need in order to evolve as a whole, as an adaptive system. We extend our bodies and consciousness in order to fly, to compute, to communicate, to be faster, to reach further, and so on. Good or bad is not of interest here. This is just how it works. This is how we have created all of our tools and technologies, or "media" as Marshall McLuhan would say. To extend ourselves.

Nevertheless, tools and processes are the fastest layer in the evolution of a human system. If you observe and study them, it is very difficult that you'll understand where the future is headed. In times of concentrated change like the one we're living through, if you focus on tools and processes, you'll be observing the results of a change in people that has happened yesterday. It is, at best, the present of work. It might not be mainstream yet in some aspects, but from a systemic point of view, it is already all here.

If you want to really have some sound insight of what the future of work holds, you have to look into people. Let's see how, and what this shows.