Last week, 30-plus participants in the 23rd Hands-on Agile meetup had a virtual strategy session where they explored Liberating Structures’ Critical Uncertainties microstructure. They identified robust and hedging strategies for Scrum Masters and agile coaches regarding the challenges of remote work and distributed agile teams.
Read on to learn more about wildest dreams, overconfident teams, and Scrum Masters to the rescue.
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To learn how to cope with uncertainty, we chose one of the advanced Liberating Structures microstructures — Critical Uncertainties:
What is made possible? You can help a diverse group quickly test the viability of current strategies and build its capacity to respond quickly to future challenges. This Liberating Structure prepares a group for strategy making. It does not produce a plan to be implemented as designed but rather builds resilience: the capacity to actively shape the system and be prepared to respond to surprise. This means being better able to see different futures unfolding, better prepared to act in a distributed fashion, and more ready to absorb disruptions resiliently. (Source.)
This microstructure is compelling yet challenging simultaneously, particularly with diverse groups that do not share a common background, for example, working for the same organization. On top of this, we all attended a virtual meetup that would only allow for a reduced level of communication compared to face-to-face meetups. Nevertheless, the advantages seemed to be more beneficial than corresponding risks.
Note: Whenever you read ‘Scrum Master’ in the following post, include other roles like the agile coach in that term.
We followed the subsequent steps—directly taken from the skript—to accomplish the task:
The whole exercise with a short debriefing/retrospective took about 2.5 hours, including a break. The number of participants peaked about half an hour into our virtual strategy session. (36 out of 116 who RSVPed.) At the end of the exercise, 22 peers were still onboard.
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The purpose of the meetup was two-fold:
The group managed to deliver a suitable outcome for both of them:
The group identified the following four scenarios for Scrum Masters to deal with remote work and distributed teams:
For more details on the scenarios, please refer to the graphic above.
We identified the following challenges when running Critical Uncertainties in a virtual set-up:
Even though the road to the outcome was sometimes bumpy, the 23rd Hands-on Agile meetup did explore how Liberating Structures’ Critical Uncertainties microstructure successfully. It can be used to identify robust and hedging strategies for Scrum Masters and agile coaches facing challenges working with distributed teams — even in a virtual set-up.
Have you tried Critical Uncertainties in a virtual set-up? If so, what have you observed? Please share it with us in the comments.
At the end of March, we ran a Remote Agile Practices & Tools live virtual class with about 30 participants from all over Europe, the Eastern Seaboard, and Canada. The participants agreed on recording it and make it available to the agile community. We edited the recording slightly; for example, we removed the waiting time during the exercise timeboxes. Otherwise, the video accurately reflects how one way of collaborating with a distributed team using Zoom breakout rooms may work.
Except for three teaching blocks of about 20 minutes in total, the whole Remote Agile Practices & Tools class of 2:45 hours comprised of interactive work:
If you have any questions regarding the class, please let me know via the comments, or contact me in the Hands-on Agile Slack community.
If the video snippet does not play, please watch the video on Youtube: Remote Agile (1) Replay: Practices and Tools for Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, and Product Owners.
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Remote Agile (Part 1): Practices & Tools for Scrum Masters & Agile Coaches.
Remote Agile (Part 4): Anti-Patterns — Pitfalls Successful Distributed Teams Avoid.
Liberating Structures for Scrum (5): Strategy.
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