Last week, about 30 members of the Hands-on Agile community in Berlin came together to identify opportunities for personal and professional growth for the coming year, using Liberating Structures’ Ecocycle Planning in the process, to further your Scrum Master career 2020.
Read on and learn in this post what opportunities you have to advance your career as a Scrum Master or agile coach in the next year.
Created by Keith McCandless and Henri Lipmanowicz, Liberating Structures cover a set of easy to learn, yet powerful ways to collaborate as a team—even as a (very) large team by Scrum standards—, overcoming traditional communications approaches like presentations, managed discussions, or another disorganized brainstorming at which the loudest participants tend to prevail.
Liberating Structures are well suited to improve the level of engagement among participants of Scrum events, thus stimulating the kind of outcomes that are necessary to create learning organizations. Liberating Structures also provide an excellent toolbox to handle Product Backlog refinements or improving the Definition of Done of an engineering organization.
Lastly, Liberating Structures are a great tool when large groups come together for retrospectives, self-selection of teams, or—as in our case—to figure out how to advance their careers by crowdsourcing and sharing lessons learned from the Scrum Master or agile coach perspective.
The subtitle of the Ecocycle Planning page summarizes the potential of this microstructure well:
Analyze the Full Portfolio of Activities and Relationships to Identify Obstacles and Opportunities for Progress.
In my experience, Ecocycle Planning has proven to be a powerful tool for Scrum Masters and agile coaches whenever the need arises to analyze the status quo and identify what factors have contributed to the current stage, both from a positive as well as negative perspective. Regarding the Scrum Master career 2020 question, we were particularly interested in what issues contributed to positive professional standing, starting with education and not ending with tools & practices.
As usual, we started with an Impromptu Networking to create a first level of familiarity among the participants.
With regards to the time constrictions, we had about 2 hours available, we then moved directly to the Ecocycle Planning, taking the following steps to create lists of activities, practices, and relationships that helped shape the participants’ professional status today. The original instructions were as follows:
We then decided to split into six groups tasked with introducing the findings for each zone of the Ecocycle—gestation, poverty trap, birth, maturity, rigidity trap, creative destruction—to the rest of the group utilizing Shift & Share. Please note that you may find identical issues in more than one zone. This inconsistency is a result of the widely varying levels of professional experience of the participants as we valued the inclusion of all Hands-on Agile community members over limiting participation to those with a comparable professional background for more stringent results.
I took the liberty to edit some of the suggestions where the author pointed at the right issue; however, he or she formulated the issues in a way that contradicts the respective Ecocycle zone. The results for the Scrum Master career 2020 opportunities are as follows:
We used the following slide deck to guide the effort during the session. You can download it for your purposes:
If the embedded deck is not working, read the slides directly on Slideshare.
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Liberating Structures are developed by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
While we did not discover the magic wand that catapults a Scrum Master or agile coach among the rich and famous of our industry immediately, we did though find robust and proven tactics that—if exercised diligently—will advance your Scrum Master career 2020..
What opportunities for personal growth and career did we miss? Please share it with us in the comments.
Scrum Master Anti-Patterns — 20 Signs Your Scrum Master Needs Help.
Scrum Master Trends Report 2019. (This survey is based on more than 2,000 replies from Scrum Masters and agile coaches from around the globe.)
How to Get Hired as a Scrum Master.
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