Be the Change You Want to See!

Summary of the session "Be the Change U 1 2 C" on Agile Coach Camp Germany 2012 (#accde12)

Many people are talking about changing organisations, teams, managers, and many more to become more Agile. Inspired by an article on HBR, I proposed the session "Be the Change You Want to See" on Agile Coach Camp Germany 2012. Content of the session was the question: "Which concrete things can I do tomorrow, to be a good role model for the change I want to enable? How can I be the change I want to see?".

I would like to share the results of this session on this blog, since I feel that there are some very good points in the results. You are free to pick one or two items and to start changing yourself, before changing others:

• Play Failure Bow
• Make your Impediment Backlog public
• Prepare your meetings
• Make your decisions and their reasons transparent
• Communicate important decisions face-to-face
• Let others speak (and accept their opinions)
• Make transparent who may decide what and to what degree
• Make transparent what your interests and goals in any discussion are
• Reflect on yourself
• Read business cards as you recieve them as a sign of respect
• Give people time to react on your feedback - do not walk right away immediately after giving feedback
• If you do not give positive feedback very often: Search for somebody and tell him, that you want to do this in the future
• Use and distribute "Thank You" Cards (e.g. the ones distributed by Martin Heider at the Coach Camp)
• Make your own work transparent (e.g. have a public Backlog)
• Make your own daily retrospective by writing up three things you were grateful for today every evening
• Play appreciation games, e.g. "Positive Paranoia" by Ben Furman
• Do what you say - be reliable
• Give up control
• Play a role play "change of perspective" to establish trust
• Offer your help
• Make your failures public
• Do not work longer than you expect your collegues to work

Not all of this items are very concrete, so if you have ideas to make them more concrete or if you have any other ideas - feel free to leave them in the comments section!

To me it was a great session and a nice finish four the Agile Coach Camp. I want to thank all participants for bringing so many great ideas to the session and sharing openly! You all made my day!

Session result