Uncover The Secrets Of Moving Meetings From Pointless To Great

get-rid-of-useless-meetingsThere comes a point in almost every meeting where the presenter is on autopilot, that guy on your left got a new record in ‘Candy Crush’, others are having daydreaming faces and then there is always this super hero multi-tasking participant that answers emails and chats permanently. We all know these kind of meetings that are useless and a waste of time. This blog post provides you 10 easy steps to create much better meetings and a great tool to reduce the number of pointless gatherings.  Continue Reading →

5 surprisingly easy methods to fight your inner Procrastinator

Fight against Procrastination

Do you know this? You think about a task you actually don’t like to do. You shift your focus of attention to something more enjoyable. Temporarily this causes you to feel better but unfortunately the long term effects of this habitual avoidance can be very painful: work piles up, your brain gets stressed and you fall into last minute work. In this article I want to give you some actionable tips and tools on how to fight procrastination and how you can master your daily habits! Continue Reading →

3 Mandatory Characters You Need For Highly Innovative And Creative Teams

3-characters-innovation-creativity

Hey everybody. I want to write my blog posts as authentic as possible. Therefore every single article is based on real-life experiences from my daily work as a Coach. This time I want to tell you something about bad team setups. In my time as a Coach I often faced the situation to join a team whose members were mixed up randomly by the company. The resulted constellation can be super frustrating because team members weren’t selected according to their skills and context. In this blog post I will explain you the hard consequences of building teams without a plan. Read about the 3 main characters that are absolutely mandatory for a highly innovative and creative team. No Theory! No Fluff! Just Real Life Facts! Continue Reading →

3 Incredibly Useful Coaching Tools You Wish You Knew Earlier

Easy Coaching Tools

Me @ Training From The Back Of The Room

Know what’s harder than running great Coaching Sessions?

Making them unforgettable! 

That’s exactly what’s needed if you’re serious about Quality Coaching and Teaching! In this blog post I want to answer a very simple question:

What quick and applicable Secrets can help you instantly of moving your next Training from average to unforgettable?

Therefore I asked some Scrum Masters and Coaches in my network to share the coolest and fastest ways to increase the quality of any kind of instruction. I’ve assembled a very small list of the best ideas that you can apply in different occassions like Retrospectives, Workshops or Plannings. Below you’ll find 3 refreshingly original ways that help you run an unforgettable Coaching Session. Let’s jump in! Continue Reading →

How To Create The ‘Tree Of Teams’ That Influenced The Culture Of An Entire Bank

agile branches

One of the most important challenges on agile transformations is influencing the current culture. Culture is more than making ceremonies, creating new roles and putting Kanban Boards full with Post-It’s. Although it’s absolutely true that visible artifacts show cultural expression, values and principles, however I believe that talking and showing values on a more active way is a much healthier way to initiate a change.

The following guest blog post by my friend Johnny will show you how a small group of Scrum Masters came up with an awesome idea to radiate values and principles on an artful way. The following tutorial will show how they implemented the Tree of Teams in a one of the biggest banks in South America. Read how you can do it too!

Continue Reading →

How To Improve Teamwork In One Easy Lesson

happy team members are important

Organizations have to take care on their teams because they can be crucial for the company´s success. Recently one of our distributed teams faced some ugly problems regarding collaboration and communication. I noticed that some team members were quite unhappy. I came up with the idea to bring all of them together to one physical location. I started to prepare a workshop and invited 20 persons. I want to share with you this applicable step by step guide that shows how we improved the teamwork in one easy lesson. Continue Reading →

Top 15 Books About Agile & Coaching

Best Agile Coaching Books

Several month ago I started to collect a list of the Top Agile Coaching Books from various social channels like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. I received so much input from so many people so I decided to divide the book list  into five different categories: Top agile books for Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Agile Developers, Leadership & Agile Coaching. In this article I want to show you the Top 15 books about Agile & Coaching recommend by the Community. Continue Reading →

My interview at the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Scrum-Master-Toolbox-Podcast-Interview

image source: http://fancycrave.com/post/140386672838/download-by-lukasz-popardowski

A few time a ago a mentor and friend of mine Vasco Duarte asked me for an interview on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast. I wanted to know more about his project. He told me that his idea was to create a community of knowledge that ensures a long-term sustainability of cutting knowledge that helps other Scrum Masters to succeed in their daily work. I loved the idea. And I loved it more to be part of that community. Listen to my interviews about “bad apples”, system thinking, business impacts and how coffee breaks can help to make a difference :-) Continue Reading →