Overview of Systemic Agility Team Facilitation
A great deal of learning and experimenting – challenging and lots of fun.
Luis Carvalho
Course Overview
The Team Agility Facilitation workshop will help you develop the attitudes and learn the skills of an effective team facilitator. You will learn and practice techniques and behaviours from the world of professional facilitation and creative problem solving, in the context of meetings such as Planning Meetings, Retrospectives, Creative Thinking and Design Thinking workshops. Participants will leave the course feeling empowered with skills, models and styles of facilitating. Whether facilitating virtually or in-person, this course will equip you with the skills and confidence to unite, focus and mobilise teams.
Topics Covered
The Agile Team Facilitator Role
Team Agility Facilitators foster collaboration amongst team members. Here we introduce you to the attitudes and behaviours that make a good (even great) facilitator. You will have the chance to reflect on your own personality characteristics and when certain characteristics are useful (or not).
Development Path for Agile Coaching
Additional skills are required as one advances along the Agile Coaching development path. These include not only facilitation skills but also professional coaching, mentoring, teaching, and consulting skills.
Designing and Setting Up Meetings
A lot of the work around facilitation is thinking work in advance of a meeting or workshop. In this part of the course you will encounter tools and techniques for use before, during, and after meetings and workshops.
Facilitating a Meeting
As this training is particularly experiential, you will have the opportunity to facilitate parts of meetings and to receive feedback from peers, using the facilitation tools and skills learned.
Facilitating Collaboration
Maintaining awareness of our own style of working, and of other styles, allows us to facilitate more meaningful and inclusive team dialogues. Here you will learn about your own working styles, and consider what changes you might want to make to your working style profile.
Facilitating Agile Practices
In this part of the course you will be presented with approaches to facilitating practices such as standup meetings, planning meetings, retrospectives, and design thinking workshops. You will experience witnessing and facilitating these activities.
Skillful Facilitation Techniques
This part of the course offers approaches for working with different stages of team maturity and team development, and working with team dysfunctions.
Virtual Facilitation Techniques
Regardless of whether this course is attended in-person or virtually, attention is paid to both in-person and virtual facilitation techniques with a particular focus on one or the other depending on the delivery mode of the particular course you are attending. All tools taught and practiced are equally applicable to both delivery modes.
Tools and Practices You’ll Explore
- Host Leadership – why as facilitators we need to move from serving to hosting
- The Pentagons of Agile Coaching – your strengths, stances and limitations as a facilitator
- The 12P Facilitator Canvas – a tool for (co-)facilitating meetings like a pro, taking every detail into consideration
- The Double Diamond Meeting – a meeting and workshop process from end to end that can be used for almost any creative process or retrospective
- Creative & Design Thinking – tools for getting those creative juices flowing
- The 8 Dimensions of Leadership / StrongSuits – models for understanding your leadership and communication styles and those of your team members, and for developing agility in your facilitation style
- And several more…
Certification
Those who participate in the full course will be issued with the Team Agility Facilitation certificate issued by Systemic Agility and the Agile Team Facilitator (ICP-ATF) certificate issued by ICAgile.
Overview of Systemic Agility Team Coaching
Thank you for running an awesome Agile Coach course, which attracted some very talented Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches and Agile practitioners from around the world.
Conrad Swinfield-Wells
Course Overview
The Team Agility Coach course is a highly interactive, experiential journey that will help you develop the attitudes and learn the skills of an effective Team Agility Coach. You will learn and practise coaching, mentoring, and teaching skills in the context of Agile ways of working. You will leave the course feeling empowered with skills, models, and styles of working with individuals and teams in order to help them continuously improve.
Topics Covered
The Agile Coaching Context
Agile Coaches draw on a variety of skills and practices. In this part of the course we will put Agile coaching into context and attempt to answer the question: What is Agile coaching and what shifts might we need to adopt?
Professional Coaching Skills & The Coaching Conversation
A coach assumes that team members have an individual and a collective wisdom, and that the task of the coach is to elicit the answers within. The main skills taught are listening actively, asking effective questions and following a coaching process. As this training is particularly experiential, you can expect to learn about your strengths and your own areas for development.
Coaching Alliances and Contracts
Setting the stage for a coaching relationship involves clear contracting and designing of alliances. Here we expand on the typical coaching triangle (coach, team, and organisation) and present a wider stakeholder view. You will learn how to design a coaching alliance and how to contract with all parties.
Key Mentoring Skills & Mentoring Agile Role Transitions
At times an Agile coach needs to impart her Agile expertise and to guide the team by making suggestions, giving feedback, giving advice, instilling practices, and guiding transitions to Agile roles. Along with such changes come fears and “resistances” and so a framework for working with change is presented. Knowing when to coach and when to mentor is a key skill of an Agile coach.
Key Teaching Skills & Teaching Agile
Teaching the basics of Agile is an activity the Agile Coach performs again and again and is conducted both in and out of the classroom. There are different learning styles, and you will practise including these in your teaching methods.
Foundational and Systemic Team Coaching
In this part of the training we focus on the dynamics at play within groups and teams, and in building our observational skills as coaches. This involves looking at the system of all humans involved and the connections between them. It also involves being able to articulate these observations in service of the team.
Team Development & Coaching the Journey Toward High Performance
How can we as Agile coaches help a team to develop as a team, along with developing trust and a healthy team culture? Along with a series of models, much of the learning here will come through reflecting on our lived experience in this and other groups and teams.
Handling Conflict and Dysfunction
In this part of the training we look at our individual attitudes toward conflict and dysfunction, building self awareness in the team, and strategies for surfacing and working with conflict.
Handling Organisational Impediments
Often the forces that impede the team come from other parts of the organisation. In this part of the training we will look at ways that the Agile coach can help the team to surface such impediments and to make decisions on how to work with them.
Tools and Practices You’ll Explore
- The House and Pentagons of Agile Coaching – the why, who and how of Agile Coaching
- The Drama Triangle – how to break out of it and instead move yourself and your team to the Winner’s Triangle
- The TGROW model – following a coaching process that works
- The Question Bank – a powerful game for asking powerful questions
- Action Learning Sets – a team and group coaching model that’s earned its reputation
- Systemic Coaching and Constellations – seeing the invisible in groups and teams
- Agile Culture Mapping – seeing and inquiring into the kinds of cultures we aspire towards
- PLUS tools for building trust, fostering collaboration, dealing with conflict
- And several more…
Certification
Those who participate in the full course will be issued with the Team Agility Coaching certificate issued by Systemic Agility and the ICP-ACC certificate issued by ICAgile.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is certification included in the costs?
Yes. This Deep Dive is quadruple certified. All participants who attend and participate in a full course will be issued with the ICAgile certifications ICP-ACC (Agile Coaching) and ICP-ATF (Agile Team Facilitation). In addition, participants will receive the Systemic Agility Team Facilitation and Systemic Agility Team Coaching certifications.
Is this just two back-to-back courses? Can I attend one course and not the other?
No. We’ve interwoven the two courses into one transformative deep dive journey into the best of Systemic Agility Team Coaching and Facilitation to create one week-long immersive experience.
About the Facilitator
Ryan Behrman
Ryan is an enterprise and team coach, consultant and change facilitator. Over the past decade he has trained hundreds of managers, coaches and facilitators in agile approaches to management, leadership, coaching and facilitation. He is the co-designer of highly acclaimed industry-certified courses in agile coaching, agile facilitation, enterprise agile coaching, and lean change management.
Ryan is a highly experienced agile team coach and enterprise agile coach and has a proven track record of bringing teams and managers together to communicate, collaborate and innovate in large scale programmes and multi-stakeholder environments in almost every industry spanning retail, supply chain, publishing, government, renewable energy, travel, cloud software, education, investment banking, wealth management, risk management, fintech, telco, energy, and data analytics.
Prior to coaching and facilitation Ryan spent a decade in the city of London as an e-commerce software developer and senior project manager in multi-national consulting firms.
He holds an electrical engineering degree from the University of Cape Town, an MBA from Warwick Business School and over a dozen certifications including being a trained Professional Coach (ICF), Systemic Constellator (organisational and family), Lego Serious Play facilitator, StrongSuits trainer and Action Learning facilitator.