Lean, Scrum, Design Thinking + Organizational Skills

Agile Leader’s Toolkit

A 1 Day Workshop

Lean Scrum Design Thinking

Workshop Objective

As a leader, you’ve thrown yourself into the deep end and learned to swim. That’s why you are where you are today, and it tells your strength and talent. However, survival swimming is different from performance swimming. It’s time to check, update and upgrade the essential tools and skills for your leadership. Specifically, Agile skills.

This one day workshop will be lead by agile-od.com Chief Coach, Takeshi Yoshida. As master practitioner of Lean, Scrum and Design Thinking, Takeshi will share the essence of these Agile approaches in a clean, concise and complete way, so that participants will be able to map their own experiences in understanding when and where these approaches will be useful for their leadership, and use as a guiding point for further leadership learning.

Takeshi will also spend time on practicing essential “soft skills” for organizational communication. We now very well understand that organization culture is key to team performance. Creating an emotionally safe workplace where team members can work in an Agile, self-organized way, is an important function for leaders. Takeshi will introduce useful mental concepts and conduct exercises that will help develop such culture in the workplace.

Workshop Contents

Lean

  • Clarifying Lean, Lean Manufacturing, Lean Startup
  • The spirit of Kaizen (continuous improvement), Gemba (“get out of the building”), and Muri, Muda, Mura (reduction of waste)
  • Finding product market fit with Built-Measure-Learn
  • Learning when to pivot
  • How to scale (“crossing the chasm”)

Scrum

  • What is Scrum? Why Scrum? When Scrum?
  • What’s inside Scrum: Scrum backlog, Sprint planning, planning poker, Scrum board, daily standup, Sprint review, Sprint retrospective
  • The role of the Scrum Master and Product Owner
  • Is Scrum only for software development?

Design Thinking

  • Why Design Thinking (DT) is “uncomfortably” powerful
  • The expanding and contracting sequence of “empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test” DT stages
  • How might we…?
  • Other tools we can borrow from Design Sprints, User Story Mapping, etc.
  • Try a hybrid approach of DT + Scrum

Organizational Skills

  • How organization cultures are formed
  • Vertical vs Flat organization structures, Theory X&Y, E&O, Type 1&2, A&B: the never ending saga between hard and soft management styles
  • Learning organizations: managers as coaches, leaders as facilitators
  • Workplace emotional safety and how to defuse and detoxify crisis situations in the office

Reference reading

Lean, Lean Manufacturing, Lean Startup, Clarified | Lifecycle
A Pretty Good Summary of Lean, Agile, Scrum | Lifecycle
Try Design Thinking + Scrum | agile-od.com | Lifecycle

Workshop Structure

Foundational Knowledge ⇌ Exercise ⇌ Dialogical Learning

The workshop will be held for a full day starting in the morning and concluding in the evening, with coffee, lunch and afternoon tea breaks at regular intervals. The setting will be in a flat floor classroom with movable desks and chairs to clear space for the exercises. Workshop size will be capped at 21 participants; there will be Scrum team exercises of maximum 3 teams of 7 participants each.

Chief Coach Takeshi will oscillate between foundational knowledge teaching, exercises and facilitated dialogue for participative learning.

For foundational knowledge (theory) of the workshop topics, Takeshi will teach in a way that is clear, concise and memorable, so that the learning is both immediate and lasting.

The exercises will be conducted in a “coach the coaches” fashion; the objective is to allow participants to (a) experience the exercises, (b) understand the “whys” of the exercise, and (c) be able to take back the exercises for trying with their own teams.

And lastly, throughout the day Takeshi will facilitate active dialogue among participants to retrospect and share their own experiences and findings on each workshop content. Dialogical learning stimulates discovery and multi-dimensional thinking from others and own thoughts shared.

Upon completion of the day, participants will receive an Agile Leadership Workshop certificate of participation.

Inquiry

► Contact Us

This course is available as a corporate training course, and a public open course. For workshop schedules and availability, contact us from here or send us an email to engage@agile-od.com.

About Takeshi

Takeshi Yoshida

Chief Coach, agile-od.com | Founder, Lifecycle (operating company of agile-od.com)

Takeshi is a veteran banker and seasoned startup entrepreneur turned Organization Development professional with 25 years of industry experience. Takeshi specializes in Lean & Agile and is an ardent advocate of Learning Organizations. You can read Takeshi’s teachings on https://agile-od.com/insight and view his full profile at https://linkedin.com/in/takeshiyoshida.

About Lifecycle

Lifecycle is a Singapore based learning & development and consulting company founded in 2011. agile-od.com is our portal for Lean & Agile Organization Development. Our objective is to help organizations become more creative and resilient by developing a work environment that harnesses the incredible learning power of people.

Our Approach

Human-Centered & Dialogical

In its simplest form, organizations are made of relationships and conversations. And collective learning is achieved through shared understanding.

Conversations build relationships, and shared understandings are the building blocks of organizations. We help our clients with organization building, one conversation at a time.

After two and a half millenniums, the Socratic Method still holds.

Non-Prescriptive & Multi-Disciplinary

If the only tool that you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Clearly, we shouldn’t try fixing everything with a limited set of tools just because we are familiar with them. Likewise for example, going Agile does not mean you have to start running Scrum Sprints.

We value choice and experimentation. We help our clients gain a broad scope of the many tools and concepts available with Lean & Agile and beyond, and we assist in selecting and experimenting the appropriate approach for each unique situation and environment.

Systems Thinking

A piecemeal approach to Organization Development will render it ineffective. For example, Organizational training should not be considered in isolation from organization design, process management and strategy etc.

Organizations are living, breathing, complex systems; input (intervention) into one part of the system may have a leveraged or regressing impact to another part (reinforcing and balancing feedback loops).

We help our clients develop a holistic systems perspective to their organizations and become cognizant of organizational dynamics; a key organizational risk management skill.

Mental Models

We make heavy use of mental models in teaching the various concepts that go into Lean & Agile. Many of these thinkings come from disciplines beyond Lean & Agile.

Mental models are extremely helpful because they allow compartmentalization of knowledge and provide the opportunity to map one’s own and “vicarious” experiences, making them realistic learning and pragmatic tools that become mentally immediately available when the situation arises.