Learn Design Thinking + Scrum
With Lego4Scrum & Liberating Structures
A 1 Day Workshop
Why Scrum + Design Thinking?
Design Thinking and Scrum are complementary Agile approaches, the former strong in Ideation, the latter in iterative building. Why not combine both?
Relentless Pursuit of Product Market fit
“Is this really what we should be building?” – This simple product market fit question often gets pushed aside while everybody is absorbed in the frantic pace of Scrum Sprints.
Scrum is for product development, not for productivity management. What (outcome), is more important than how much (output) and how fast (velocity). For that matter, we have the Sprint Review and Retrospective to keep our product development priorities straight. However, sometimes when we are so entrenched in the motions, taking a step back to inspect the “what,” “for who” and “why” with a fresh mind, can be a challenge.
This is where Design Thinking can help. Design Thinking is a powerful cognitive framework that helps teams learn and understand the customer and problem at deeper levels, and ideate potentially better solutions.
Shared Agile Values
There’s a concept called ScrumAnd in the Scrum practitioner community. ScrumAnd is “Yes, we currently use Scrum, AND [strategy to evolve].” A multidisciplinary approach to Agile is harmonious with ScrumAnd.
Design Thinking shares the same Agile values with Scrum; understanding the user is sacred, the spirit of hypothesization and experimentation is there, and the build-inspect-adapt flow is same. The two approaches are uniquely congruent and complimentary with each other.
The Drive of Scrum
For Design Thinking professionals, Scrum’s discipline of iterative building is refreshing. Scrum is no longer just for software development; the framework can be applied to a wide variety of complex challenges. The drive of Scrum is exhilarating, particularly as Scrum is a practice of evidence based management, where data and metrics showing value creation is used for stakeholder communication and organizational alignment.
Workshop Structure
This workshop is a practiced version of Lifecycle Chief Coach Takeshi Yoshida’s LinkedIn Pulse viral article “Try Design Thinking + Scrum: A Powerful Hybrid Agile Approach.”
Coach Takeshi’s overarching approach is learning by doing (experiential learning). In designing the workshop to be an impactful learning experience with clear takeaways, Coach Takeshi integrates two unique concepts into the workshop structure.
Lego4Scrum
The whole day will be structured around a “Lego4Scrum” product development simulation.
Coach Takeshi and co-coaches will be giving participants a complex product challenge where they will be asked to build a solution with Lego. This is a complex challenge because multiple Scrum teams will be asked to cooperate with each other in building a combined single product solution (a Scaled Scrum challenge).
Self-organization will be a key encouragement from the onset, and participants will be asked to form Scrum Teams of each 3~9 members by finding people of complimentary skill sets.
Lego4Scrum, courtesy of https://www.lego4scrum.com, Alexey Krivitsky
The Scrum Teams will go through multiple Sprints, each time repeating a build-inspect-adapt cycle. At earlier stages of the exercise, the coaches will help the teams learn how to apply Design Thinking to the product challenge. Regular Sprint Planning will be taught as well, so that the teams will be able to contrast the different approaches to planning what to build, between Design Thinking and Scrum. At later stages of the day, as self-organization is encouraged, the teams will be left to their own decision making on when to apply Design Thinking in their process.
Liberating Structures
Participants will quickly notice that the key factor for building a joint solution to a complex challenge is communication. Brain storming is notoriously dysfunctional and group thinking often make people collectively not smart.
Liberating Structures (http://www.liberatingstructures.com) is a collection of powerful alternative ways of team work. Coach Takeshi will apply a number of structures throughout the day so that participants can experience and practice these new ways of collaborative discovery and decision making.
Liberating Structures, courtesy of http://www.liberatingstructures.com, Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless
(https://agile-od.com/mental-models/liberating-structures)
Workshop Goals
The focus of this workshop is not to teach a particular methodology or an instructive set of how to do things.
Our intention of the workshop is to provide a safe, sandboxed environment to experiment new and different ways of approaching complex business challenges. If participants are inspired to try the learnings from the workshop back at their work, or we trigger the curiosity for further learning and practicing, that would be our delight.
Participants will receive a certificate of attendance upon completion of the workshop.
Workshop Schedule and Fee
Please refer to our event booking page (https://agile-od.com/book).
Workshop Lead Coach
Takeshi Yoshida, Chief Coach & Founder, Lifecycle Pte. Ltd.
As a former banker turned serial entrepreneur with 25+ years of industry experience, Coach Takeshi conducts workshops and training programs for multinational corporations and large regional enterprises, including at his MBA alma mater INSEAD, alongside managing a portfolio of startup projects. Takeshi is a Professional Scrum Master and Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSM II, PSPO, Scrum.org), Certified LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® Facilitator, and is a prolific writer with a large following on Medium and LinkedIn Pulse.
Suggested Reading
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