Workshops
Agile Basic Training
Summary: What is Agile? What’s the significance? How relevant is it to me – is it going to help me? Do I have to worry about big changes? This course is targeted to the working professional who is new to Agile. It will be conducted in plain, non-techy English, and will focus more on the whys and general hows of Agile, rather than going into the technical and procedural specifics of the various Agile applications. Nonetheless, by the end of this one day workshop, participants will come out with a good grasp and handle of the core concepts and basic how-to’s of popular Agile approaches such as Scrum and Design Thinking. The course embraces the spirit of Activity Based Learning, and participants will be doing many snippet size exercises involving a lot of post-it writings, brain spilling talking, ball throwing and LEGO® fiddling. Format: Workshop Duration: 1 day Inquiry: Contact us from here, or send us an email to engage@agile-od.com for details.
Agile Holistic Organizational Training
Summary: A concurrent one, two and three day workshop program designed as the initiating stage of an organization’s holistic Agile transformation effort. Format: Corporate training workshop Duration: 1 day for Teams, 2 days for Managers, 3 days for Leaders. Managers will participate in the first day with Team members and Leaders, and likewise Leaders will participate in the first and second day with the Team members and Managers. Respective first and second day participation for the Managers and Leaders are mandatory as the course is structured as a continuation from the previous days’ contents. Course contents and further details: Go to course page https://agile-od.com/essential-training Inquiry: Inquire us from here, or send us an email to engage@agile-od.com, with subject “Agile Essentials – Workshop”.
Lean, Agile, Scrum, Design Thinking – ONE DAY BOOT CAMP
Summary: This course is for current practitioners of Lean, Agile, Scrum, Design Thinking or any other “EI” (experimental and iterative) models and approaches such as OODA, wishing to gain a clear, factual and comprehensive knowledge of other EI approaches. EI models exist for a reason, and there are also reasons why there are many branches of them. A true Agile (or Lean or design etc.) professional should be aware of the many disciplines of EI, and use them to their advantage in a multi-disciplinary fashion. This workshop is a crash course to pick up those skills. Participants may also opt to attend the Design Thinking + Scrum + LEGO® workshop, which is a continuum of this course’s theme in a further hand’s on practicing format. Format: Workshop Duration: 1 day Inquiry: Contact us from here, or send us an email to engage@agile-od.com for details.
Design Thinking + Scrum + LEGO®
Summary: Linked-In Pulse viral article “Try Design Thinking + Scrum: A Hybrid Agile Approach” is now a Workshop! In this one day Workshop, Lifecycle Chief Coach Takeshi and team will be giving participants a major project of significant complexity to build with Lego. Participants will learn how to self-organize and operate as Scrum teams (and collectively as a Scrum-of-Scrums team), and experiment empathizing with the customer, defining the problem, ideating solutions, prototyping and testing the product with Design Thinking. The whole exercise will go through a number of build-measure-learn iterations as Scrum Sprints, and participants will experience when to persevere, tweak or pivot at critical junctures of the project. Participants who have attended the “Lean, Agile, Scrum, Design Thinking – ONE DAY BOOT CAMP” prior to this course will directly benefit from practicing their newly acquired skills with the Lego simulation. Participants may also opt to attend the “Lean, Agile, Scrum, Design Thinking – ONE DAY BOOT CAMP” after this course, to consolidate their experience into wholesome knowledge. Format: Workshop Duration: 1 day Inquiry: Contact us from here, or send us an email to engage@agile-od.com for details.
Agile Leader’s Toolkit: Lean, Scrum, Design Thinking + Organizational Skills
Summary: 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. Format: Workshop Duration: 1 day Course contents and further details: Go to course page https://agile-od.com/agile-leaders-toolkit Inquiry: Contact us from here, or send us an email to engage@agile-od.com for details.
Agile Organizational Culture Transformation – Core KSA Training
Summary: What are the core knowledge, skills and attitude (“KSA”) needed for successfully leading organizational culture change that embraces new values such as Agile? This is a two day specialized training course for organization leaders, transformation project leads and special resources designated as organizational change agents. Part 1: Foundational knowledge for understanding what is organization culture Learn the forces and intricacies behind organizational culture formation, stabilization, destabilization and change. Part 2: Core skills training for acquiring the tools, concepts and models for planning and implementing organizational culture change Build an arsenal of immediately applicable mental models from the essence of Organizational Behavior, Systems Theory, Organization Design, Lean, Agile, Theory X & Y, Theory U, Hawthorne Effect, Hierarchy of Needs, etc. Part 3: Crucial Attitude Development Workshop – Interpersonal communication and workplace emotional safety Listening, dialogue, learning and facilitating as a leadership and management style Overcoming individual and organizational resistance to change, defensive routines, survival anxiety and learning anxiety etc. with teachings from Non-Defensive Communication, Conversational Intelligence, Radical Candor and the Socratic Method etc. Format: Workshop Duration: 2 days Inquiry: Contact us from here, or send us an email to engage@agile-od.com for details.
Agile with a Heart – A “Soft Skills” Workshop
Summary: A one day workshop to learn and practice key interpersonal and team communication and facilitation skills for creating a genuinely productive Agile workplace where people can flourish. The course will be conducted in active workshop style with many role playing exercises incorporating teachings from Non-Defensive Communication, Conversational Intelligence, Radical Candor and the Socratic Method etc. Why join?: Most Agile change programs fail because of behavioral and cultural reasons. Let’s take an example. Agile embraces the spirit of trial and error. Therefore, we need to provide an emotionally safe environment where people don’t fear “failing.” Yet blaming, shaming, guilting is an ingrained element of our behavior and judgement systems. Unless we ourselves “de-learn” such traits and work on installing a no-blame culture around, people won’t truly venture to experimenting and learning from failure. Meanwhile, being “nice” is not good enough. We also need to develop a “nudging” attitude – a gentle push to stimulate learning. And to do this, we need to understand our innate defensive routines and resistance to change; again, something to de-learn and re-learn. So, the “soft skills” that we need to learn to make Agile successful are actually critical skills. It takes a lot of effort, and of course, trial and error. Let’s get started. Join this one day workshop and learn what it is to be a “nice” and “nudging” person. It will be good for you, and for the people around you. Format: Workshop Duration: 1 day Inquiry: Contact us from here, or send us an email to engage@agile-od.com for details.
SMMA
Summary: SMMA is a highly pragmatic three step approach to solutioning both day to day and long-term challenges. What is SMMA? Format: Workshop Duration: 1 day Inquiry: Contact us from here, or send us an email to engage@agile-od.com for details.
Vision Hierarchy
Summary: This is a one day facilitated corporate leadership and team exercise to put “Vision Hierarchy: Making Your Vision Connected with Your Team – An Agile Exercise” into action. Format: Corporate training workshop Duration: 1 day Inquiry: Contact us from here, or send us an email to engage@agile-od.com for details.
Agile CEO Master Class
Summary: Leaders, you are not alone. This is a periodically held 2 hour workshop facilitated by Lifecycle Chief Coach Takeshi conducted in a small group setting limited to CEOs and organization leaders committed to furthering learning of Reflective Leadership and building Learning Organizations. Inquiry: Contact us from here, or send us an email to engage@agile-od.com for details.
Mental Model Dōjō
Summary: This is a periodically held 2 hour “dōjō” style workshop facilitated by Lifecycle Chief Coach Takeshi for practicing “Mental Models.” Inquiry: Contact us from here, or send us an email to engage@agile-od.com for details.
Classroom Sessions
A Pretty Good Summary of Lean, Agile, Scrum AND Design Thinking
Summary: “What’s it with Lean, Agile and Design Thinking and stuff? It sounds like a battle of methodologies and it’s hard to keep up.” If you feel this way, join this course. In three hours, Lifecycle Chief Coach Takeshi will walk through the nuts and bolts and hows and whys of Lean, Agile, Scrum and Design Thinking. Format: Classroom session Duration: 3 hours Inquiry: Contact us from here, or send us an email to engage@agile-od.com for details.
Experimental & Iterative (“EI”) Models: Compared, Explained, Clarified
Summary: “EI” (experimental and iterative) models exist for a reason, and there are also reasons why there are many branches of them. This is a three hour lecture session that clarifies the fundamental sameness and practical applications difference of old and new EI models, and how to make best use of them in a multi-disciplinary fashion. Format: Classroom session Duration: 3 hours Inquiry: Contact us from here, or send us an email to engage@agile-od.com for details.
Design Thinking + Scrum
Summary: Design Thinkers, meet Scrum. Scrum practitioners, meet Design Thinking. This is a classroom session version of the Linked-In Pulse viral article “Try Design Thinking + Scrum: A Hybrid Agile Approach.” Format: Classroom session Duration: 3 hours Inquiry: Contact us from here, or send us an email to engage@agile-od.com for details.
SMMA
Summary: SMMA is a highly pragmatic three step approach to solutioning both day to day and long-term challenges. What is SMMA? Format: Classroom session Duration: 3 hours Inquiry: Contact us from here, or send us an email to engage@agile-od.com for details.
Talks
Agile for Business – Because we live in a VUCA world
Back to Basics – Agile for Startups
A Pretty Good (1 hour!) Summary of Lean, Agile, Design Thinking
Start: Organizational Culture Transformation
Summary: Individual and organizational defensive routines and resistance to change will be in the way, yet if we understand the forces and intricacies behind organizational culture formation, stabilization, destabilization and change, yes leaders can facilitate organizational culture change. Duration: 40 minutes Inquiry: Contact us from here, or send us an email to engage@agile-od.com for details.
The Future-Proof Organization
Summary: Organizational ambidexterity is an organization’s capability to exploit maximum performance today, while exploring future opportunities with full vengeance. Most organizations’ efforts to explore the future are “distracted” by attending to today’s urgent operational needs, making organizational ambidexterity an ideal notion. Yet, some organizations are starting to notice that future thinking can be ingrained into today’s day-to-day operations. Lean & Agile is the key. Learn why from Takeshi Yoshida, Chief Coach and Founder of Lifecycle. Duration: 40 minutes Inquiry: Contact us from here, or send us an email to engage@agile-od.com for details.
Critical Conversations, Crucial Relationships
Summary: We tend to take work stress and pressure for granted. As a matter of fact, most of us feel proud to persevere and suffer. We all know that mental health is important, but collectively at the workplace, we seem to forget about it and accept the daily grind. Well, there’s an explanation to that and there are things that we can do – as leaders, managers and peers. Let’s talk about how we can make the workplace an emotionally safe place. Duration: 1 hour Inquiry: Contact us from here, or send us an email to engage@agile-od.com for details.
Agile 101
Summary: What is Agile? What’s the significance? How relevant is it to me – is it going to help me? Do I have to worry about big changes? This talk is targeted to teams new to the concept of Agile. It will be conducted in plain, non-techy English, and will focus more on the whys and general hows of Agile, rather than going into the technical and procedural specifics of the various Agile applications. The goal of this one hour talk is to help participants feel comfortable and gain readiness to adopt a new work culture that embraces the spirit of Agile. Duration: 1 hour Inquiry: Contact us from here, or send us an email to engage@agile-od.com for details.
Organization Development in the Social & Digital Age
Summary: Social and digital is rapidly changing people’s behavior, and in turn, that is fundamentally changing virtually all industries and businesses; i.e. disruption. That is a fact and therefore, yes, organizations do have to change, transform and innovate to one degree or another. Yet, a badly done intervention for change is as deadly as inaction. What do organization leaders need to know to decide on their best course of action for Organization Development? Duration: 40 minutes Inquiry: Contact us from here, or send us an email to engage@agile-od.com for details.
Is Agile a Fad?
Summary: The labeling, “Agile”, could go away, but the truth is, experimental and iterative (“EI”) thinking is nothing new; they have been around for millennia, and are here to stay. Yet trial and error is hard to practice because we like certainty – it’s a psychological trait we humans innately have. That’s why throughout history many strings of EI models emerge as each is a new attempt to get it right; just in the modern times we’ve seen PDCA, OODA, Lean, Agile, Design Thinking, etc… So, let’s take a proper look at Agile and learn why it matters, although it doesn’t matter what it’s called. Duration: 30 minutes Inquiry: Contact us from here, or send us an email to engage@agile-od.com for details.
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