Agile Open 2005 : the feedback

Ecris le 8 mai 2005
Dans la catégorie Uncategorized |

Open Agile was a very interesting event. It was great for the content of the conference, but also for the form

The form

It was an Open Space format. It was the first I intend this kind of conference. The benefices are numerous:

You can really interact with other people. You are not just sitting to wait somebody pushing its slides, you actually interact with him to give direct feedback, to expose your thoughts about what is discussed and then get feedback on your own ideas.
The agenda is not fixed in advance. You can come with your own subject and propose it to the audience. If enough persons are interested, the session is set up!

The sessions

I intended the following sessions:

All of those sessions were very interesting, and you can look to the wiki pages to have some ideas of the outputs.

Balancing act

This session was special to me. It is strange, because at first, I did not vote for it: it seemed to complex or out of my scope. Basically, it was an experiment around the Virginia Satir model of communication. I read about it in some books of Gerald Weinberg, but I did not know it in details.

Willem, Nynke and Marc exposed the model to all of us, and encouraged to try it during the session. The session was very interesting, however I did not get the “aha!” effect during it. The effect came later.

I always had the feeling that it what not possible to improve my communication or management skills. It was possible to improve the technical skills, but not the “soft” skills: one was a communicator or was not. Actually, this is false. It is possible to improve your communication and your management skills: that’s what did the Balancing Act for me.

I did get many positive feedback from my improvements, from many different sources. However, I dont want to share those experiences here: this is not the purpose of this blog. All I can say is a recommandation: seek for the Congruence in Action session in the agile conferences to come, which seems to be an improved version of the Agile Open Balancing Act.

Social Bookmarking