About

About Agile Coaching Retreats

Retreat

The word “retreat” is a purposeful choice for the event as it represents a deeper and more meaningful experience of a smaller group of peers, creating time for people to gather in a purposeful way for focused learning and growth. Different from a gathering, open-space, conference or camp, the goal of a retreat is to collaborate more deeply in teams. Retreats are a place to separate from the day-to-day, dive deeply into topics, collaborate wholly with peers, and hopefully leave with renewed perspectives.

Scrum

Scrum Coaching Retreats are based on Scrum, where teams explore problem and solution spaces collaboratively and iteratively. At each retreat, teams are formed, goals are established, backlogs are developed, sprints are executed, and learning is expected. Through this approach, participants experience a double learning – team learns about their primary focus of their work while inspecting/adapting to accomplish a goal; in addition, participants learn what it is like to be on a team and live Scrum in a very hyper-focused and intense way. Typical team dynamics, leadership challenges and goal-shifting are to be expected!

Deep

Scrum Coaching Retreats provide opportunity for deep learning. While there are many events where broad learning takes place, this is the only event specifically designed for deep collaborative learning. Teams focus on a specific goal iteratively through successive, high-intensity sprints, and provide an opportunity to deliver useful and valuable results – for both the participant and for the coaching community.

Long

Scrum Coaching Retreats provide continuity in learning to develop coaching skills. A retreat is a long-term learning, collaboration, and relationship-building event. A successful retreat has preparation work to focus topics, teams and prepare ideas prior to the retreat. A successful retreat has many focused working sessions during the retreat through multiple perspectives. A successful retreat has follow-through on results to carry the momentum forward into the coming year. We expect retreat organizers to help guide this.

Two Sleeps

Scrum Coaching Retreats leverage a “two-sleep” learning process, borrowed from Future Search. Human brains continue to work and make weak-signal (creative) connections during our sleep when our brains are quiet. Through focusing on a topic across successful days, it provides participants an opportunity to work through various problems and solutions to find creative and valuable outcomes. Retreats leverage team-based work across two nights of rest and creative idea formation – the first sleep is designed for problem connection and understanding and the second sleep is designed for solution resolution.

Shared Learning

Scrum Coaching Retreats provide an opportunity for shared and collaborative learning. Most gatherings and events have localized learning in sessions with minimal or spotty write-up and documentation. A retreat is designed for multiple sessions around a single topic with both inter- and intra-team learning. A successful retreat will allow for multiple sprint cycles with some room for shared reviews, shared learning and presentations to connect all retreat participants.

Slack

Scrum Coaching Retreats provide an opportunities for respite. Retreat schedules will allow time for reflection, renewal, rest and retreat from the fast pace of life and work. Most decisions at work are made with quick thinking fibers in the brain which are based on past experience and learning. In order to recognize new ideas and to create new thinking, quiet time for reflection should be included to enable access to these weak brain signals of new ideas.