The Scrum Coaching Retreat held in Cape Town, South Africa this week flew by in a flash!

The retreat started off with a ‘Get up to speed‘ workshop run by Growing Agile which was a nice intro to get to meet other like minded coaches and discuss burning issues raised by us, the coaching community.

Beginning with some great warm up exercises certainly got the energy going. After the four hour workshop new friendships had already started to form!

• Agile upwards (c level)
• How to keep the focus on values and principles
• What is the next small thing change agents can do
• Distributed teams
• Incentives & consequences
• External dependencies
• …..and the list went on

To see a short video on Sketch noting click here – great fun and visual facilitation is just so effective!!

The main Retreat commencing after the workshop above was based on the theme “Small Improvements”

How did it work?

• Topics were raised by the 40 odd attendees
• Topics were grouped –  resulting in 7 main ones
• People assigned themselves to what they wanted to work on
• Teams were formed and the bonding began

Working in a Scrum format over the two day period, the teams created some really spectacular outcomes which can be viewed here.  A lot of what we delivered is what I see as a great start to some excellent tools and collaboration on coaching in the Agile industry.

My take-aways from the retreat:

• Some really wonderful and like minded people in this coaching community both local and international – new friends were definitely made
• Working in a team again helped me re-think the principles that we often teach
• Being exposed to different and refreshing approaches to coaching
• Just confirming my belief on a daily basis, its all about the people!

Would I do it again? Definitely!