During the Agile2011 conference, I drew some mindmaps to capture my experiences(All the diagrams here are downloadable from “astah publish” site.). I’d like to share some of them here with some personal notes.
The first one is on Barbara Frederickson’s keynote, “Positive Emotions”. She described how the power of “Positivity” has been scientifically proven in these ten years.
It was suggestive that this idea shares the same timeline as how Agile has become big in our software development field. I felt strong “Synchronicity”. I shared this strange (or maybe certain) feeling with Linda Rising who gave the final keynote “Agile Mindset”.
The second one is “The Emperor’s New Clothes” workship by Portia Tung and Jenni Jepsen. In this workshop subtitled “Meaningful Interactions in Stressful Situations”, they shared with us an awareness of how we tend to behave in difficult situations and suggested how we should cope with it, using her original workshop style and great facilitation skill. Look at the funny pictures of the attendees in the workshop! I like their ideas about conveying common Agile behavioural principles in the cute original format of “Agile Fairytales.” These pictures can be seen at this facebook album.
The next mindmap is about Carlton Nettleton’s “Powerful Questions”. As a Lean coach, I personally wanted to attend this session because I was beginning to find the power of “questions” not “solutions” to change teams.
In this workshop, we gathered commonly heard questions, categorized them, and change them into more powerful forms. By the way, it was good to know after the conference that “Powerful Questions” was first introduced into Agile world by Deborah Hartmann Preuss, my friend. These pictures can also be seen at this facebook album.
The last one is “etc.” I took many pictures on Day 0 of the conference. I attended the retrospective meeting by stage producers because I was a stage co-producer of the “Hands-On” stage with Kay Johansen. It was my honer to have a chance to work with her in such a productive way even though we live so distant — Salt Lake City, US and Fukui, Japan.
This Agile2011 was a special conference to me, not only because it was a 10-year anniversary of Agile Manifesto, but also because my personal 8-year anniversary of my first visit to Salt Lake City for Agile Development Conference 2003, where I received the “thank-you-for-coming-all-the-way-from-Japan” award from Alistair Cockburn 🙂
-Kenji