Posts by ellengrove

One of the most vivid sessions I took part in at the Play4Agile conference in Germany last month was a session on Games for Distributed Teams.  Led by the amazing Silvana Wasitova, this discussion built on the preceding session about “Games in 5 Minutes” to explore how these activities can be used with distributed teams.  I was hoping to get some new ideas for games to use with teams that are not colocated, since in my experience it’s...

“The opposite of play is not work. The opposite of play is depression.” – Dr. Stuart Brown, in a magnificent TED talk on the importance of play (posted here in case you haven’t already seen it): I know that I overuse the word “magic” to describe what happens during LEGO Serious Play (LSP), but I can’t stop myself. When a group of people sit around a table, each outfitted with a little box of fairly unremarkable plastic bricks,...

I’m very much looking forward to participating in Play4Agile 2012 in Germany next month.  Last year’s inaugural event was such an amazing experience that registration for this year’s unconference sold out in less than 12 hours.   I registered for p4a11 one year ago today, thinking that I would take a bit of a busman’s holiday – fly to Germany for a weekend (!?!), meet some interesting people over some good beer, and hopefully learn a...

Is your team is interested in new approaches to encouraging meaningful discussion about big opportunities or challenging problems? Playing with Lego can help! Serious fun can result in serious work getting done in not a lot of time, with a lot of laughter along the way. Lego Serious Play is a playful approach to tackling challenging conversations about individual professional development, team dynamics and organizational strategy and...

Earlier this week at a combined Agile Ottawa/Ottawa Scrum User Group joint event, Joe Little facilitated an entertaining discussion about the basics of Agile release planning. This gathering was instigated by a question at an Agile Ottawa meeting a few months back about whether any sort of release planning happens in an Agile context. Given that much of the Scrum canon just does some vague hand-waving around this topic, it’s...