June 9, 2021 (Virtual): Powerful Activities (with Damon Poole)

Powerful Activities

Powerful questions are a mainstay of coaching individuals. They stimulate the coachee’s thinking in a direction the coachee is already moving. Powerful questions can be expanded to teams by applying a Professional Coaching mindset to facilitated team activities. Just as with powerful questions, use powerful activities to stimulate the team’s thinking in directions of their own choosing. The power of the activities comes from choosing just the right activity based on the team’s context and current state of mind.

Powerful activities are valuable for helping the team to draw on their collective knowledge and talents, determine the goal of their conversation, discover and explore topics, come up with action items, and stimulate learning and growth. Thus, you can apply the same thinking behind powerful questions to teams. In this session we’ll explore the characteristics of an activity that make it a powerful activity as well as take a look at a couple of examples including Team With the Best Results Ever. As part of exploring Powerful Activities we will run a few of them in breakout rooms.

Damon's Bio

Damon is an Enterprise Agile Coach and the co-author of Professional Coaching for Agilists (Addison-Wesley). In addition he offers courses on Agile Coaching and Professional Coaching. He has coached and trained thousands of people at companies such as EMC, Capital One, Oanda, Ford, and Fidelity. As a coach of coaches at Eliassen, Damon led the Agile Delivery team which grew to hundreds of Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches in the field. He is an International Coaching Federation Associate Certified Coach, International Coach Academy Certified Professional Coach, and ICAgile Certified Professional in Agile Coaching. Damon frequently presents at local and international Agile meetups and conferences such as the Agile Alliance Conference, Play4Agile, and Agile and Beyond. He has also co-created a series of popular Agile games such as User Story Games, Agile Coaching Games, Heroes of Agility, and a small collection of online games. This element of learning through play is a consistent element in all of his work.

AGENDA