Coaching for academics by fellow academics

I read the article on coaching ‘Let the Coach take the Strain‘ in the Times Higher Education last week on coaching, and reflected on how coaching has worked for me. I see this from both sides as a ‘coachee’ being coached by others, and as someone offering coaching to fellow staff here at the University

Read More…

Play4Agile 2016 – one big family

All in the family Play4Agile (p4a) 2016 is over for another year. As always it’s part reunion with dear friends, and part excitement at meeting new people at this ‘unconference’, where you learn to expect to be surprised by what you find happening. I mentioned this as part of my brief lightning talk on the

Read More…

Culture Coding Concept

The last session I went to at #p4a16 was ‘Culture Coding’ from Ari-Pekka Lappi was great. He explored how you can use the notion of ‘coding’ with its ‘function’ concepts to build design routines into your practices. In the same way that a kid could use Scratch with its drag-n-drop code snippets to form loops

Read More…

Build a Better You Through Failure – #lascot15

I am presenting a talk on how to use ‘becoming comfortable with uncomfortableness’ as a growth strategy at Lean Agile Scotland 2015 in Edinburgh. Since then I have also presented this as a workshop twice, once for the BCS SPA conference in 2017, and for the University of Aberdeen’s Leadership Academy in 2018. These are the slides,

Read More…

CoCreACT! Facilitator Training in Hamburg

Since leaving Hamburg the last time in 2012 after my StrategicPlay training as a Lego Serious Play facilitator I have been meeting Katrin Elster each year at Play4Agile and always been impressed by her sessions, and the ideas we’ve talked about at meals and in the bar. For a while she’s talked about a ‘new’ training workshop, and I’ve

Read More…

Play4Agile 2015

In February I returned to Play4Agile 2015 in Germany. As always this was an excellent event where I could gain new ideas, discuss old ones and try out some new ideas of my own too. It was also special this time as I took someone with from Aberdeen. This made attendance different in a good

Read More…

Crucial Conversation Card Game

A friend suggested reading Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking when the Stakes are High and I found the book very useful. It offers strategies to help with those difficult conversations that we all need to do now and then, which are ones we need to do, but which we know will be difficult. I also

Read More…

My Play4Agile Story

People attending this years’  Play4Agile 2014 were asked to blog their answer to these simple questions: Who or what brought you to Play4Agile in the first place? I saw Olaf post a tweet about the first one in 2011 and started following Katrin then too, but couldn’t make it. I was able to meet both of them

Read More…

The Dream Team Nightmare

Books tell stories to teach us important lessons in a variety of ways. Many ‘howto’ type books tell us what to do in a logical, linear path from beginning to end. Some of these might have quizzes and exercises that help us to learn the materials. Portia Tung’s book The Dream Team Nightmare uses a different device to help

Read More…

The University of Aberdeen is a charity registered in Scotland, No.SC013683