I went to a few sessions at the Agile 2009 conference related to group dynamics, hyper productive teams and corporate culture.

Help me to see... corporate culture with Tobias Mayer and Lyssa Adkins. "Using a simple yet effective collaboration game from the Improv tradition this session will challenge our assumptions and open up new neural pathways." It was a very interesting workshop with a limited number of people. Tobias showed us different techniques to describe a new reality for an agile person, an agile team and an agile organization in a collaborative and simple way without being locked in our traditional beliefs.

Help me to see... 

Scaling Up by Scaling Down: A (re)Focus on Individual Skills with Ashley Johnson and Amr Elssamadisy. The key message on this session was to focus more on developing personal agility, before trying to scaling up. The primary aspect of agile is skills and personalities (Individuals and interactions over processes and tools…).

Scaling Up by Scaling Down

Some of the quotes from sessions and discussions:

• "The pain of change has to be less than the pain of failing"
• "Trust and credibility is the glue, if you don't create it you will fail"
• "Before getting it to work in the large, we need to get it to work in the small"

I think from an agile point of view, we need to understand our craft much better and focus on business value, innovation and continuous learning.

We talk more about "How we create the solution" than "Why do we create the solution?"

We talk more about "How great we are doing" than "How we can continuously improve and be better?"

We talk more about "How can we be more productive" than "How can we create less useless features?"

I think we should focus more on

• Building a better understanding on what we are doing – create a unity of purpose
• Working with continuously improving and learning in the organization
• Teaching and using problem solving techniques
• How we structure our work with cadence, flow and pull 
• How we establishing more transparency and accountability

What do you think?