If you\u2019re looking for a fun way to kick off discussions of difficult topics, then failure bows may work for you.<\/p>\n
In September I was at the Agile Coach Camp US<\/a> (#ACCUS<\/a>) in Columbus Ohio.\u00a0 Friday was \u201cGames Day\u201d, devoted to fun ways to engage agile teams with games.<\/p>\n Tobias Mayer led the \u201ckeynote game\u201d, and he did a number of great exercises.\u00a0 Perhaps my favorite was the \u201cfailure bow.\u201d\u00a0 Tobias talked about how we usually feel when we fail at something.\u00a0 We mope around, hang our heads low, look at our feet, etc.\u00a0 We tend to pull into ourselves as much as possible, as if we can hide from the failure and from the people around us.<\/p>\n The failure bow is very different.\u00a0 There are two rules.<\/p>\n The first is that instead of hiding from that failure, we call it out publicly and celebrate.\u00a0 Tobias taught everyone to stand up and hold their hands up high in the air, as if you were on a roller coaster ride.\u00a0 Then put as stupid a grin on your face as possible, and say something like this:\u00a0 \u201cI failed!\u00a0 This is a learning opportunity!\u201d\u00a0 You should say it proudly, and say what you failed at.<\/p>\n The second rule is that everyone else in the room should applaud and cheer you when you make this public display of willingness to learn.<\/p>\n This exercise was a lot of fun, and through the rest of the weekend whenever a session facilitator or attendee made a mistake, they would usually stick their hands up in the air, smile with a silly grin, and everyone around would applaud.<\/p>\n I had a great time at ACCUS, and on Sunday as I prepared to leave I considered all the things I learned.\u00a0 I wanted to apply them to my current coaching project right away.\u00a0 Failure bows leaped out at me.<\/p>\n On Monday, I had already scheduled a team meeting to discuss a difficult technical topic.\u00a0 I am helping this team adopt agile automated testing, but they have a very fluid data set and the manual test cycles take a long time.\u00a0 There are a number of technical reasons I won\u2019t get into here that make it very hard to have a repeatable data set when you test, and so automation has been hindered.<\/p>\n I called together the developers, architects, and testers on the system to brainstorm for an hour.<\/p>\n Because there were a lot of preconceived notions amongst the team about what could and could not be done, I decided I needed to break them out of their mold a little bit.\u00a0 I wanted to disarm them at the beginning, make it fun, and set a tone that they all had something to learn from this meeting, and they all had something to contribute.<\/p>\n I did this by asking their permission at the beginning of the meeting to try something a little silly.\u00a0 I explained failure bows, and asked everyone to say something that they didn\u2019t know anything about, and then take a failure bow.\u00a0 Everyone else had to applaud them.<\/p>\n The team played along great.\u00a0 I kicked it off by saying that as an outside consultant, I really didn\u2019t know squat about their system.\u00a0 Everyone laughed and applauded.\u00a0 Other relatively new team members also admitted in their failure bows that they don\u2019t understand the system all that well.\u00a0 Others admitted they really didn\u2019t know anything about automated testing.<\/p>\n There was a lot of laughter and applause, and I think it set a good tone for the brainstorming session.\u00a0 Everyone demonstrated they had something to learn, and I think everyone also heard other people admit areas of uncertainty that they could help with.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll also briefly describe how I facilitated the rest of the brainstorming session.\u00a0 I set one more rule in addition to failure bows.\u00a0 No one was allowed to say \u201cNo\u201d to an idea, they had to use the \u201cYes, and \u2026\u201d pattern instead.\u00a0 This is a pretty common brainstorming technique to try and get people to throw out as many ideas as possible, and not spend their time shooting down other people\u2019s ideas as infeasible.\u00a0 There\u2019s plenty of time later to shoot down ideas!<\/p>\n As a group, we drew out the current testing process and identified the bottlenecks.\u00a0 Then I split the room into two halves, and asked each group to come up with as many ideas as they could in the next 15 minutes for how to improve the testing process and tackle the data challenges.<\/p>\n I was impressed with how many things they came up with.\u00a0 It was a reminder to me as a coach that even though I know automated testing very well, I don\u2019t know their problem domain and ultimately they are going to find most of the solutions.\u00a0 My job is to help coach them towards those solutions and challenge them when they are not thinking broadly enough.\u00a0 My job is not to drive them to a particular pre determined solution.<\/p>\n Then each group presented back to the full team, and we did \u201cdot voting\u201d to determine which tasks were most useful to start with.\u00a0 This led us to four \u201cNext Steps\u201d that we assigned owners to and then posted in the team room.<\/p>\n The next steps list contained items I had not expected, and excluded items I thought would make the initial cut.\u00a0 It was a better list than I would have come up with alone, and I think a better list than any one team member would have come up with alone.<\/p>\n That\u2019s due in part to setting a good tone for the brainstorming session, and I think failure bows were an important piece of the puzzle.<\/p>\n Thanks to Tobias and Agile Coach Camp for the excellent and inspirational sessions!<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you\u2019re looking for a fun way to kick off discussions of difficult topics, then failure bows may work for you. In September I was at the Agile Coach Camp US (#ACCUS) in Columbus Ohio.\u00a0 Friday was \u201cGames Day\u201d, devoted to fun ways to engage agile teams with games. Tobias Mayer led the \u201ckeynote game\u201d, […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[41,5,6,19,21],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","yoast_head":"\n