A musical reading to talk about Agility, differently

These last 10 days have been very emotional for me. Indeed, I presented with my colleague Christophe Keromen our “little paws” reader at the Agile Tour Rennes 2017 and for the first time with a client. The feedback is positive but more than that, it is very different from usual: the participants speak with their hearts more than with their heads! This led me several times to question myself on why I was doing this job and on what I really wanted to bring to others.

In this article, I propose to tell you the story of this lectelier presented several times to talk about Agility, differently. Introducing agility without slides by using the power of story telling and metaphor means addressing feelings rather than rationality and fostering rich and authentic exchanges between participants! 🙂

Ready for the adventure?

Music reading?

I discovered the concept of musical reading last year by Christophe during a conversation. Telling a story accompanied by a musician was an activity that intrigued me! He had the opportunity to present nimble little paws” at Agile France 2015 but accompanied by recorded background music.

Note: Christophe offers this type of intervention at home – you can also find his project and his reading suggestions on his facebook page: “ tell me words“.

Musician in my spare time, I offered him – initially in a joking tone – to accompany him in order to give him more flexibility in the interpretation. He took me at my word (it won't be the last time 😛 ) and it was during our adventure Boooksprint December 2016 that we will for the first time bring life, in our own way, to Frederic Brown's Tyrannosaurus, a SF author of the 40s and 50s.

At the end of January 2017, we are organizing a special evening for the official release ofAgile Rocket Guide which we will introduce with a reworked version for the occasion of musical reading. This will be our first public performance! 🙂

The reading remains at this moment only at the stage of entertainment, but it is when we have the privilege of being invited to Agile Spring of Caen that Christophe shares with me the participative dimension that he had implemented at Agile France 2015. We then come to call our session " Lectelier“: a mixture of reading and workshop. 😀

The reader in Agile conference

Caen Agile Spring 2017

Christopher wrote a great article describing our session. I invite you to read it to better understand the atmosphere and the environment that we wanted to build. I would rather share with you what I experienced, felt and above all learned there!

We had divided our intervention into 2 parts: a time of immersion, through reading, then a time of collective work with the participants.

The transition to the collective took time to get started, the participants still seeming in their imagination! Asked about what they had learned from the metaphor and the links they made with the reality of their daily lives or society, I was pleasantly surprised to see such intense exchanges between participants – who did not know each other a priori. It was even difficult to stop them to come back as a full group! 😛

I think the most amazing thing for me was during the closing circle, animated by our speaking gull, where we asked the participants to share a few words about what they had experienced and what they were leaving with.

Indeed, unlike the closings to which I am accustomed, I was extremely touched by the testimonies of the participants who did not speak only with their heads but especially with their hearts. I will always remember this person looking for a job for whom this moment of sharing gave him courage to move forward. Could you have imagined expressing this kind of thing in front of about thirty people that you did not know an hour ago?

Here are some feedback from participants:

Pleasantly disturbing

Original approach full of poetry

Stories are the best way to learn

Curiosity = Agility

+++ use of culture

It was the first time that I personally felt so many emotions during a conference. I knew intellectually that story telling was a good communication vehicle, but I had never imagined its unifying power and generating such authentic emotions. Isn't art therefore underused in our society?

It was when I left with the balm in my heart that I really asked myself the question: isn't that why we do our job?

Restore hope and courage, 

Allow everyone to express their humanity,

Transport to better inspire.

Agile Vendee 2017

Here we are a few months later in the Vendée to tell our story! I remember a wonderful time with a great sun, so bright that we had to cover the windows to be able to create an intimate atmosphere conducive to travel. For the first time, we welcome participants to music which will turn out to be the main theme of the reading.

Following the same format, here are some feedback from participants:

Quirky workshop = Open-mindedness

Originality!

Beautiful emotions Bravo

imagination ++

Again !

Agile Tour Rennes 2017

After loading the piano in the car, departure 6:30 from Carnac to Rennes! This time, the Lectelier will have a slightly different flavor: yes, it will be open to children! 😉

Being positioned at the end of the day, we were afraid that there would be no one left to come to our session. It was then with pleasure that we welcomed a dozen brave people ready to live this strange experience! 😛

Once the reading is finished, the participants are divided into groups to collect their inspirations. The children are then at work and seize the pens, markers and chalk to draw what they had retained from the story. The spontaneity of their actions and the authenticity of their words were beautiful to see, and that's what I think made this session just as unique as the previous one.

Passing through the groups, Christophe suggested that the adults use the metaphor to explain their job to their children. Thus, beyond the content, it was the fact of having been able to create a moment of sharing between parents and children that warmed my heart.

The closing circle finally took place with our famous talking seagull. And it is with great surprise that the same phenomenon occurred: participants who express themselves with an open heart, without fear or restraint, in a spirit of sharing.

It is always difficult for me to feel the impact of the experience on the participants before the closing circle and I was again deeply touched and moved by their words. Thanks again to them!

I wonder then more and more if this is not in fact our job:

Bring a little dream and enthusiasm

In any case, it is for this kind of moments that I love my job and that I consider that my efforts are worth it! 🙂

Some feedback from participants:

Excerpt from steve evers blog :

Just like in the theatre, when it is lived live, in flesh and blood, we cannot describe this magical moment, which will remain engraved for a long time in the minds of the happy privileged people of this moment. We are in Ri++, far from a Shu or even Ha session. For few being open and ready, there are very few other sessions seen to date that reach this level of instruction. Thank you Christophe and Olivier.

It was while waiting to load the piano back into the car that I had a discussion with Julien Fallet and Timothee Chevrier. They asked me if we had ever tried to introduce the reader to a client, to see how he would react. I told them no, but that it would be a great experience to live!

I think this was the origin of the discussion I had with Christophe a few minutes later. Indeed, we had to lead a session on Agile Management for a client a few days later and we were not yet fixed on the content. I then offered him in a joking tone to be the reader, in order to be slightly more disruptive in our approach. And he took me at my word again! 😛

The reader at a customer

The Managers Cafés are recurring meetings bringing together around a hundred Air France managers around a theme linked most of the time to Management. The subject of this Tuesday, October 17, 2017 was therefore “Between agile teams and agile business”. The usual format being rather a classic presentation with a question and answer session at the end, we opted for something more participative by subtly including our reader! 🙂

The participants being welcomed under the soft sound of the piano, Christophe takes the opportunity to warn that we are going to offer a “strange”, “weird” experience and that people who are not ready for it have the possibility of leaving if they wish. He even goes a step further and invites people to take off their shoes in order to physically anchor themselves to the ground and let themselves be transported by the story he was going to tell them.

A few presentation slides later, our reader could start…

Back to reality, we invite the participants to share among themselves the possible parallels they make with their daily lives. We then take the opportunity to prepare the following interactive sequence. Indeed, we then ask them to bring their smartphones to answer 2 questions thanks to Horn (discovered again at the Agile Tour Rennes).

What are the characteristics of the T-Rex?

What are the characteristics of small things?

In the absence of having configured the following on Klaxoon, we invite participants to reflect on the following 2 questions in a sub-group and on Post-it notes.

How to be more T-REX?

How to be smaller things?

Christophe then ended the session by sharing the key messages – borrowing from the concepts of Heart of Agile ofAlistair Cockburn, seen again a few days earlier at the Agile Tour Rennes – which we wanted to bring to the audience.

Some feedback from participants:

Thank you for this nimble parenthesis! It was very good, interesting, oxygenating!

Continue to shake up our habits and codes!

I would like to sincerely thank the Air France Campus team for allowing us to live this experience and for trusting us to the end! 🙂

Moreover, if you too would be interested in this reader, do not hesitate to contact us! 😉