What is the most valuable thing you have learned through training people?

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4 minute read

What is the most valuable thing you have learned through training people?

I’ve learned that no matter where you are in the world, everyone faces the same primary problems.

When organizations decide to adopt agile, often using an agile framework like scrum, everyone runs into the exact same teething problems.

As soon as you consider empiricism, that being transparency, inspection, and adaptation, you often find that people have to make a massive adjustment from traditional project management and transition from robust, rigid project management frameworks to agile values and principles.

People think that the walls they are bumping into are unique to their organization, their culture, their environment but as soon as they start scrum training, they quickly realise that everyone on the class, despite being from all around the world, are grappling with the same issues.

I train people from Asia Pacific, India, Scotland, Canada, South Africa, United Kingdom, and dozens of other territories around the world, so I know that these issues are common to every application.

I love the degree of engagement I get from multi-cultural, multi-geographically located students from around the world. As soon as I’m able to resolve their problem or address their concern with a path forward, people get super enthusiastic.

I love that about training, and I’m deeply grateful for my scrum practitioner and agile consulting experience that empowers me to help them through common and complex problems in their unique context.

Sometimes, when you are dealing with a single organization in a classroom, or even people from the same country, you get an echo chamber. People think that the problems they are experiencing are unique to their culture or organization, but as soon as we bring in delegates from around the world, everybody sees for themselves that these are universal issues.

Witnessing that sets people at ease and allows them to breathe. A solution is at hand. The problem has been encountered before and it has been resolved. There’s light at the end of the training tunnel.

People feed off the energy and experiences of others, from around the world, because they are receiving insight into challenges that they are likely to encounter. Receiving insights into how powerful scrum can be once you’ve worked through the teething issues in the environment.

That’s the value of globalization.

Regardless of the territory,

  • People are trying to create products that delight customers.

  • People are trying to solve complex problems.

  • People are trying to improve time to market.

  • People are trying to respond to competitor disruption.

  • People are trying to be more effective.

And so forth.

From London to Berlin and every other country I’ve been in, people are trying to do a great job in a way that delights their customers, their organization, and provides competitive advantage in the markets they serve.

That’s why Scrum is such a universally popular agile framework.

It’s proven itself in a myriad of applications, industries, and geographies.

The great thing about our digital, live delivery of scrum training is that people also get exposed to problems, challenges, and opportunities they would never have considered.

A developer in Mumbai may be dealing with the challenges of remote work in multiple territories, across multiple teams, where the developer in Glasgow may never have encountered anything outside of working in a small, 6-person team.

These shared experiences really bring home how powerful scrum can be, and how fit for purpose it is for product development despite an astonishing array of applications and territories.

So, if you’re struggling with a topic, challenge, or problem within your environment, join us for a scrum course and you will find the answers and experiments to run that you are looking for.

About NKD Agility

Naked Agility is an #agile consultancy that specializes in #scrumtraining, #agilecoaching and #agileconsulting to help teams evolve, integrate, and continuously improve.

We recognize the positive impact that a happy AND inspired workforce can have on customer experience, and we actively help organizations to tap into the power of creative, collaborative, and high-performing teams that is unique to #agile and #scrum environments.

If you are interested in #agiletraining, visit https://nkdagility.com/training/ 

If you have identified the need for #agilecoaching and #agileconsulting, visit https://nkdagility.com/agile-consulting-coaching/ 

We would love to work with you.

#scrum #agile #scrumteam #agileprojectmanagement #agileproductdevelopment #projectmanagement #productdevelopment #agilecoach #agileconsultant #agiletraining #scrumtraining #scrumorg

So the question is what’s the most valuable thing I’ve learned training people? I think it’s that there’s two things that are kind of related. One is no matter where you are in the world, everybody’s got the same problems when they’re implementing Agile, when they’re trying to do Scrum, when they’re trying to think about the implications of empiricism and a value focus on their organisation. Everybody runs into exactly the same walls. Everybody runs in Texas; they think their walls are unique, but everyone runs into the same walls.

But the value that I find for me is I love the engagement that I get in multicultural, multi-time zone, multi-country training events much more than I do from single country events because I feel like there’s a little bit of echo chamber in a single country event that there aren’t as many different ideas generated. I think it kind of demonstrates that value in globalisation, right? You’re teaching a class and you’ve got, you know, even five people from the US, five people from the UK, and they’re bouncing off each other. Then that one student that’s from Eastern Europe will say, “But what about this type of thing?” Oh, never thought of that, right? Because it’s not even within their sphere of experience.

And those ideas coming in, I think, helped me appreciate the diversity of cultures, but it also results in a better training experience for the students because they get more conversation, more topics, more—disagreement’s not the right word—but more ideas coming in there. And for me, that’s the most valuable.

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