And so it finally began. Yesterday, eleven Starlings met for the first time to follow David Lowe & Rafael Ribeiro on this journey in the land of the Advanced Agile Team Coach Cohort Program (ICE-AC, ICAgile) .
Two hours in, I can already confidently say that I made the right choice.
It’s rare that I don’t feel impatient to get into the depth of the contents. A laugh and a chat to start a call is always great, but then I crave getting deep into the new experience. Instead this time, Rafa and David, being the dynamic duo that they are, created such a comfortable and engaging space that spending the whole time purely getting to know each other and setting expectations for the program ahead felt like the most natural thing to do.
How did they accomplish that?
With a mix of expertly designed games to gently glue us into a cohesive group. We started with a quick check-in to normalise our emotions. Many people were understandably excited, but I was overjoyed. So much so that I was even confused, while trying to close three open threads and open a new one. I learned that having to say out loud, “I’m checked in,” requires intention and creates accountability. That simple sentence was enough to make me aware of the status I was in and to ground me quickly.
We then played games to demonstrate how appearances are deceiving and how making assumptions based on the location or even the origin of a person is always dangerous, even more so in a virtual context. We became curiouser and curiouser, discovering more about each other in a gamified attempt to find commonalities, without knowing that we were getting to know the other members of our triad. We were all doubled over in laughter during a round of personal bingo where the craziest things came up and Rafa and David turned into something that would have been worthy of a NYE countdown. We were just missing the Ball Drop!
A storm of starlings
What often feels like a boring rite of passage that we rationally accept as important became for us an incredibly pleasant opportunity to bond and come together, exactly like a storm of Starlings, who fly high in the sky, almost telepathically synchronising their movements with each other.
And that type of alignment is what David and Rafa invited us to treasure, as we’ll need it. We’ll need it to survive a super intense program that has 16 calls (only 15 more to go!!) with homework to do in triads between each call, four deep dives in four stances of Agile Coaching, a requirement of 100+ hours of practice in those four stances, journaling all throughout, and a final week of residential.
It’s going to be an amazing journey, and I’m thrilled by the opportunity that Adventures with Agile gave me to document it entirely through my sketchnotes.
Initially, I thought I would have been able to produce only one drawing every two sessions at most, more likely one every three or four. After yesterday, I feel fairly comfortable saying that I can fill an entire page with images, quotes, and reflections after every single call. I will try to do so and, as always, share it here.
Curious to learn more about the Advanced Agile Team Coach cohort program could mean for your agile coaching career or capability?
Check out the program page or contact us to arrange a call to about your goals for taking your agile coaching to the next level.