Team Genesis – The Facilitator’s Guide

What is it?

Team Genesis is a team kick off or reset workshop, which lays the foundations necessary for a high-performing team.The fundamental principle we cover in this workshop is people over process.

But where do high-performing teams come from? They don’t come from frameworks or processes they come from a place of trust and understanding. Team Genesis is an experiential workshop in which participants explore the concepts of trust and team bonding through a variety of exercises. They will also learn some theory that underpins the building of a high-performing team.

The workshop is largely made up of activities interspersed with theory and explanation throughout. Ending with the collaborative creation of a team charter. The team charter provides teams with clear reference points that will enable the team to frequently reflect on their performance and identify actions that will drive continuous improvement.

Team Genesis was collaboratively created through the experiences of Adventures with Agile’s (AWA) Coaches and based on theory and techniques from Lyssa Adkins, Sharon Bowman, Peter Senge, Jurgen Appelo, Patrick Lencioni, Geoff Watts and Paul Goddard.

We have been experiencing great success with the teams that have attended Team Genesis, so we wanted to share this workshop with the community. In August of this year we ran it as a meetup to enable others to run Team Genesis. We had good feedback from the meet up and it was suggested that a written guide to the workshop was needed. We have now developed a facilitators’ guide. Like everything we create at AWA it is under a creative commons license which means its free to use, just mention us 🙂

The Facilitation guide

The guide starts with a POWER start description of the workshop (a technique learned on Lyssa Adkins’ Agile Facilitator Course). You can use this power start to let people know what to expect before the workshop. The POWER start is also extremely helpful for setting the tone of any workshop or meeting. We suggest starting the workshops by running through this with the group.

The guide gives you step-by-step instructions on how to run the Team Genesis workshop along with explanation of the theory after each section. We recommend familiarizing yourself with the “Why” sections to help with team discussions, they can also be helpful when seeking buy-in to run the workshops.

Prep instructions

• Download the Facilitator’s Guide pack [click here]
  • Print “5Dysfunctions_Headers”
  • Print “5Dysfunction_cards”
  • Cut out “5Dysfunction_cards”
  • Draw out the team canvas on a large flip chart
  • Create your own personal Map to share in workshop as an example

Resources Needed

• Pens for each team member
• Flipchart paper
• Post its
• A3 Paper – one sheet per person (used for personal maps)

We’d love to hear your experiences with Team Genesis. If you wish to please email community@adventureswithagile.com with your stories and experiences running Team Genesis!