Once, on our way to the movies our tram stopped at “Heinrich-Heine-Alley”. It’s a popular tram stop in Düsseldorf, especially for tourists. One such (German!) tourist exited there with his family and remarked: “Ah, Heinrich-Heine-Alley, he was mayor here once.” That tourist was making sense of his surroundings and “previous mayor” seemed like a reasonable …
Author Archives: Corinna Baldauf
Host Leadership is the better metaphor
Whenever someone mentions “Servant Leadership” it triggers an almost Pavlovian reflex in me to say: “Have you heard of ‘Host Leadership’? IMHO it’s the much better metaphor for Scrum Master work.” Part of SM work is enforcing rules. How can you do that as a servant? The metaphor breaks. As a host it makes perfect …
Open Up Solution Space by Reframing
Last year I shared Reframing advice from Esther Derby, about how you can change your own thinking about “difficult” people. This year it’s advice from Veronika Kotrba and Ralph Miarka about how to open up solution space in other people’s thinking: When someone says “My boss never listens to me” this is a very definite statement. “Never” and …
Mein rechter, rechter Platz
[English summary: Armin Schubert suggested a super nice “Set the stage” activity for Retromat that doesn’t translate well, so I present it in the original German.] Immer wieder bekomme ich tolle Vorschläge für Retromat, die ich schweren Herzens ablehnen muss, meistens weil es bereits eine sehr ähnliche Aktivität im Retromaten gibt. Bei der folgenden Idee …
My friend, the time clock
This little exchange happened on Twitter: I thought the topic might be worth elaborating on, as “no overtime” seems to be a rare thing. It’s time to confess my undying love for our time clock: Obviously, it’s not its looks that secured the clock my affection. In fact, whenever I take visitors on a tour …
Cluster stickies next to each other
Here’s another tiny facilitation coconut for something I’ve handled wrong suboptimal in the past: When it’s clustering time, related stickies often ended up on top of each other. Veronika Kotrba and Ralph Miarka remarked that this is not very appreciative of the bottom sticky and its author. It’s just a tiny detail but it makes sense …
Letting go of decisions
When building self-organizing teams, one of the hardest things for their (former?) managers is to pass power on to the team. Power as in “the possibility, ability and duty to take decisions”. If you pass a decision on, you have to let go of your “solution”. There are infinite solutions out there. Don’t expect the …
All eyes not on you – Chain Question
As a facilitator, I think it is my job create opportunities for others to speak. I try to keep in the background as much as possible, which isn’t always easy. Participants focus on me more often than I’d like. That is to say, not only when I talk about meta information like instructions, but also …
Would you like a coconut?
Last week I attended a very enlightening workshop hosted by solution-focused coaches Veronika Kotrba and Ralph Miarka. Early in the workshop Veronika introduced a superb metaphor for giving advice that nobody asked for. I’ve written about unsolicited advice before, but the coconut-model does a much better and funnier job. Let’s start with one of the …
Too much of a good thing? Why you don’t have to take part in every method craze.
This post is written by Petra Wille and only translated by Yours Truly. When I read her original German post, I felt vaguely guilty. I loooove methods! Read about them, try them, create summaries and books about them… I want people to know about a lot of possible solutions so that they can pick one that can help with …
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