"I love the people; I love my community. But it’s hearing new problems and understanding where they fit in the landscape of how people are trying to advance agility in their company. For me, that’s always the best part of the summit!" - Eric WillekeThe Berlin SAFe Summit brought most of the Shaping Agility community together in one place for the first time since we formed. We seized the opportunity to record a face-to-face podcast, which was, more truthfully, the beer club t...

“What’s the moment when you can help people understand the cause of some pain they’re in and offer them something that’s going to help with the pain?” - Mark Richards Rebecca’s back from Disneyworld! Mark’s discussion with two of his children about BDD triggers a fun exploration of our experiences with introducing it. We detour through Mark observing some people trying out Eric’s new PI Objective toolkit before life gets a little contentious. Somehow, a chat about i...

"I deeply love curiosity-driven learning. Go figure" - Eric WillekeRebecca leaves Eric and Mark unsupervised this week, and the conversation winds up revolving around Mark's highlight of the week, which is his excitement as he experiences the power of cohort-based training.The exploration begins by comparing our mental models of what a training course is and the realization that although it's Mark's favorite new toy, Eric is no stranger to it. After a chat about how COVID forced us to learn t...

"First you sit in the moment, then you dance in the moment, if a little bit later." - Eric WillekeRebecca's in Disneyworld this week, so Eric and Mark are unsupervised again! We've both just finished our second draft of our talks for the Berlin SAFe Summit, so naturally, we start by sharing a little of that process. Talking about managing the timebox somehow leads to dancing in the moment, tap dancing, and journeying through the agenda mosh pit while facilitating.With that, we're off – since ...

"If you can get somebody to be brain melty and gooey and actually happy about it, man, go you!" - Rebecca DavisOur second coffee club took a very wandering path. After Rebecca kicked us off talking about the RTE Summit, Eric's highlight of the week was the Princeton Panel discussion he participated in on the Future of Agility. Mark followed up with a geek-out about the joy he was having iterating his Product Owner mastery course.This led us into a deep discussion on iteration. We started by c...

"This is a very real concern for how we make decisions that need to filter all the way down to what people are doing day to day. Otherwise, it's just going to stay in that ethereal layer of well-intentioned statement that doesn't actually get acted upon." - Michael CaseyThis week, Eric, Rebecca, and Mark are joined by Michael Casey and Saahil Panikar. Weekly highlights included likening the journey of a feature to a kayak on a river, deep dives into AI and machine learning, dodging monster tr...

"I think being a leader and running an organization, especially one that's hard, that's big, is actually really hard. And it frustrates me when I read something and people are trying to make it sound easy or simple." - Rebecca DavisAs 2023 wrapped, we decided two things about the Saturday Sessions livestreams. One was to shift to midweek at a more humane time for our US folks, and the other was that our conversations were much better suited to a podcast than a Livestream. This is the kick-off...