Yesterday I delivered my talk what I learned from burning down my (parents) house in Kiev @ AgileEE 2010. Last year, the first edition of AgileEE made a big impression on me. Thanks to AgileEE I could follow a Coaching course by David Hussman
I felt really bad when I had to say to Alexey that this year I would arrive very short for my talk and leave the next morning. Work/Life Balance working 3 days a week in Bordeaux after my family went back to Belgium, I want to avoid being away too long.
Due to a slow security check I only arrived 20 minutes before my talk. Just In Time to the extreme. Robin and I designed the talk (last year somewhere in a London pub.) to be a very interactive. At AgileEE I was talking at the main stage. That stage is in a traditional room.
Although an interactive talk in a room like this, is quite a challenge, I’m happy I kept the talk as it was.
Some people on twitter thought there were too many people for this kind of talk, I disagree, it was more about room layout then number of people. After the break I started walking around in the room, to make it feel more like a training then a conference talk.
On my way home I finally started reading (instead of skimming) Training From the Back of the Room. During my talk, I did not went to the back of the room, I do think I did do wat is ment in the book. While reading I thought of something that Mary Poppendieck said last night: instead of convincing people to use idea’s of agile we should better look more at idea’s of other industries. (Robin and I had that idea on slide 21 of my talk).
Reading this book, made me think, how many coaches, CST etc are reading books about teaching? (I’m not talking about facilitating books.) And that made me think about the one book that David Hussman adviced me to read last year that I still have not read.
I have written before about some of the idea’s where I am learning from outside our agile world.
With David & priorities, I’m back to where I started this post. Although I was only half a day in Kiev, I had a great time. The (short) discussion I had with Robin, Henrik, Mary & Jurgen has triggered a lot. Thank you Alexey, Nataliya for inviting me again.
Update: If you saw my talk at AgileEE, please rate it here