The Liberators in 2018 — A Visual Overview

The days around Christmas are an ideal opportunity for reflection. Although it’s challenging to find a quiet moment between all the activities with friends and family, the early hours in the morning offered a solution. For a couple of years, we create a photo collage of special occasions; like training, workshops, seminars, and meetups. These collages are a great tool to bring back related memories. This article contains a monthly visual overview of the most special engagements and adventures we’ve experienced as The Liberators. Creating this visual overview left us with only one conclusion:

What an amazing year it was!

January — Scrum Master Advanced training at Scrum.org

We kicked off the year with training at Scrum.org HQ in Boston. This wasn’t just ‘an average training’ with some ‘random participants’. As The Liberators, we were invited to showcase our Scrum Master Advanced training having Scrum.org staff, course stewards, and customers as participants! Speaking of nerve-wracking training…

Given the fact that the training was launched in August as the new Professional Scrum Master II class without any major changes, I think we did a pretty good job :) If you’re interested in the complete ‘making of the PSM II class’, this article will uncover all the details.

February — The Liberators Meetup at Quby

Together with Tom Suter, we provided a Zombie-Scrum workshop at Haufe-Umantis in St. Gallen in 2017. Being located in Barcelona as well, we were invited to run the same workshop in Spain as well. This proved to be a challenge for my facilitation skills. Spanish culture and time-boxes are an interesting combination…

In February we also started hosting meetups exclusively for participants of courses and workshops provided by The Liberators. We believe that regardless of the training, workshop, or course you’ve followed, and whatever certificates you’ve have earned, the best lessons are learned through practice. With the quarterly “The Liberators Meetups”, we support each other in our professional journey to mastery. The meetups are focused on peer-to-peer coaching, building networks, and the sharing of experiences, lessons learned, and useful practices.

The February meetup was hosted by our friends of Quby. Given our strong relationship with them, this was the best location to kickoff The Liberators meetups!

March — Liberating Structures Immersion Workshop #1

March was all about Liberating Structures. In the week before the workshop in Amsterdam, our four-man Design Team (Coen Brouwer, Ruben Klerkx, and The Liberators) participated in the Immersion Workshop in Berlin. This gave us the opportunity to experience what a workshop looks like, what participants are expecting, and to meet both Keith McCandless and Fisher Qua in person.

A couple of days after ‘Berlin’, it was time for us to facilitate our own Immersion Workshop in Amsterdam. This proved to be a truly amazing, humbling, life-changing experience! Before this immersion workshop, we were already enthusiastic about Liberating Structures, afterward, we were hooked! Check this video for an impression of the 2-day workshop. A logical next step was starting the Dutch Liberating Structures User Group. The purpose of this group is to practice and explore how to use Liberating Structures in a wide variety of situations. The group provides a safe-to-fail environment where everyone can try out new structures and give and get help. After having powered 9 meetups, the user group has already grown to almost 650 members!

April — Founding of The Liberators

In April we started the Scrum Master journey at KPN iTV. The Scrum Master journey consists of monthly workshops and Retrospectives focused on making Scrum Masters more effective in their role. By focusing on the principles and values of Scrum, we encourage participants to practice all the stances of a Scrum Master. This means doing exercises related to facilitation, coaching, teaching, and mentoring.

April also contained a trip to Dublin for speaking about the Scrum Master role at Agile-Lean Ireland. This community-lead conference is dedicated to spreading learning in Agile and Lean to the Irish and international community. Using Croke Park as the venue, this was a really cool location to host an event!

However, the official founding of The Liberators is obviously this month’s biggest milestone. Starting our joined company triggered some legal and tax challenges, but April 23rd became the date The Liberators saw daylight! Check this video for a short explanation of our purpose.

May — Traveling to Copenhagen, London, and Gothenburg

We kicked off the month of May with a Scrum Master Advanced class and a Scrum Myths workshop at the Agile Akademiet in Copenhagen. Based on the Scrum Mythbusters series we addressed the most common myths and misunderstandings about the Scrum framework.

Our next stop was London for attending the Scrum.org F2F and sharing ideas about the Scrum learning competencies. By now, the first version has been published on the website. These competencies are created to help guide an individual’s personal development with Scrum. The next day we participated as a workshop facilitator at Scrum Day London. For the fourth year in a row, we joined this community event, a great opportunity to meet like-minded people!

The Scrum Master Advanced class organized by Fredrik Wendt at Jeppesen in Gothenburg was this month’s final abroad engagement. The training resulted in lots of valuable feedback that we could incorporate in the to-be PSM II class. More importantly, we discovered the “Fika”: this is Swedish for a coffee break that’s more about socializing than drinking coffee.

June — Training in Boston, Barcelona, and Amsterdam

We the upcoming launch of the PSM II class in mind, we took every opportunity to gather feedback by which we could improve the course. June (and the first week of July) would offer more than enough options with classes in Boston, Barcelona, and Amsterdam! We gathered tons of useful feedback. Some of it encouraged us to make some changes, but luckily it mostly confirmed that we’re on the right track.

As if this month wasn’t already busy enough, we also showed up at Scrum Day Germany for a presentation about the Scrum Master role. Because most sessions were done in German, this was a great opportunity to refresh our German language skills!

July — Scrum Day Europe

With the upcoming vacation in mind, the only thing left on our agenda was Scrum Day Europe. Having participated in all editions so far, this year couldn’t lack as well. By being part of the organizing committee and facilitating two sessions we were more than present! One session was about Scrum Myths and their impact on digital transformations. In the other workshop, we hosted the Management in Scrum exercise that clarifies common dysfunctions. We really enjoyed the beer(s) at the end of the seminar; it meant time for a couple of weeks of vacation!

August — Launch Scrum.org PSM II class!

When we provided the Scrum Master Advanced class last January in Boston, Dave West (CEO) announced afterward “great, we’ve got our PSM II class, let’s launch in August this year!”. Although the class itself was pretty complete, the necessary supporting materials (trainer guide, etc.) weren’t. So we basically spent our “holiday” by writing a trainer guide… The new PSM II class was launched according to schedule at Agile 2018 in San Diego. From that moment on, we started training Professional Scrum Trainers in providing this new class and jointly try to improve it even further. If you want to learn more about how we created a new learning experience, read this article.

August also meant the start of “The Liberators Friends”. This invitation-only user group is for a close network of friends from The Liberators. Together, we collaborate to help customers in a way that benefits them and us. By now, we’ve already grown to a group of 13 friends!

September — Scrum Kickoff at the KNAW

In September we facilitated the first workshop for the KNAW, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. The intention was to adopt Scrum as a framework to be more responsive to change, to provide more focus and generate more value (e.g. an empirical process). Together with about 50 participants we created a shared understanding about Scrum and identified first steps together to start applying it.

In the same week, we provided a workshop at Agile Prague as well. By doing the Management in Scrum exercise we explored common dysfunctions in how activities are managed in Scrum.

In 2018 we facilitated a series of Scrum Master workshops at the ABN AMRO. About five in total. During these workshops, we explored the different stances of a Scrum Master. Besides these 1-day workshops, we also started a Scrum Master journey at the ANWB. So by now, we were guiding a group of Scrum Masters at two companies: KPN iTV and ANWB.

October — Agile Turkey Summit in Istanbul

With the launch of the Scrum.org PSM II class, we became course stewards. As course stewards, we facilitate the Professional Scrum Master curriculum in a community-driven manner. Working with the awesome Scrum.org staff & trainers we continuously update the courseware to ensure high-quality material. Another responsibility is training other trainers in teaching the PSM II class. In October, we even had a class with only PSTs. This proved to be a completely new (cool!) experience. Not having to worry about the basics, we could have lots of in-depth conversations.

From Stuttgart, we went to Copenhagen for another PSM II class with our friends of the Agile Akademiet. A couple of days later we were back at the KNAW again, this time for a Product Discovery workshop. Together with representatives from each Scrum Team, we made the landscape of products and projects transparent, identified challenges and critical dependencies, and helped them created the first versions of their Product Backlog.

The biggest adventure in September was a trip to Istanbul for the Agile Turkey Summit. What an amazing seminar! We’ve experienced a whole new level of hospitality. The organizing team really took care of all possible details, making sure that we as speakers didn’t have to worry about anything. Exploring Istanbul was something to remember as well: wow! Check this after-movie to get an impression of the event.

November — A New Website for The Liberators

We started the month of November with the development of a new website for The Liberators. By teaming up with web-agency Fonkel and animator Laurens Verwijs we realized this idea in a 5-day Sprint. The Scrum Team contained all the necessary frontend, backend, design, test, Scrum Master, and Product Owner skills. This week offered us so many (confirmed) insights about the complexity of software development and the best approach to deal with it! We’ve shared our learnings in this article and video.

November was a month full of training as well. We facilitated public PSM and PSM II classes in Amsterdam and a private PSM II class at the Chamber of Commerce in Utrecht.

For The Future Group, we organized a 1-day Liberating Structures workshop. During the day we helped them discover the attributes of Liberating Structures and how they help improve collaboration and solve difficult problems. We practiced about 10 structures and learned the participants how to use them.

The last days of November were spent at the XP Days Benelux. This year we provided a workshop in which the participants explored how Liberating Structures can help you create an effective workshop with a great learning experience.

December — Liberating Structures Immersion Workshop #2

At the beginning of December, we attended a Liberating Structures immersion workshop in Hamburg. This had the dual purpose of team building for the design team and learn from the workshop’s design and structure. Afterward, we managed to immerse a group of 121 participants in over 20 different Liberating Structures ourselves in our own Liberating Structures workshop in Amsterdam. We’re still digesting all the amazing things that happened during this 2-day workshop, but here you can find some of our thoughts and findings:

• Liberating Structures immersion workshop: lessons learned;
• Being part of an awesome design team;
• What is a Liberating Structures Immersion workshop?;

We closed this year’s rollercoaster with a public Liberating Structures meetup at Bol.com. With this month's theme ‘how to make an impact without being part of a team?’ we explored and practiced several Liberating Structures. Check this public Trello board for the details.

Closing

While seeing all these highlights it seems almost unreal to us, that all of this happened in only one year. We consider ourselves very fortunate to have met so many amazing, kind, and inspiring people. Realizing these cool engagements in different countries and cities isn’t something we take for granted. It’s something for which we truly grateful. If you’ve played any role in this: thank you so much! Although it will be challenging to beat this year’s rollercoaster, let’s try to make 2019 an amazing year as well!

If you want to learn more about Scrum, check our public Scrum.org PSM and PSM II classes. If you want to learn more about Liberating Structures, attend our upcoming immersion workshop in May and/or join the Dutch User Group.