The Liberators in 2019 — Our Goals for this Year

A couple of weeks ago we shared an article that contained a visual overview of the most special engagements and adventures we’ve experienced as The Liberators in 2018. In this blog post, we’ll share the ideas we have for this year. It has all the potential to become a year to remember as well!

One thing that we want to do differently is hitting the pause button more often. Slow down a bit. Relax. Reflect on the workshops, training, meetups, and/or seminars in which we participated and take some time to share our findings with the community.

The time for reflection also offers the opportunity to make more deliberate choices about the work we do. How does it contribute to fulfilling our mission: unleashing organizational superpowers? Do we have sufficient time for preparation? Do we really want to do this engagement, or are we only pleasing someone and afraid to say ‘no’? Do we believe that we can achieve the desired outcome and impact? Do we need this assignment from a financial perspective, or have we already covered our financial bases? These are just some questions we continuously ask ourselves. It helps us do the right things right.

Below you’ll find an overview of all the ideas we currently have with The Liberators for 2019. It’s already an impressive list. It would be awesome if we would actually make this reality! :)

Want to learn more about our purpose? Check this short video:

Liberating Structures

The ideas we have with Liberating Structures are…

• Expand the Dutch Liberating Structures user group and continue sharing all our lessons learned with the community. We currently have 640 members. It’s our ambition to have 1250 members by the end of the year. Given the monthly meetups and two immersion workshops this should be possible;
• Organize 2 Liberating Structures immersion workshops in the Netherlands. One workshop is already planned for May 28/29, the second one will occur somewhere in November. Stay tuned via the Dutch website of Liberating Structures.
• Facilitate a Liberating Structures immersion workshop tailor-made for Scrum.org in Ulm (Germany). During this workshop — which took place in the second week of January — we used over 20 Liberating Structures to discover all other kinds of training & facilitation techniques that might improve the learning experience of students;
• Support the facilitation of a Liberating Structures immersion workshop in Barcelona (Spain). Together with ITNOVE we’ll give the user group in Spain a boost!
• Provide 2 Liberating Structures workshop in Brazil. These workshops will be a joint effort with Alexandre Magno — known from Learning 3.0. The cities we’ll visit are Sao Paulo and Porto Alegre.
• Participate in the first Global Gathering of Liberating Structures. This will take place March 13–15 in Seattle. With about 300 like-minded and experienced practitioners, it promises to be a mind-blowing event!
• Organize a 2-day Liberating Structures immersion workshop in Boston together with Ryan Ripley and Todd Miller. It’s our ambition to make this a large-scale event with about 250 participants. We’ve already got a theme: Agile Leadership! The workshop will take place on September 24–25.
• Support the organization of a potential European global gathering of Liberating Structures. So far this is only an idea. But it would be awesome to create a gathering of Liberating Structures enthusiasts in Europe as well!

Want to learn more about Liberating Structures Immersion Workshops? Check this video we recently created for the December 2018 workshop. It contains a couple of interviews with participants who share their experiences.

The video we created for the March 2018 workshop gives you an inside into what it’s like to experience a Liberating Structures Immersion Workshop. It’s probably something you’ve never experienced before!

Scrum

The ideas we have with Scrum are…

• Continue fulfilling our role as a Scrum.org steward and improve the Professional Scrum Master curriculum in a community-driven manner. This means working with the awesome Scrum.org staff & trainers to update the Scrum.org courseware and ensure high-quality material;
• Organize public Scrum.org PSM I and PSM II classes in the Netherlands. These classes are mostly done in English given the number of international participants we have nowadays;
• Provide PSM II classes with our friends from Co-Learning (Belgium), Agile Akademiet (Denmark), Ryan Ripley (USA) and Joshua Partogi (Indonesia);
• Improve the PSM II assessment and the mapping with the related course;
• Support other Professional Scrum Trainers in giving the PSM II class. The PSM II class is a fun yet challenging course to provide. Therefore we want to offer trainers sufficient guidance to enable them in achieving the desired learning objectives;
• Help further develop the Scrum.org competencies model. Scrum.org has created these professional Scrum competencies to help guide an individual’s personal development with Scrum.
• Start the development of a public Scrum Master journey. This will be based on the journey we are currently doing together with KPN and the ANWB;
• Organize a public Professional Scrum with Kanban class in Amsterdam/Utrecht together with Dan Vacanti. Professional Scrum with Kanban is a 2-day course that teaches Scrum practitioners how to apply Kanban practices to their work.
• Attend the Scrum.org F2F meetups in Amsterdam, Delft, and Boston. These are great opportunities to catch-up with Scrum experts and jointly improve existing material and/or create new exercises.
• Organize meetups exclusively for participants of courses and workshops provided by The Liberators. Whatever training, workshop or course students follow, and whatever certificates they have earned, the best lessons are learned through practice. These meetups are our way to support students in their professional journey and keep them inspired and motivated on what can sometimes be a challenging journey to mastery. The meetups we organize focus on peer-to-peer coaching, building networks, and the sharing of experiences, lessons learned, and useful practices.

Customers

The type of work we’re going to do with some customers…

• Continue the Scrum Master journey at KPN and the ANWB. 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.
• Support the KNAW (the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) in their adoption of the Scrum framework. Their intention is to use the framework to become more responsive to change, to provide more focus and generate more value (e.g. an empirical process).
• Share experiences and ideas with Swisscom about their Scrum Master journey. Since August 2018 Swisscom started its own journey with a group of Scrum Masters. Together with a couple of Scrum Masters from KPN, we’ll share insights and findings of both our journeys.
• Provide the workshop “The 8 Stances of a Scrum Master” at TomTom. In this 1-day workshop, we’ll collaboratively explore the diversity, complexity, and comprehensiveness of the role.
• Facilitate a workshop in which SimCorp explores how they can take Scrum to the next level. Topics that we might touch upon are ‘how to improve the meeting culture’, ‘how do you enable teams to be self-organizing, self-managing and self-sufficient?’ and ‘how can we create an environment conducive to being a Scrum Master?;
• Coach Scrum Teams @ smaller companies, like Sparkles and Utilize. Coaching teams on how to use Scrum effectively continues to be one of our core practices. As larger companies can pay more, it can be tempting to work exclusively for them. But we try to make a conscious effort to spend part our time working with smaller organizations where we can create a bigger impact. Often, a small push in the right direction is all they need to get on the right track;

Seminars and events

Some of the seminars we are going to participate in are…

• Scrum Day Europe in Amsterdam. Given the date — July 11th — this seminar is the ideal opportunity to catch up with some friends before kicking off the holiday season. It’s our intention to host a workshop, hopefully, our proposal will be accepted by the organizing committee.
• XP Days Benelux in Belgium. After having attended the previous 6 editions we will be present in 2019 as well. Last year we not only hosted a session about Liberating Structures but also sponsored the Friday afternoon drinks. Sponsoring such an awesome event is definitely something we’ll reconsider for this year as well!
• Scrum Day <fill in country>. As Scrum.org stewards we are improving the Professional Scrum Master curriculum in a community-driven manner. Therefore we continuously gather feedback from the people using the Scrum framework. Given the increasing amount of Scrum Days in different countries, we’ve got enough opportunities to collaborate with the Scrum community!

The Liberators Friends

The ideas we have with The Liberators Friends are…

The Liberators Friends is a close network of friends from The Liberators. Together, we collaborate to help customers in a way that benefits them and us. We also support each other in our personal journey becoming better versions of ourselves. With the growth of the network, we will most likely join forces even more often in providing training, workshops, coaching, and creating inspiring content. Upcoming March we’ll use a full day to create a ‘purpose-to-practice’. This Liberating Structure is going to help us decide what principles to follow, whom to include, what structure to choose and what practices to do in order to make our purpose come to life.

Research & Development

The ideas we have for Research & Development are…

• Writing blog posts. What a surprise :) With the founding of The Liberators we also started a shared publication on Medium. Besides the articles written by Christiaan or myself, you can also expect contributions from The Liberators Friends. One article every week should definitely be feasible.
• Create videos. Last year we created about 20 videos capturing our journey. This year we’ll expand our YouTube channel with more videos about the training, workshops, and events we organize. Another idea is to create short videos for some of our most popular blog posts. For example the Scrum Mythbuster series. People tired of reading can still grasp the essence of these articles in these 3–5-minute videos. Stay tuned!
• Improve our website theliberators.com. In November 2018 we launched the first version of our new website. Of course, the Product Backlog still contains lots of cool ideas that we would like to turn into reality. Using an iterative and incremental approach, you’ll see the website improve continuously!
• R&D Sprints. Focus. That’s the most important element when doing R&D. For this year we scheduled (at least) 4 weeks in which we will focus on writing articles, develop new products, and/or improving courseware. During this week we’ll switch our telephones off, won’t open our mailbox, and ignore Slack. Let’s be productive :)
• Expand the Facilitation Toolbox. The public Trello board “Facilitation Toolbox” contains icebreakers, Retrospectives formats, Liberating Structures, energizers, and all kinds of other techniques that you can use for facilitation. Given the earlier mentioned R&D Sprints, this Facilitation Toolbox will be expanded rapidly!
• Publish a book about Zombie-Scrum. We’ve already written quite a few articles about Zombie-Scrum. Yet there’s more to tell. Much more! The Zombie-Scrum website contains information about how to recognize Zombie-Scrum and some inspiration for treatment. The book will contain in-depth information, tactics, and strategies to prevent or cure teams and organizations.
• Distribute our material via a webshop. We love to create games, exercises, visuals, and other things that are helpful to Scrum Teams. In the article ‘Free games, templates, formats, and inspiration for Scrum Teams’ you can find some examples. Given the increasing demand for these articles and our ambition to create even more products, we’ll set up a webshop to enable distribution to our community.

Closing

In this article, we’ve shared an overview of all the plans we currently have with The Liberators for 2019. It contains the ideas we have with Liberating Structures, Scrum, The Liberators Friends, seminars & events, and Research & Development. It promises to become an awesome year! It would be great if you can be part of it as well!

What is something that stands out for you? What do you think of the goals and initiatives we have in mind? Anything else you would like to see us working on? We would love to get feedback from you as well, especially on the R&D part.

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.