Conversational Transformation Newsletter - No 1 of 2021

Hello Readers! While writing Agile Conversations, our attention was on what skills would help you to transform your conversations. Since publication, our attention has shifted to helping you actually practice the material from the book. In this newsletter we’ll set you on the path to learn how to hold your own “Conversational Dojo”, and also tell you where you can join one. We’ll share a few stats from the 2020 season of the Troubleshooting Agile podcast, and provide a select list of articles and other resources from throughout the year.

As always, you’re invited to join us on the Agile Conversations Slack. We’d love to hear your thoughts on putting Agile Conversations into practice. Join the Agile Conversations community today.

Practice in “dojo” sessions

Many readers found that Agile Conversations took longer to get through than they expected. The book introduces skills to be practiced, and that practice takes both time and energy. To help readers effectively practice these skills, we’ve published a guide to holding Conversational Dojos. To hear more you can join our session “Frustrated? Embrace the Pain with Conversational Dojos” on Friday, January 15th at 12:00 MST / 19:00 GMT, when we’ll be joining the Online Agile Virtual User Group to provide an overview of what makes conversations hard, and how you can use conversational dojos to develop proficiency.

The value of social practice is something we know firsthand: our own skills were honed in a small learning group. Those experiences were in mind when describing the social style of reading as one way to use the book, and also why the conclusion advocates for creating a learning group of your own.

To help you put this advice into practice, we’ve created our Conversational Dojo Kit. This kit includes a runbook and handouts for running your own dojo. The kit is paired with a primer through the recorded webinar “Build Agile Conversation Skills with a Conversational Dojo”.

If you’d like to experience a session, there are two live dojos scheduled for Thursday January 14th, and Tuesday January 26th. We will be holding more of these dojo sessions in 2021, so please let us know your timezone and what skills you’re most interested in, so that we can schedule the session that would be of most benefit to you. You can stay up to date with the ConversationalTransformation.com events page.

Troubleshooting Agile Podcast in 2020

2020 was the biggest year in the Troubleshooting Agile history. We had 62,694 plays of our episodes in the year, with the most popular being May’s Software Factory to Feature Factory, the podcast companion to Chapter 1 of Agile Conversations. Rounding out the top five we had July’s User Stories Gone Wrong, February’s Multi-Sprint Stories and Measuring Teams, and finally July’s Handling Negative Emotions Safely. What was your favorite episode? What haven’t we discussed that you’d like to hear about? Let us know on Twitter or email us at info@conversationaltransformation.com.

2020 References, events, and resources

You may have come across us in the wild, advocating conversational skills. We curated the following highlight list of these apperances. You can track our evangelizing on the Conversational Transformation resources page.

Do get in touch anytime to discuss the book, your ongoing conversational transformation, and any questions you have.

Until next time, keep talking!

Jeffrey and Squirrel