Often as a Scrum Master you can find yourself having to disseminate large amounts of static information to your team. This type of information could be
- an introduction or an update to the scrum framework
- an introduction or update to a scaled agile framework
- a corporate presentation
We can achieve this by making a small announcement at the end of the daily scrum and forwarding an email, or a presentation in a workshop with the team. Then, more often than not, the scrum master then has to be a gatekeeper of sorts, ensuring the information is correctly acted upon.
If you are finding that the information isn’t absorbed effectively by the team, or would like a different method, then this post is for you.
Try the following:
Print out the material and randomise the order of the pages. Have the team take turns taking 1 page each until there are no more pages left.
Instruct each of the team members to read their pages in silence. Ask the team to signal they are finished by raising their hands. Do not rush this step.
Once finished, give everyone 10 minutes to find one partner and exchange what they believe to be the most important information on their page(s). Select one person to act as a scribe recording on a whiteboard the information the receive, as well as their own.
Repeat these steps until they cannot form any new pairs. By then the whiteboard contains a complete summary of the information, and everyone has covered all the material.
As a group work together to put a logical order to the summaries on the whiteboard.
When finished, you can use the 1-2-4-all format to ask questions like “What did you learn? Has anything surprised you? Is our reality different from what was describe? What do we need to change now?”.
By doing it this way we are using teamwork to help each individual learn for themselves.
As a scrum master I like this method because of two things. The first is trust. The close communication in groups helps maintain trust. The second is learning. The puzzle being solved and repetition undergone during each cycle helps the team remember better than any presentation or verbal update ever would.
You must log in to post a comment.