What a packed day. Today was the first full day of the Agile 2011 conference. I attended sessions on how to use Non-violent communication which was very interesting. This session provided some basic tools to think about the basic needs that all humans have, and how to take a coaching problem and use the analysis of what we need as humans to understand it from different angles. It also taught us how to separate observation from (often negative) evaluation, and how to apply that back to people’s feelings. If you can understand that, you can often unlock potential means of more effective coaching. Lastly, we did some exercises to consider what our own needs are as coaches – that tends to get lost in the day-to-day work of servant leadership to our teams but it is important to know and ground ourselves in order to be effective coaches for them.

In the afternoon, I attended Christopher Avery’s session called “Coaching Success: Getting People to Take Responsibility & Demonstrate Ownership” where he taught research on the Responsibility Process and how to practice it. That was pretty interesting from a psychological standpoint, but I feel like I need to read more about it to be able to really absorb it. Luckily, Christopher has more about this on his website at www.christopheravery.com.

Those two sessions took up the bulk of the day. At 5pm, they held a ‘Reunion’ session for the creation of the Agile Manifesto, which was basically a Q&A session to 15 of the 17 original authors. The session was humorous and pretty interesting as the authors basically recalled the meeting they had here in Salt Lake City 10 years ago where they drafted the manifesto.

Finally, the night ended with a reception – dinner, drinks and socializing. It’s been fun so far, I’m really looking forward to tomorrow and the rest of the week.