What?!?! There’s no agenda? This was my initial reaction when I looked at the agenda on the 2015 Agile Open Northwest site. At first, I thought that this was the craziest thing ever. How in the world can you get over 100 people organized if you don’t have an agenda? Then when I thought about it, it was the most amazing thing ever. Typically before a conference, I spend hours scouring the session agendas and descriptions. I’ll get my highlighter out and color over all of the sessions that I want to attend. But, this time, a huge weight was lifted off of my shoulders. I get to pick what interests me at that exact moment. It was brilliant! My colleague Bob and I were in the middle of creating a game that we wanted to submit to a future conference. Bob had the great idea of using the Open space concept to get real time feedback on the draft version of the game we had created. Another brilliant idea! This made me look forward to the conference even more.
Once I got there, I was amazed at the physical space! The organizers did an amazing job picking a location that would foster conversation and openness. Picture a space with minimal walls, concrete floors, exposed duct work and LOTS of coffee. It really was perfect. In the center of the space, there was chairs set up in a circle. In the middle of the circle were several large pieces of paper and markers. All of you open spacers know the drill (so feel free to skip to the next paragraph if you know this). Everyone that wanted to wrote down a topic that they were interested in or that they wanted to share on the large piece of paper. My card said “Who wants to play a game?” When it was my turn, I explained what it was that I wanted to do and invited people to play with me. I selected a timeslot and room and BOOM! Instant session. Just add markers.
What happened next was so incredibly cool. When I went to the room, about 10 other people who REALLY wanted to help me joined in on the conversation. They came from all different backgrounds. Developers, Scrum Masters, Gamers. . I loved it. We threw some flip chart paper up on the wall and just started brainstorming. They helped me come up with tons of content for our game and even made suggestions for future versions. Once I had that information, I thought “I’m going to do this again tomorrow!” That night, my fiancé and I spent a lot of time making a paper version of the game (talk about just in time design). So the next day, I did the same thing. I created another session. But, this time, we played the game.
Overall, I really fell in love with the open space concept. What I truly loved were the 5 principles:
- Whoever comes are the right people.
- Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.
- Whenever it starts is the right time.
- Whenever it’s over, it’s over.
- Wherever it happens is the right place.
It left me feeling like I was in control of what I wanted to learn and to teach. I felt like the conference had just enough guardrails without getting too prescriptive. I would definitely recommend an open space conference if you haven’t been.
Or you could try AONW 2016!
Another idea….come to LitheSpeed’s Agile Games Day on March 20th. Play is key to learning for people, it provides an enjoyable, low consequence environment to try out new ideas and explore new modes of interaction. Our experience as trainers and mentors and the research is showing that games are not just for kids anymore. Find out more information.
