Agile Coach Journal

I had the honor to present two sessions at the Agile2010 conference this week with my co-host Mark Levison. These sessions are the latest in our collaborative quest to bring the findings of neuroscience into our work as Agile coaches.

Learning: the Best Approaches for Your Brain

Session 1 was “Learning: the Best Approaches for Your Brain”, a workshop in which we present the basics of how the brain learns with details around the topics of Prior Knowledge, Mistakes, Emotion, Images and Integration. In the 90 minute session there is only time to cover 3 of these 5 areas. The bulk of the time is spent during group exercises to create and perform a short play illustrating the concepts.

Here are the slides from our presentation .

Mark’s article on InfoQ has much of the information that we presented in live format. You can read it here.

Continuous Creativity for Agile Teams

The second session was “Continuous Creativity for Agile Teams”, a look at the neuroscience of individual creativity and a toolbox for enhancing group creativity with a goal of reaching the state of “Group Flow” as described by Keith Sawyer in Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration. We have drafted a companion article and will release it soon. Here are the slides of the session.

The handout is here.

We will continue sharing what we learn about neuroscience and how it applies in our field as we make our way further in this fascinating subject.