About a year ago, I went to a training given by Sandra Bouckaert and Lydie van de Laar on the basics of Deep Democracy . My wife was 35 weeks pregnant and I was working on a project with worryingly limited financing so I was not exactly in the perfect 'zen' mindset for a day of mind-battering brainstorming. I expected to leave the day dazed and confused, yet found myself in the car buoyed up and even excited about what I had just experienced. Deep Democracy is a method developed in South Africa at the end of the apartheid regime and specializes in getting minority views heard. It is concurrently a team-building tool and an ideation tool.
After a day's sailing, we've dropped anchor, cleaned the boat and poured ourselves a drink. “So - what is it you do again?” “I’m a Scrum Master. It’s like the Master of Sail on tall ships.” “What - like the second-in-command?” “No, I don’t have a position in the hierarchy. I just make sure the boat and crew are fit for purpose and help the sailors and staff understand what is going on.” “Why would an organisation need that?” “Many organisations approach products as if it were an industrial process like transport. They load the cargo containers as full as they can get - calling it ‘scope’, then they plan very exactly how to drive from A to B to predict the costs and how long it will take to deliver. “For my clients, their product doesn’t actually match this industrial process very well. I get them to think of it as if they were explorers trying to reach some distant shore. “They should pack very light and get great at teamwork so that...
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