How I met Lean Inception
In 2014, when I was at Agile Brazil in Floripa, in the middle of a lot of lectures and activities that always made me a little confused which way to go, I ended up choosing one of the lectures, but I wasn’t sure what was ahead.
Suddenly, I found myself in a lecture in which a couple of presenters were talking about a collaborative workshop called Lean Inception and, it was on this day, that I turned to my colleague, who was with me in this lecture, and said
Roberto!!! We have to take this to Terra!
From then on there were several facilitations of Lean Inception Workshops and, in 2017, I ended up going to work at ThoughtWorks in Porto Alegre and, on my first day there, I was very well received by Paulo Caroli himself. And a great partnership started, me wanting to learn and him giving me encouragement to challenge me and follow my own path.
Distributed Teams
I always had a concern when running Lean Inception for distributed teams: The need for everyone to be participating in the same room. It looked like it wouldn’t work if part of the team was remote, I even tried a few times to connect a group of people from another location, but the result was definitely not the same. There was some interaction, but participation was impaired compared to the people who were present in the room. This happened in workshops that I facilitated, in which part of the team was in Brazil and another part was in Chile and Argentina. Often we are unable to get everyone to the same place. The result was not good, so much so that, after a few attempts, I stepped back and thought that I would no longer allow remote participation, I said: “better not even try to participate”.
Remote by need
As of March 2020, we found ourselves in a new reality, bitter of course, but we decided: it is a situation in which we have to adapt and move on, this time fully distributed and this also includes facilitations of various dynamics and Lean Inception.
The remote Lean Inception workshop
I thought we would have to make Lean Inception work completely remotely, that’s when I crossed my path again with Caroli. We started talking, exchanging ideas and experiences to start doing the workshop completely remote. From there, I started to think about what tools I would use.
Tools used
To facilitate a Remote Lean Inception Workshop it is necessary to have the same elements as a face-to-face workshop and adapt them to the new reality. I decided to use the following tools:
Zoom — The means of communication. With this tool it is possible to connect all the people who participate and it is possible to separate the big group into small ones, and then return to the main room, a necessary feature to be able to run the workshop.
Mural — The walls of the classroom workshop are represented in this tool. We can hang posters, write on a white board, use stick notes, move the posters, include notes and notes and notes and notes.
The Template
It was from the Mural that I thought we could develop a template that we could use in the Lean Inceptions facilitations totally remote and that we could share this template with more people.
We felt that we needed one more person to build this template with me and Caroli, someone who would complement the team and look at the user experience. It was then that from Caroli came the name of Ana Paula da Silva, who is Trainer and Facilitator of Lean Inception and PBB by Caroli.org.
Until the current template, we learned by practicing a lot and, after several workshops, several meetings at night and on weekends, we arrived at the first version of the Lean Inception Remote template.
We decided to share this template publicly, after all, we want people to be able to use it and bring contributions to improve it.
