I’m excited to be offering my first conference taster session at Agile in the City in Bristol this week – particularly as there are so many pleasing parallels between the principles of agile delivery I used to work with and the sophrology wellbeing method that I’m now offering!
I’m also really keen to start a conversation about how wellbeing might be built into agile ways of working… more on this later in this post.
‘Tools for Wellbeing’ at Agile in the City
At the conference I’m running a session at the start of the second day called “Tools for wellbeing” where I’ll be introducing a few techniques to bring calm, focus and positive energy.
As well as experiencing these together in the room participants will also be able to take the tools away to use whenever they need them.
Coming home to agile
It feels very fitting to be doing my first taster session at this event, partly because it’s in my home city of Bristol, but also because agile and the agile community are still close to my heart.
(For those not part of this community… Agile is an approach to software development (and more) which is very collaborative and iterative, encouraging small teams to solve problems and develop solutions in short bursts or “Sprints” usually lasting no more than two weeks. The team start each day with a quick check in, called a Stand Up, and they also end each Sprint with a Retrospective session where they can reflect on how things have gone, and decide what to do more of, or do differently. There’s more to it than this, but these are principles that I’m referring to here.)
I was a big fan of agile as an organising principle during the years I worked in and with teams developing digital products and services. I really valued the collaborative and egalitarian approach to teamwork, and also the iterative approach to development – breaking things down into manageable chunks, testing, seeing what worked, iterating. I also loved the routines, particularly the daily Stand Up and the Retrospectives at the end of each Sprint.
Sophrology is agile too!
When I started my sophrology training I was amazed to discover that there were very similar principles involved.
Firstly, the medical doctor who developed the method, Professor Caycedo, took a genuinely iterative approach to that development. He did his initial research, came up with hypotheses, and then tested his ideas with real patients. He asked them to write about their experience, and based on this feedback he iterated and adapted the approach, returning for more testing with increasingly large groups. This process went on over many years until he was satisfied that he had a set of tools and techniques that would really produce results for the majority of people.
I’ve also discovered that this principle of adapting and iterating based on feedback is still central to how sophrologists work with clients. We spend time up front asking questions to better understand the context and needs of the people we’re going to work with. We agree a goal, and then the sophrologist designs sessions with the aim of meeting that goal. However every session starts with a check in, and based on that the sophrologist might adapt what they had planned, choosing different exercises or a different emphasis. We also invite reflection and feedback from the client at the end of each session, which feeds into the next iteration. And so it goes on.
I was even more pleased to discover during my training that we’re also encouraged to do a Reflective Practice after each session (in common with doctors and other medical practitioners). When this was first explained to me I felt right at home – as there was so much in common with the Retrospectives we used to have in my agile teams!
Building wellbeing as well as products?
Beyond these pleasing parallels, I’m also interested in exploring how these two worlds might come together.
- What might it mean to build wellbeing into Agile routines?
- What if the daily Stand Up wasn’t just about how your work is going but also how you are doing too?
- What if teams were given tools they could use to optimise their own wellbeing and performance, as well as that of their products and services?
I’m excited to be starting this exploration and this conversation at Agile in the City, in Bristol. I’m really looking forward to where it might lead, and how I might work with agile teams again in the future… this time as a sophrologist, rather than as a Product Manager or Agile Coach.
If you’d like to be part of this conversation, or explore how we might work together in the future, do get in touch.
Bring Balance 