<aside> <img src="/icons/list-indent_gray.svg" alt="/icons/list-indent_gray.svg" width="40px" /> The Sync Event

• Duration

• Participants

• Components

• 1toAll components

• The Open Space

• Pre and post-event

• Organising team

• Logistics - in person

• Logistics - Remote

• Example agenda </aside>

1toAll components of the Sync Event are about each team presenting information to everyone else. As such, look for relevance, conciseness, clarity and entertainment.

It is important for each team to have their own space and think about what others could find useful and/or interesting from them. The round robin is not time efficient, so this section will need to be compressed in every way you can think of.

You can make or break a whole SIS cycle with boring and/or incomprehensible team presentations.

Typical topics to cover are learnings, achievements and intentions.

Some recommendations:

• Give a fraction of the time people think is needed. We got best results with 1/10th.
• Until teams become good, review presentations before the event, from the point of view of someone not technical. Ask your Marketing or Finance functions to be guinea pigs if it helps. For all information, it has to be crystal clear:
  • What is it – in plain English, no technicalities or acronyms
  • What it means for the value stream
  • Why it is interesting/novel/useful
• Encourage follow-up technical deep dives and demos. But not to everyone - it must be a self-selected audience. Either at the open space or later.
• Make it fun in every way possible. Don’t be too clever about it - slapstick brings everyone to the same level!
• Teams tend to think in terms of work. Coach them into thinking and communicating more about outcomes, learnings and goals.

<aside> ℹ️ Within an extremely technical and stern environment we introduced a PechaKucha/Ignite Talk format. Each team had exactly 3 minutes to talk over their self-advancing PowerPoint presentation.

It was hilarious, especially for teams who attempted multiple speakers. Within 3 iterations, these presentations were engaging, extremely dense with information and cleverly original – which helped information retention. After another few iterations, teams were explicitly planning with the end of cycle communication in mind.

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<aside> ℹ️ Fun and silly prizes for the “best” communication work well. Never award anything of real value though - the effort spent on these communications must remain marginal.

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<aside> ℹ️ Play with different formats, eg each team covering the whole agenda in one go; or having separate sessions for learning and achievements and later for intentions.

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Next:

The Open Space

Stream Iteration Sync is licensed under CC BY 4.0