Short introduction for playing fearless journey at a conference

1. Fearless Journey
Up to new horizons
Martin Heider, infomar software
@martinheider

2. Your Tour Guides
Martin Heider , @martinheider
Agile Consultant, Coach and Trainer
Supports teams and organisations by introducing and
developing Agile approaches in their environments.
Community Gardener
Speaker on international conferences, initiator of Agile Coach
Camp Germany, Play4Agile and further community activities.
20+ years Development Background
Vision for teams/orgs and customers :
• „Thank God it‘s Monday“
• „I love your Product“
Holger Koschek, @holgerkoschek
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3. History of Fearless Journey
• Book „Fearless Change“
by Linda Rising and Mary Lynn Manns
• Play4Agile unconference
• Development of card game „Fearless Journey“ by Deborah
Hartmann Preuss et al.
• Why it pays off to play Fearless Journey?
• Why it still pays off to read Fearless Change?
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4. Goal of Fearless Journey
Overcome impediments outside your direct area of influence
in order to get from a <starting situation> towards a <goal>:
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5. Examples for Fearless Journey
• From sporadic knowledge to general usage of Design Patterns
• From isolated TDD Evangelists to guaranteed exceptional quality using TDD
• From Nightly builds to Continuous Integration
• From sporadic Pairing to Pairing within all development teams
• Von Continuous Integration zu Continuous Deployment
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6. Strategic Patterns of Fearless Journey
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7. Value of Fearless Journey
• Get ideas for new behaviours & actions
• Increased optimism that your goal is achievable
• Learn consensus decision-making, collaboration and
appreciation.
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8. „Team Building“
• Organize yourself at tables à 4 – 8 persons
• Every Table has 4 „player“
• If you are more than 4 people at a table, players are made
of 1-2 people
TeamSpieler
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9. Success & Start situation
• Agree in your team on
– an important valuable goal, which is
difficult to reach, because there exist
important factors outside your team‘s
control. Make the goal really outstanding
and write in on a index card.
– the corresponding start situation ans
write it also on a index card.
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10. Impediments on the way
• Within your team write at least 20 impediments on index
cards, that might happen on your way towards your goal.
Make the impediments as specific as possible.
• Add 1/5 of empty impediment cards to your stack
• Shuffle all impediment cards
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11. Let‘s start
• Start Setting
– Set Start and Success cards 40 or 80 cm apart
– Make a note for yourself how close you feel you are to the goal
(0 = far far awy, 10 = already there)
• Player
– Draw a path card
– Draw a impediment card (if empty, it‘s the next players turn), read it aloud and block
the last played way card with it
• Team solves an impediment with one or more pattern cards, as long as
no team member has a veto
• Player thanks the team members that contributed pattern cards for
solving the impediment at hand by giving them cards of its own hand.
Afterwards the player fills up ist hand from the pattern card stack.
• Next players turn in clockwise direction
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12. Debriefing
• Discuss following questions at your
tables:
1. What were your highlights during
playing Fearless Journey?
2. What was difficult? What was easy?
What was surprising?
3. How do you feel about your original
Goal now?
4. What‘s the next step in your Journey?
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13. Further Links
• Printed rules, ways and Fearless Change Pattern cards can
be found at
– http://sn.im/FearlessJourneyGame
– http://www.fearleassjourney.info
• There you can also
– leave Feedback, if you used the game in your context
– Buy the „designed“ card game
• Versions are available in six languages
English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch
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14. Thanks! Questions?
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Martin Heider ,
• 20+ years Development Background
• Agile Consultant, Coach and Trainer
• Community Gardener
• Twitter: @martinheider
• Email: martin.heider [at] infomar.de
Holger Koschek
• 20+ years Development Background
• Agile Consultant, Coach and Trainer
• Twitter: @holgerkoschek
• Email: beratung [at] infomar.de