The Agile Skills Library – EP8: Leveraging Video Reviews to Abstract Thinking

Leveraging Video Reviews to Abstract Thinking

Paul Goddard [00:00:00]: Hello there, Geoff. How are you?

Geoff Watts: I’m alright. I’m alright buddy.

Paul Goddard: Good, and welcome back to our, listeners for another edition of the Agile Skills Library.

‘Cause we are gonna talk today about something we called video reviews. This is something that Geoff and I has been part of our advanced scrum master training for a very, very long time, and we thought it’s time to share it with you and stay tuned right to the very end of this short podcast because we are gonna give you some content to basically do some video reviews for yourself.

. Geoff? Firstly, welcome welcome back. Video reviews. Can you remember, can you put a date on this? When did we start doing this?

Geoff Watts: Oh, do you know what I, happened to come across some of the old, um, handouts for some of the advanced classes that we did?

Paul Goddard: Yeah.

Geoff Watts: I can’t believe how long we’ve been doing things like this, you know, like over 10 years.

Paul Goddard: Yeah. We, we were doing. We, I think we should be proud of this. We were doing advanced scrum master training before it was a thing in the Scrum Alliance before it became absolute [00:01:00] certified in the Scrum Alliance. We recognized the need for that for scrum masters, had to have something beyond just the basic training.

Geoff Watts: We were pushing for that for years.

Paul Goddard: Yeah. So, um, we’re, we’re proud of that. And , an element of that within the course was something we called video reviews. Now we took a lot of inspiration from many people outside of the Agile and scrum industry. When we were creating our training materials, and we need to pay , credit to a man called Phil Jackson. And many of you might have heard of Phil Jackson, but if you haven’t, Phil Jackson was a very famous and very decorated. NBA coach, basketball coach. He famously coached the Chicago Bulls , in the 1990s. He went on to coach the LA Lakers after that, and he coached some of the biggest personalities in the NBA, including Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Dennis Rodman, and Shaquille O’Neal.

Basically anyone who of in the nineties that you knew was a basketball player, [00:02:00] had probably been coached by Phil Jackson. But he was a man of his time as a coach was somewhat ridiculed by other NBA coaches for his style and for his coaching methods. A lot of other NBA coaches described him as far too spiritual , but he was hugely successful and he firmly believed in developing the players as well as tactics.

We took a lot of inspiration from Phil and I’ve read a lot of his books. He’s written many books, but one of the things that Geoff and I kind of tapped into that Phil did was basically give his players a. Content and materials to read or to watch, which were nothing to do with basketball, absolutely nothing to do with basketball.

There might have been a chapter from a famous book, or there might have been a few scenes from a movie that was out in the theaters at that time, and he would ask his players to watch that or read that and then leave training and come back the next day. Come back to the [00:03:00] team and instead of doing a drill warmup, it would be sit on the floor and talk through what that chapter of that book told you about our team, about our performance last week.

And I love that. And we, we read that, Geoff, and we thought we could make something out that we thought there’s mileage in that. So we created something called video reviews.

Ted and YouTube are great resources for all sorts of online content. And over the years we’ve curated a library , of online content, which is what we think useful for Scrum Masters and product owners to look into and to tap into, but , in effect, they’ve got nothing to do with Scrum or Agile themselves.

And we ask our students to make connections to them. It’s a really interesting exercise and as part of this, we will give you some templates and some tools to use at the end of this episode. So you can have a try of this yourselves as well as a few example videos that you can watch and try and review with yourself , or with a [00:04:00] team.

So yeah, Geoff, I’ve talked for long enough, so a little bit from you. What do you think we, why did we put it into the course in the first place? Why, what did we get out of it? ’cause perhaps we could share some of the thoughts as why we thought it was so useful and what typically what people usually got out of it.

Geoff Watts: It’s good to, so I wonder whether, actually my answer now would be the same as when we. Put it in, ’cause I can’t remember now, but right now if I, if I was advocating for it, it would be a few things. I think one of them would be just don’t take the word of someone who’s standing at the front of a room and assume that it’s relevant to you.

So we wouldn’t present the video as fact or morally correct or something that, you know, the team should. Adopt blindly. It was more, uh, something abstract really. And so, so get people to think. So when people have to think about something, it’s more likely to stick [00:05:00] when they have to think about something abstract and say, so how does this apply to my context?

It’s much more likely to be meaningful to them than if I said, this is what I think this says about your context. There’s , a really interesting study about I forgot what it’s called now, but essentially a lecturer gave. Group of students, the same content to learn, but one of them had it to read in a really easy to read font.

The other had it in a really difficult read to font and the group that had it in the font that was more difficult to read did much better in the exams ’cause they had to work harder to learn it. So I think we were making these people work a little bit harder rather than spoon feed them information.

But what was fascinating for me, and this is another reason why I would do it now, and maybe I didn’t know it at the time, is that almost everyone in the room took something different. From the little video that we gave them. And that’s because they’re all in different circumstances and so they, they filtered what was relevant to them rather than us trying to assume that they were all gonna take the same message.

Paul Goddard: Yeah. And I, I think the content that we selected, curated at the [00:06:00] beginning has changed over the years as, as more content online has become available that we could, um, we could reference, but there would’ve been. Probably themes that me and you thought of that we thought this is linked to a theme that’s, there’s underlying principles within this that we feel are useful, but the real detail was relevant to that person when they watched it at that time.

And like you said, they could watch the same video again six months later and they’ll pull something else from it. That was important to ’em at that point in time. And we played around with the format quite a lot over the years. We actually set it up originally, and I still do this now, we, we give the room or the students in this case, we’d give a, um, a choice of six or so videos to watch and they can self select just from a video title and the speaker’s name , which one they think sounds interesting.

We generally also encourage people to pick something they haven’t seen before, because a lot of these Ted talks especially are quite well known. [00:07:00] And then they would form a group we usually said, don’t watch it on your own. Make sure there’s at least one other person you can watch it with.

We’d give them a laptop. In the, , good old days, we used to, , hand around our laptops and some audio connections so they could all plug in their headphones to the same machine. And they would sit in a quiet, , spot in the room or , in the building that we were working in, and then sit down for 20 minutes or so and watch the video.

We gave them some structure. In terms of a time box, we gave them an output a handout I should say. So they could collect their thoughts while they’re watching the video. But then we encouraged them to talk through it between them and their partners so that the small group and , the final part of the exercise was then for that group to come back and share what that group had learned about that video with other groups who hadn’t seen the same video.

And we allowed a little bit of time at the end of , that time box for teams to do a short presentation on a flip chart and [00:08:00] share what they’d learn and what they’d extracted from it from that video. And it would largely be. Different every time.

There’d be something some detail that came out that emerged for some kind of pain point that that company was experiencing right there at that point in time. But it was just really interesting that sometimes the things that me and you saw in that Geoff were completely missed, , but they’d seen something else which resonated for a different reason.

And I think that’s, it was a really good example for me, and it still is of an open retrospective format, if you are a scrum master or you are a coach and you’ve got nothing ready, prepared to go into a retrospective with, you can chuck on a video and let the team watch it and see what they come back with.

Geoff Watts: May, maybe we’ll cut this, but as you were talking, I remember a couple of people over the years said, this is just you being lazy, isn’t it? You just, you just stick it. It’s the equivalent of your teacher at school coming in. They were hung over on a Monday and they just rolled the video player out and say, Hey, watch this kids, and I could see why they’re saying it, but part of the end of the exercise it was, it is.

It’s [00: 09:00] a powerful thing. Yeah.

Paul Goddard: And it is a little bit about a different, it is a d different teaching method is that like you said, we, you don’t always have to believe what Geoff and Paul are telling you from the front of the class. Here’s someone else saying it something different. And you, you extract what you want to learn from that.

And then we can kind of guide you along the way. Yeah, there was always, yeah, there was a reason why we picked these videos that let’s not, they weren’t random kind of cartoons but they were, good speakers, in a high quality format. And it was a nice short, typically Ted is around that kind of 18 to 20 minute period.

Isn’t it? That sweet spot in terms of just enough to keep people interested, but enough new information so it doesn’t get forgotten.

And there’s some really good examples, and as part of , the content we will give you at the end of this you’ll be able to have a try at this yourselves.

Geoff Watts: So yeah, we gave them, as well as the videos, we gave them a structure that we wanted them to use to reflect on it.

Paul Goddard: Yeah. Do you wanna talk through that quickly?

Geoff Watts: Yeah, yeah, sure. So it was a, the three W’s, so there was the, well the three WHATS really. There’s the, [00:10:00] so what was in the video?

Uh, basically just a quick precis, a recap of the message, the narrative, what was said, you know, what was the video about? What were the key points? Then there was the so what. And this is where the abstraction is brought back to the reality.

Right? What’s that gotta do with us? And so that, that’s where they, we challenge them to think, okay, well this is sort of relevant here and that’s sort of relevant here. And, and that’s kind of, yeah, that spoke to me. So they’re making their connections there. And then the third part is the, now what? Which is, okay, so you’ve made these connections.

What are you gonna do with this information? Are you inspired to actually put something into practice? Do you want to go and research something more? Do you want to share this with other people? What do you actually want to do as a result of this? So that’s, that’s the structure. And they, like you said, they would present it back.

So there was, there was also a presentation skills element to this as well. Can you summarize these learnings? In a succinct way, get your message across to other people in that way. And also by, by [00:11:00] doing that, it also deepens the learning itself by having to present back to somebody else what you’re thinking.

It just makes it stickier.

Paul Goddard: Yeah, and that presentation skills was always quite a little interesting point for feedback as well, because typically we give them five minutes to give an overview of those three elements. What, so what now what, and they would spend four minutes talking about what, because they’d enjoyed watching the video so much, they just wanted to retell the stories that that speaker had shared in the video list.

And they didn’t leave enough time to share the rest of it. But yeah, that’s, that’s just a kind of typical response. But some of the nuances we always we, as part of this exercise, we played this back to our students and our, uh, our coachees at this point, and they’d give us some feedback on the exercise itself.

So what was interesting the way that we used to run it we’d share out lots of different videos and it’s a really interesting way of looking at it differently if a number of subgroups. In your teams or in your organization, if they all watch the same video, [00:12:00] would they all come back with the same thoughts and the same, , extraction.

And sometimes that’s an interesting, rather than trying to teach lots of different, , messages and share, lots of different , learning points. Is there just. One video can we extract and narrow down our focus , on a particular theme that we’re looking at, and also asking the students themselves or our audience themselves, to suggest content rather than Geoff and Paul creating content for you.

Is there content that you think this I wish, I hope my team would watch this. And it doesn’t have to be anything to do with what your, your current context. But is there something within that, a really compelling TED talk that you’ve seen that , , your Scrum team or your organization would benefit from learning from?

I know, , one organization that I’ve worked a lot with, they took a lot of inspiration from the David Marquet video, which a lot of people may have seen about the submarine commander. Basically, , running , a nuclear submarine and letting the, crew take charge of decision making.

And again, that video was a great [00: 13:00] source of inspiration for this particular group of people. So it can be, quite a, useful way of having a different voice in the room.

Geoff Watts: Yeah. . So we’ve, we’ve mentioned Ted Talks a few times. They’re, they’re almost readily curated and, in a nice bite sized chunk.

Don’t get hung up on that. We’ve, we’ve seen people use chapters from books.

We’ve seen people take little clips from films we’ve had. Um, yeah. The little clip from the Adventures of Tom Sawyer or the Karate Kid or some little things that just snip them out. Yeah. Even adverts. Songs or poems or blog posts or anything you think, okay, well this is a little bit abstract.

It’s not directly what we’re talking about going through, but it could be really quite useful or interesting.

Paul Goddard: Yeah, and there’s a massive storytelling element towards this as well. The idea of that speaker sharing. Usually good speakers will be sharing some kind of story and some kind of moral behind it, and it is the moral that sometimes is what we wanna bring out.

Excellent. Good stuff, Geoff, we’re, it’s some of our [00: 14:00] favorites so we thought we’d share it. What we’re gonna do for our listeners is we’re gonna give you a couple of tools to have a go at this yourselves. We will share with you a nice, easy to use. What, so what now, what structure which you can, uh, make some notes against.

And we’re also gonna give you a few examples of the videos curated content that Geoff and I have used in our courses. There will be many more other links that you can find and share. But, um, we’ll give you a little starting point so you can, and perhaps have a look at those and send it in your comments as to what did you extract from those videos and see if they’re similar to what Geoff and I would’ve extracted

and.

Geoff Watts: Tell us what you think we could watch and maybe learn from.

Paul Goddard: Yeah, absolutely. Always willing to learn. Thank you very much for that, Geoff. Really enjoyed sharing that one. We’ll ask our listeners to make sure they’re subscribed to our podcast and wait for the next episode to come, which isn’t far away people.

So , watch this space.

Geoff Watts: Take care. Bye-bye.

Paul Goddard: Cheers, [00:15:00] Geoff.