Today

To thrive in the business world today we need the speed of the human mind, racing ahead of our stumbling footfalls; we need the immediacy of eye contact and physical touch (embrace me, fellow traveler), and we need the creativity of the collaborative spirit, unleashed through trust and self-organization, eyes filled with wonderment, nerves tingling.  Maybe then we stand a chance.

A new role for 2010

At the end of last year I discussed with Tom Mellor (chairman) and Lowell Lindstrom (managing director) the need for a new role in the Scrum Alliance, a role which we began calling Creative Director.  I was offered, and accepted this role which began officially on 1st January.   I’m very honored to be joining the Scrum Alliance in this capacity, and look forward to working with the rest of the staff team, and the community in general.  An official announcement of this, and other important updates about the Scrum Alliance is posted as a news item on the SA website.

Here follows a first-draft, high-level job description that Lowell and I put together.  As this is a new role, much of what I’ll be doing is piloting new ideas, so expect the job description to change over time.

Creative Director Job Description

The Creative Director is a new role in the Scrum Alliance.  The person filling this role will be responsible for the creative direction of the Scrum Alliance.  Creativity does not come from the few, but from the many, so a key part of this job will be to reach out to individuals and groups in the Scrum and wider Agile communities, to collect ideas and synthesize them for the benefit of the members of the Scrum Alliance in the form of gatherings, workshops and other live events, videos and written work.  A second, and equally important part of the role will be to coordinate the efforts of the Improvement Communities, to ensure clear goals are set, progress is visible and results are socialized to the community.  The Creative Director will also initiate and coordinate special programs within the Scrum Alliance, such as the new Scholarship program for those in financial difficulty and a mentoring program for CST applicants. This role is currently 75% full time.

My heart is in community and in exploring creative directions in which Scrum can be taken towards the SA mission of “transforming the world of work”, so this job is a good fit.  In search of creativity and community spirit I will be traveling often to different parts of the world, and available to talk or run workshops at user group meetings or other community-focused gatherings.  You can check my calendar at http://bit.ly/wherestobias to see where I’ll be at any given time.

I hope to meet many of you over the next twelve months.

It starts with belief

Hey Lisa Barone, the 1980’s called — they want their values back.

And so this is Christmas, a time for compassion and kindness, for thinking well of people, for hope, for encouragement, for love.  How sad then, that at such a time of year I stumble onto the blog [ref] of the young and opinionated internet marketer Lisa Barone. In a rather ugly rant Lisa berates the unemployed for being, well, unemployed. “You suck” she says, from her ivory tower of Entrepreneurship. “Most people are lazy and a waste of your time” she continues, so shut up, stop whining, get out there and get a job, become an entrepreneur like me! And so on.

It isn’t that Lisa is wrong. There are indeed many opportunities for those who truly seek them, and Lisa’s black-and-white view of the unemployment situation can be put down to youthful excitement about making it big in a tough economy, and I say congratulations to her for that.  The worrisome thing is her arrogance, the sheer lack of understanding or compassion expressed in the article.  Lisa’s categorization of “the unemployed” as one mass of wasted space is both lamentable and shocking.  The values Lisa espouses are a throwback to the bleak and dismal era of Thatcher and Reagan, an era characterized by self-interest, competition and screw-thy-neighbor.  My entire 20s were spent in Thatcher’s Britain where the advice to the unemployed was “price yourself into a job”, “don’t shop when you are hungry” and other such gems, only just falling short of “let them eat cake”.  The rich got richer… and more fearful, as poverty and crime exploded onto the streets. Cardboard sub-cities of broken, rejected people grew up in industrial wastelands, railway sidings and deserted archways. Misery was tangible.

This is not the world I want to live in today, and this is one reason I gravitate towards the Agile community.  In the Agile community I find intelligent thinkers, change agents and social warriors who prioritize collaboration over competition, sustainable living over wealth, listening to over shouting at, and understanding over judgment.  This is not partisan politics, this is simply the embracing of our humanity.

There is no such group as “the unemployed” there are just people, just us.  Sometimes we work, sometimes we seek work — and it is not the work that defines us.  There are no doubt  many people currently working who suck too.  One’s employment status is irrelevant; one’s attitude to life and other people is likely a better gauge of “suckiness”.

That Lisa can write such a smug diatribe perhaps says something about where she might be on this scale.  And sad as it is to read an article like hers, it is made all the more upsetting by the number of her loyal followers who cheer her on.  It is to be expected that those reading her blog would be like-thinkers, but reading praise after praise for this attitude was really quite distressing.  Happily there were a few who called her on this, as I am doing here.  Her response?  Close down comments “before things take a nonproductive turn”.

No surprise there then. Arrogance has its usual sycophants close by: Cowardice and Fear.  Lisa’s response was to censor and silence her critics.  But hey, Lisa, as an internet marketer you of all people should know you can’t gag the internet.  It lives and breathes, and while it does expect to see opposition to your self-righteous stance.  Perhaps sometime you’ll take a moment to listen.

Meanwhile, Merry Christmas everyone. I wish you a day of laughter and hope.

This is not like That

This is a repost of an article written by Lyssa Adkins that first appeared on my old Agile Thoughts blog, in March 2009.  In the past few weeks I have had reason to quote from, and refer people to Lyssa’s words, so I figured it would be good to give this article a second life here.  Lyssa addresses our tendency to map new ideas to old, and suggests this may not be the best road to truly embracing Scrum.

____________________

“…we all safely interpret dangerous things in ways that don’t require us to change our lives.” — Orson Scott Card

I was honored to co-facilitate an Introduction to Scrum session recently for sixty-eight Project Management Institute (PMI) folks, who were all willing and open-minded. Even the ones I had known in past years who were not so open minded to Scrum raised their hands high and proud when asked, “Who is excited to try this in their work?” Within an hour of starting the session, though, I was compelled to stop it. My co-facilitator was introducing the group to Scrum and hands were popping up everywhere. The questions being asked were all some version of “How does this match what I already know?” “So, the product backlog is your requirements document, right?” “You can’t really expect people to sit together. That would never fly where I work.” “I just don’t get what you do without a plan. How will people know what to do everyday?”

When I stopped the group, I asked that they give themselves the gift of learning something new without forcing it into the categories already in their heads. “Perhaps,” I said, “just perhaps you will need new categories to understand what’s being given to you. So rest for now and learn Scrum for the sake of learning Scrum – without relating it to plan-driven project management, without worrying about whether or not it will work in your current situation.”

As I peruse the submissions for the Agile 2009 conference, I see the same tendency in the community as a whole. It’s a fervent desire to map Scrum to something else, something more familiar and, therefore, at least seemingly safer. PMBOK, CMMI, Lean, Kanban, the list goes on.

As the Orson Scott Card quote says, there is something in us that desperately wants to “safely interpret dangerous things in ways that don’t require us to change our lives.” Is Scrum dangerous that way? Absolutely. If you are doing Scrum well it will require you to change your life. You will have to give away your belief that having a checklist makes things run smoothly. You will have to stop chasing the perfect process and, instead, start cultivating your ability to trust the resourcefulness of others. You will cease using line items checked off on a plan as your measure of value. You will face your fears, all of them, about yourself and other people. You will stop making progress and start making products.

If you must map Scrum to something you already know, go ahead. Use that door to come to Scrum if that’s what makes sense to you. Heck, for PMBOK, you don’t even need to do it yourself. Michele Sliger and Stacia Broderick have done a fine job of it for you [ref]. If you come through that door though, don’t stop just inside the foyer. Keep moving. Immediately seek out people who allowed their brains and hearts to expand when they learned about Scrum and go learn from them. Allow the simplicity and depth of Scrum to rock your world and open your mind up to news ways of being in the workplace and getting work done, together. Try on some of the radical practices recommended by good Scrum coaches, even if you think, “Oh, no. I could never…” The practice you have that reaction to is the one you need most. So, do it. Let the dangerous thing into your life and allow it to change you. It’s absolutely for the better.

© Lyssa Adkins, 2009
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Lyssa Adkins is a personal coach, a Certified Scrum Trainer and a PMP.  She is the creator of the well-respected and oft-cited YouTube video The Road from Project Manager to Agile Coach and the author of an upcoming book in the Mike Cohn Signature series, Coaching Agile Teams.  Lyssa presents regularly at Agile and Scrum conferences and gatherings, and tends to make friends wherever she goes — look out for her on your Agile journey 

The People’s Scrum

This is a mashup of different thoughts I’ve had over the past few days.

In the five-plus years I have been teaching and promoting Scrum I have rejected the idea that Scrum is a methodology, or a process, and promoted the concept of Scrum as a framework for unearthing organizational dysfunction and empowering individuals towards a new way of thinking about work: Scrum as a force for change.  More recently, and it seems to coincide with the rise of Kanban, I have heard increasing talk of both Kanban and Scrum being described as tools, e.g. Scrum vs Kanban, by Henrik Kniberg. [ref]  This concerns me.

When I facilitate training courses, or work inside organizations as a Scrum consultant, I often teach people the art of relative estimation, and in the process usually teach Planning Poker.  Planning Poker is a tool.  The story template [ref] designed by Mike Cohn is a tool.  Likewise, a talking stick in a stand up meeting, a timeline in a retrospective, and various other techniques we employ to do our work well can be considered tools of the trade.  But Scrum itself is not a tool.  Scrum is a way of thinking about how we do our work, it is an state of mind, a journey, an exploration of self and environment [ref].  To reduce it to “a tool” is to completely miss its magic, and to bring us back into a world of best practices and repeatable process.  No, this isn’t a big leap. Consider it.

It saddens me to see Henrik Kniberg (and others) reduce Scrum to “just another tool”, along with Kanban and XP.  Kanban seems to be a tool for process efficiency and value stream measurement and improvement, and is likely applicable within a Scrum organization in a situation of continuously changing requests.  XP is –potentially– a way of being, and not a tool in itself.  It has however been reduced by many (most?) to a set of engineering practices and tools (TDD, continuous integration, etc).  I believe, that just like Scrum, truly embracing XP is beyond most people’s comfort zone.

The other direction I see Scrum going in is towards a Best Practice.  I feel uneasy when I see Jeff Sutherland attempt to align Scrum with CMMi.  I am not opposed to this (not yet), and I am hoping to learn more about the direction Jeff is going in, but I feel it is movement towards hyper-productivity, big profits and ultra-efficiency, and thus away from the joy of work.  I am a strong believer in business value and profit growing from a sense of love and satisfaction for what we do, from care and passion, not from being streamlined and made hyper or ultra anything.  I want to see The People’s Scrum, not the VC’s Scrum or the CEO’s Scrum, or the super-consultant’s Scrum.  I believe only The People’s Scrum is sustainable and true.

The People’s Scrum is Scrum created by the people for the people, not Scrum as dictated by a book or a training course or a consultant. The People’s Scrum grows organically through education, practice, failure and reflection. I welcome the mixed messages the various Scrum practitioners send forth, all the disagreements and arguments on the lists and blogs.  The knowledge work industry is a quagmire, a tangled mess, and teams working in collaboration and accord need to find their own way through this.  People helping people.  It will take a while.  And we don’t give up.

Scrum is a framework for organizational change and personal freedom. It is not a methodology. It is not a process. It is much more than a tool.  Scrum dares us to think about the world in an utterly new and different way.  We must learn to stop mapping and to start drawing in wild colors and crazy patterns onto blank sheets of paper.  Then we might start to get this.

The Agile Playground #3

Agile Playground Index: [AP#1] [AP#2] [AP#3]

Note: This exercise is probably the oldest one in my repertoire, preceding my software career.  I first used it when I was running advocacy workshops with disenfranchised inner-city teenagers – a  field of work not a million miles from the IT environments that many work in today… It needed almost no adaptation to work in Scrum training session sessions, just the recasting of some of the terminology.

Spaghetti

A game to illustrate the beauty of self-organization – and the pain of ‘expert’ management.

Instructions

Create a tangled knot of 8-10 people through a process of crisscrossed hand-holding. It feels awkward and uncomfortable. The other participants act as analysts, managers and observers. A vision of an open circle is offered, with everyone standing comfortably, holding hands. A constraint is set that in order to reach that state the hand-holding must not cease. The set-up for eight people will look something like this.

Once the team have established the spaghetti format, appoint and analyst and a manager (or ask for a volunteers).  The rest of the participants act as observers, and you should emphasize the importance of the observer role for giving feedback after the exercise.

The game proceeds in three stages:

1. The analyst is asked to write a spec: a set of steps the team members have to take to resolve the problem. Team members do not move.  You can offer the analyst a state-of-the-art analytical tool (a chair to stand on).  After a while it will becoem clear this is hard to do.  Maybe the first 2-3 steps will be written down.  Allow a few minutes, expressing impatience. Fire the analyst.  Employ a manager to direct the team.
2. The manager is asked to give instructions to each team member, using the requirements document the analyst wrote (if they managed to do so). If no document, use well-known micro-management directives to tell people what to do.  The team members will move if told. Team members not instructed to move should wait their turn. Usually this will not result in a solution.  Allow a few minutes.  Fire the manager.
3. (Of course) the team is asked to resolve the problem itself. What happens next is an almost text-book example of self-organization: a collaborative, reflective, emergent behavior occurs and the problem is quickly resolved.

Debrief

Debrief in a way that is comfortable for you, but with a strong focus on how it felt to be a team member waiting to be told what to do.  It is the feelings of frustration, irritation, boredom and waste that you’ll probably want to refer to at other times in the training. This is what Scrum helps to remove. There are many other Scrum learning moments in this exercise.  Look out for them and allow the team to discuss when appropriate.

The exercise lasts between 10-20 minutes.

Notes

If you have a large group you may want to immediately follow this exercise by allowing everyone to experience the feeling of resolution through self-organization.  Set up groups of eight and have them see how fast they can resolve the tangle.  Look at what happens when impediments occur. How are they resolved?

I have used this exercise with up to ten people in a group, but even with that number it is almost too large for the group to be coherent, and sub-groups can start to be identified.  Try it with very large groups, just to see what happens (dare to fail!) I’d be interested to hear the results.

If you are working in a culture where hand-holding isn’t comfortable, use short ropes or batons between team members.

This game has its origins in the theatre work of Augusto Boal.

Please don’t read this in IE

I have recently become interested in web-design.  Having been a software developer (ahem, craftsman) before moving into training and facilitation work I frequently find that I miss being a hands-on coder.  There was nothing (software-oriented) I especially wanted to develop though, as all my interest and work in the world of Scrum pointed me towards paper-based tools and human collaboration.

But then, a few things occurred, all around the same time: two friends asked me to design/build websites for them, I began creating a web application to run Welfare CSM auctions and I decided to improve the look and feel of my own Agile Thinking site.  Small undertakings, all, but enough to inspire me to read, play and discover the cool world of front-end technology.  One nice outcome of this is the discovery that inside the hacked-up mess we call JavaScript is a beautiful, elegant OO language waiting to be unearthed.  It is quite a joy to work with now.  The main downside of this small venture of mine is the (re)discovery of just how awful IE is.

Why is it awful?  Well, apart from the fact it is bloated and slow, the makers decided to create their own standards (I know, “own” and “standards”, oxymoron, right?).  Almost everything that renders as required in all five of the other browsers I test on (Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and Arora) renders differently in IE — and usually looks a complete mess.  Now there are workarounds, which is good, but it does mean that for every page designed maybe 20-50% of extra design time is spent tweaking and re-testing on IE.  And so accepted is the fact that IE does things differently that instead of fixing the problem, Microsoft have added a proprietary workaround (the comment-buried conditional if[IE] statement).  And no one complains.  Yes it works, but no it is not smart.  It is ridiculous.  And unusable, of course, by any other browser.

It would maybe be acceptable if each subsequent version of IE improved.  But it doesn’t, each version just adds a whole new set of quirks that have to be learned, and supported, and continues to leave out some very basic support

So, in frustration one day I just switched off IE access on one troublesome page of my WelfareCSM site.  I figured that if people wanted what I had to offer they could take the trouble to use a real browser to read about it.  And if they didn’t want to take the trouble, then maybe I didn’t want to work with them anyway.  I also felt it was my duty to educate people that IE was not their only choice (some people do not actually know this).  The IE alert on WelfareCSM redirected the user to the Firefox download page.

This action of mine triggered off a short twitter discussion, which I found hard keeping up with in 140-character bursts, so decided to expand it into a blog post.  I have since re-allowed access to WelfareCSM in IE (for now) but only while I contemplate a more thorough exclusion of IE by all my web apps backed up by a ‘browser discovery’ program.  You see, when things don’t change they tend to stay the same.  And as we all know, change isn’t what someone else does, change starts here, now.

By our current actions –supporting IE– we say to Microsoft, yes what you are doing is okay, we can live with it. We’ll continue cleaning up your mess for you, and spend many wasted hours pandering to your uncooperative spirit, your arrogance and your superiority of market share.

But it isn’t okay, and I don’t want to support it.  My proposed action may be tiny, but it is action, and if done right it could be an interesting experiment. I’d certainly want a way to get feedback from those affected by the IE ban.  Ideas?

Eric Willeke kicked off the original twitter discussion, 4 Nov…

[erwilleke] Ok – I can’t believe WelfareCSM.com actually REFUSES to render in IE… thanks @tobiasgmayer

[tobiasgmayer] @erwilleke I am considering making all my websites refuse to open in IE. Someone has to take a stand

[erwilleke] @tobiasgmayer Even if just frustrates some techies and drive away the “extra guest” types you require on the WelfareCSM? What’s the goal?

[tobiasgmayer] @erwilleke IE==60%++ more webdev time to support the worst performing browser. And everyone should have AT LEAST Firefox, for choice.

[erwilleke] @tobiasgmayer We always saw the flip-side b/c of market share. FF & Safari(mac) had “enough” to justify supporting it, most others didn’t

[tobiasgmayer] More web designers should refuse to pander to IE. Stop wasting time. Shut it down. What will you do with your extra 50% of life?

[tobiasgmayer] @erwilleke almost ALL browsers except IE follow the same standards. Support one you get all the others for free. IE is an arrogant bully

[tobiasgmayer] @erwilleke If a required web page snubs IE and the user is shown an alternative he will likely take it, and voilà! one less IE user

(a couple of RTs…)

[ravinar] @tobiasgmayer Can you explain your “pander to IE” tweet?

[BillyGarnet] @tobiasgmayer “pander to IE”? The reason we care about IE is that a lot of Internet users are using it. http://bit.ly/2WdDGO

[tobiasgmayer] @ravinar yes. IE is a piece of crap, that makes up its own standards. There are many better, trustworthy (and free) browsers available.

[tobiasgmayer] @BillyGarnet (IE) and we have the ability to change that. After all, supporting something because the majority does has a bad track record.

The Agile Playground #2

Agile Playground Index: [AP#1] [AP#2] [AP#3]

Deborah Hartman-Preuss organized a spontaneous (guerrilla) Open Space at the Munich Scrum Gathering, and it gave me the opportunity to run a couple of games.  One of my favorite games with large groups of people is a game I originally ran when working as a youth and community worker with disenfranchised teenagers in inner London.  Turns out this game is very suitable for learning about organizational behavior, and I have been using it in my Scrum trainings for a number of years now.

Movers and Shapers

A fast-moving physical game to explore group dynamics. Participants move around the room attempting to create different formations that rely on the positions of other people… who insist on doing their own thing! It is chaotic, messy and frustrating. It can also be beautiful. I never quite know the what the outcome and learning will be with this game, but during the debrief participants often identify both dysfunctionsal and healthy dynamics at work.

Instructions

Introduce this simply as a warm-up or on-your-feet exercise, to avoid pre-conceptions. The exercise requires an open space, unencumbered by furniture. Participants distribute themselves around the space. There is to be no talking in this exercise.

Part 1: Victim

You are a victim. Silently select one person in the room to be your enemy, and another to be your shield*. Once everyone has done this, each person moves to a position where his shield is between himself and his enemy.

Facilitator: observe what happens in the room, look at the shapes being created, the energy of the people. The group usually breaks up and moves outward. The dynamic here is mostly about blame and avoidance.

* David Harvey pointed out that using the term “best friend” rather than “shield” may be less loaded. Good point.

Part 2: Protector

This time be the shield. Pick an attacker and a victim. Once everyone has done this, each person moves to position himself between the attacker and the victim, shielding the victim.

Facilitator: observe what happens, usually the group will collapse in on itself. The dynamic is one of protection, about covering up the mistakes of others.

Part 3: Egalitarian

Pick two people, and move to a positon in the room so that you form an equilateral triangle with your partners, each of you being a point on that triangle.

Facilitator: note that the group will again (most likely) not come to rest, but the movement will be less hectic than in the first two parts. Eye contact is usually maintained, and implicit agreements made. The continuous movement is indicative of a living system. Static systems are essentially dead systems. If you find this part of the exercise results in stasis, introduce something to upset this equilibrium, and discuss the living/dead systems idea during the debrief.

Debrief

Debrief after each part, as appropriate to your style and according to what you observed. You may also want a general debrief at the end. Avoid making value judgments, and let the participants draw their own conclusions.

The whole exercise will last anything between between 10-30 minutes, depending on the depth of the debrief. I tend to find that exercises like this often speak for themselves and over-analyzing doesn’t add much value. An alternative way of running this is to have 3-4 observers standing on chairs or tables, to observe the patterns and offer insights.

This game has its origins in the theatre work of Augusto Boal.

CSM Auction

What is the CSM course really worth?  Essentially, the market sets the rate.  Trainers charge what corporations are willing to pay.  If the price is too high —as it was seen to be when the recent recession hit earlier this year— classes do not fill up.  Trainers/training suppliers lower the prices until sales start increasing again, and thus establish a new market rate.

The market sets the level that corporations are willing to pay for its employees to be trained.  But what if the employees have to pay for themselves?  The rates would undoubtedly be different, but how different?  I decided to take a first stab at finding out.

I am running my first CSM course where participants can bid for a place in an open auction.  The course will take place in Palo Alto at the end of November. Ten places are up for auction with a starting bid of $100.  The other places are reserved for the unemployed through direct application.

Because this is part of the WelfareCSM program, there is a requirement that all participants pay out of their own pocket, and are not sponsored by an employer. These workshops are not cheap alternatives for companies wanting to train their staff, but are for those who would otherwise not have the opportunity to achieve CSM status.

Applicants can buy a place outright at the approximate market rate of $1,2000. It will be interesting to see how much many take that option. My guess is zero.

The most anyone has paid me for attending the WelfareCSM course is $500. It is my guess that this is about the maximum the bids will go up to. It’ll be interesting to see. Of course, the number of people bidding will have an effect on how high the bids go.

You can watch the auction in progress from here: WelfareCSM Auction. All bidders will use an assigned id so will remain anonymous.

The Inadequacy of Feedback

Or more accurately, the inadequacy of the after-course evaluation process to gather meaningful and actionable feedback.

I facilitated three sessions at Agile2009 in August.  It was a lot of fun, but I found something deeply unsatisfying and frustrating about the Agile2009 feedback process.  This is not something specific to Agile2009, it is a fault of the feedback system we have become accustomed to and, it seems, have never stopped to question.  I guess I have high expectations of the Agile conference leading the way in new thought, rather than following tired, old patterns that are clearly broken.  Too bad that has not yet occurred — but here’s hoping.

In a nutshell the feedback process works like this: The session ends. Participants are given a form, just as they are ready to leave the room to drink coffee, eat lunch or play the networking game.  On the form they are expected to check some boxes on a 1-5 scale against some vague and ambiguous criteria.  They are expected to add comments.  Most do the former, few do the latter (fewer do the latter in a way that is both legible or meaningful).  The forms are anonymous.  There is no space for a follow up conversation.

The value of these forms to me as a presenter (I cannot speak for others) is almost zero.  Participants often give diametrically opposed feedback, so it is extremely difficult to use it in a constructive way.  Different sessions suit different personalities, and there is no way to make everyone happy. I also dislike that the feedback is anonymous as it flies in the face of Agile values such as trust, courage and transparency.

I am sure there are many who can explain from a psychological or systems perspective why this process is so broken and so lacking in value, and I am hoping someone will do so by way of a comment.  I’m looking at it here in a purely personal  way, i.e. how it affects me. I have always felt that such a feedback mechanism not only adds no value, but is actually destructive.

When I read these anonymous feedback forms (written under duress, and mostly as an act of compliance) I have one of two reactions:

1. I am hurt by the criticism.  I feel deflated and wounded. I feel misunderstood
2. My ego is boosted, and I feel flushed with pride. I want to brag.

It is not constructive to dwell in either of these places, and yet this is where I automatically go.  Clearly, I can work on this, and I do, but I reckon that a more meaningful feedback process would help dissolve the two extremes and create a better space for both giving and receiving feedback.

When someone takes the time, in a thoughtful and reflective way to offer me feedback, either in person or in written form, in a transparent way (i.e. not anonymous) I find I have feedback that I can hear, that I can consider, that I can take action on.

These days when I teach CSM courses, or other trainings I don’t hand out feedback forms.  Instead I use a process of continuous reflection, which is done through rich dialog.  Occasionally I have asked for feedback in the form of a drawing, or a haiku. Such mediums tap a different part of the brain —or perhaps not the brain at all— and help people get away from stating the obvious.  I heard of one Scrum trainer who hands out blank sheets of paper at the end of the training.  This is a great improvement, but the participants are still under pressure to write something meaningful in a very short time-frame.

I continue to consider and to search for new ways of gathering meaningful feedback.  I am fairly sure the situation can be improved by getting rid of the anonymity aspect, making the feedback form optional, and allowing participants to take the form away and complete in their own time.