Use of the Visioning Technique in Scrum

A Treeangle User Story

Since attending a Treeangle workshop, we asked attendees how they got on with the new tools and techniques they had learned. We wanted to know how they used their new skills to facilitate and enable innovative thinking in meetings and workshops.

Treeangle uses a combination of process, behaviours and tools to stimulate different thinking and gently push you out of your comfort zone.

We also enquired as to how new practices had been deployed, in which areas were they used and what impact and benefits were seen as a result.

Kieran Watt, Senior Systems Engineer at BAE Systems came back with 4 different scenarios where techniques gained from Treeangle made a difference. Kieran is a Scrum Master for teams which typically operate in 4 week sprints.  Additionally, Kieran also facilitates activities in wider sessions and with the management teams. He is also responsible for embedding and integrating new staff into the department.

The following examples were reported back to us by Kieran over a period of time, between November 2019 and February 2020.

1. The Sprint Retrospective

Kieran wanted the teams to be able to effectively discuss and reflect on how the 4 week sprint went, what worked, what didn’t and what could be done differently going forward.

He deployed the Treeangle visioning technique as a practice within his team’s sprint retrospective sessions. At the end of each sprint Kieran asked the teams to describe their 4 week sprint visually, with pictures drawn on a whiteboard.  Using the pictures, Kieran encourages the team to discuss what went well, what didn’t go so well and what they could do differently.

The outcome: “The team embraced it and it was a really useful way of getting them to have the useful discussion but also to have a bit of fun at the same time.”

Below are pictures from the 2 teams he has run the approach with (you can imagine the fun the team had with this!).

2. Strategy Away Day

(application of the visioning technique number 2!)

The Head of Discipline, had arranged an away day for his management team to look at the departmental strategy going forward. As most of the agenda items were discussion-based, there was concern that the sessions may become less productive as the day wears on.

Kieran, convinced the Head that the Treeangle visioning technique would be perfect for one of the agenda items “What do we think the Flight Systems capability might look like in the future?”.

The visioning technique encourages a more energetic, fun and collaborative way of communicating and sharing ideas on what the future capability might look like, more so than a roundtable discussion.

“I facilitated that exercise and it generated great discussion and themes that set us up for the rest of the day.”

Kieran has been able to demonstrate to his peers that the Treeangle visioning technique works beyond sprint teams and impacts collaborative and innovative discussion also.

3. Envisioning a Career focussed Network

(the third application of the visioning technique)

Kieran and his management peers noticed that staff new to the Flight Systems discipline were finding it difficult to network with their peers, both from a social and learning perspective.  Integrating and embedding people within the department is key to making them a successful contributor and better focussed in their role.

To address this challenge, Kieran established a network for individuals new to Flight Systems where in the launch session, he used the ‘visioning technique’. This is a tool that he picked up from the Treeangle workshop in November 2019. Kieran helped the group envision what a good career-focussed network might look like in the future once it’s maturely established.

The technique used pictures drawn by the group on a whiteboard, it was very engaging, visual and fun, helping to ‘break the ice’ and get everybody involved.  

“it was really valuable to get them talking to each other (which was one of the purposes of the day), as well as jointly articulating some great ideas as to what the network could do for them which has given us some really useful ideas to start actioning.” 

Kieran has been able to demonstrate to his peers that the Treeangle visioning technique works beyond sprint teams to initiate interactions and conversations in multiple situations. In this example it made a powerful impact in a networking environment where new staff were struggling to make connections.

4. Engineering Away Day

In our last example, Kieran told us about an engineering away day that he facilitated for a team of 45 people.

As part of that day he wanted to get the individual teams to think about what they could do in advance of a review gate 6 months down the road.

In order to facilitate that Kieran used the magic wand technique to get them to think about what the art of the possible could be for their systems i.e. if they had a magic wand and there were no barriers:

• what would they wish for?

• how close did they think they could get to the magic wand position?

This drew out a flurry of discussions about how and why achieving the magic wand result was not possible and precisely what the the barriers were. The interesting discovery for those that took part in the exercise was that many of the barriers were hypothetical, people perceived a barrier based on past-history.

The outcome? A realisation that perhaps that magic wand goal isn’t as impossible as first thought!