The Sweet Rupture , the book of collected Agile Stories

Last November the collective book of 18 agile stories written by as many authors, an initiative of Laurent Sarrazin was published on lulu.com .  The English version of the book will be released soon, so English language speakers, stay tuned 🙂

The Play-room : the location of change, an actor of change

I was very happy and had a lot of fun to write the story of the “play-room” a place where people gather to create and actually will become the change to Agile, through interactive and creative activities such as Innovation Games and many more.  I propose here a brief extract of the “Play-Room Story”.

The Environment of Change

“October2011. This wouldn’t have happen if it weren’t le the initiative to build a pragmatic guide of Agile practices for project teams. For geeks, fans of Doug Adams, that might have been « The Project Hitch-hiker’s Pragmatic Guide To Agile». The idea behind this initiative was to use the guide as « facilitation artifact  » for Agile adoption, allowing teams to start-up Agile projects.  A guide a kind of  « Oracle » to answer the troubling questions as  « How To Agile? » and « How will I be able to use this Agile staff in my day to day work? » or at least display “DON’T PANIC” in flashy letters if the previous questions were not answered. Obviously, it was a call to change and a legitimate will to find new practices and paths that help change acts and attitudes without loosing the references built by former processes and experience.

An adventure is made of a sequence of events that will eventually lead a number of characters searching to reach a common goal , to reach that goal, without knowing in advance the road to it.  Change is a always a jump into the darkness of Unknown. We may  strongly want control it, we won’t.  Therefore Change is an Adventure. As all adventures it has  characters and …  a scene.  When people change, their environment change, and that might be neither obvious nor very visible.

This  uncommon story has an uncommon main  character : the “central scene” where the “play of change takes place”.  What play ? The “Agile Transformation Adventure” one, initiated in October 2011, of course!  The  purpose of the “scene of  the Agile Transformation” was, and stays  even today,  to be an active  element of change and the lasting, present witness of that change. People that pass by just cannot ignore it. It blasts into your eyes. It will be called “the play room”.  To understand how things have happen , let’s go back to the beginning of the story.”

If this brief extract made you curious, if you think  you’re also a hero of a story alike and want to know more, follow the #AgileBlueBook hashtag and @rupturedouce to know when the integral version and other wonderful stories, written by fearless enthusiast Agilists will be available.

Until Then ,

Happy New Year 2013!