text: On Letting Go Of The Past, And Embracing The Future - Ekipa
  On Letting Go Of The Past, And Embracing The Future
  Posted on May 20, 2020 July 20, 2020 by Paul Hutton
  Facilitating experiential learning through games and team activities, has been one of the great privileges for me to have been involved in, during the last fifteen years of my professional life.
  During the last few years of growing and leading Ekipa Consultancy in South East Asia, I still look for as many opportunities as I can, to deliver our engaging and interactive agile learning programs for our clients. The highlight conducting these programs for me, by far, is facilitating the Lego Simulation, which teaches the concepts of Scrum, scaled Scrum, and other agile frameworks and practices in a fun and immersive way.
  Every aspect of it is a joy for me, from creating various themes of the simulation for clients in different industries, to sharing the vision and interacting with the teams as I role-play the Product Owner, and especially facilitating the debrief sessions, where people share their key learnings and "aha moments" from participating in the simulation.
  Frankly speaking, up until a few months ago, I never relished opportunities to deliver virtual learning events; I estimate that since 2003, I've spent around 15,000 hours leading training programs and conducting workshops in classrooms and boardrooms for more than 12,000 participants, and they feel like my second home.
  But life has a way of ejecting us from our comfort zones. I've had to adapt, along with our other Ekipa team members, to the "new normal" of working remotely, and to be willing to learn and discover new ways to create engaging and relevant learning experiences for those who attend our virtual training programs and workshops.
  And embrace it I have, after resisting it for so long. And in the embracing, I discovered that there are effective ways to create an engaging and interactive learning experience, even virtually. And live virtual training also brings some additional benefits for the learners, that the classroom environment just did not provide.
  I feel incredibly lucky to get to work with my team at Ekipa, they are true agilists, everyone shows up with a commitment to live the agile values and principles, and apply them to everything that we do together. We have thrown ourselves into conducting experiments, innovating, and challenging our previously held beliefs about what works and what doesn't, in providing our training, coaching and consulting services to clients remotely.
  Our virtual classroom has gone well past the "Minimum Viable Product" stage, thanks to everyone's willingness to learn, research, experiment, and "fail fast". We are excited about being able to achieve the learning outcomes of our clients and their teams, and in the process, for them to also get some additional and unexpected benefits that live virtual learning provides, and face to face learning does not.
  I'm still looking forward to a time in the future, when I get to be back in my classroom "comfort zone", and facilitate more lego simulations… not sure when that will be, but in the meantime, my team and I are owning what we can do now, for our clients, at this time when they need us the most, helping them to adapt their businesses, and support their teams in mastering remote agile ways of working.
  Is it time for you to gently let go of the past, and start leading your teams to embrace the future?
  If you and your team members really need to work more effectively remotely, we would welcome the opportunity to share with you on our adaptive and virtual agile services. Contact me at Ekipa Consultancy and let's embrace the future together.