How many meetings does it take to make your colleagues improve? (Or: How far can you push a rope?)

I have had little success in making others change. But we can help them discover their own motivation to change, through Powerful Questions. After that we need simply invite them to participate in designing the change they really need. This is the way to get engagement that leads to lasting change, change you do not need to “push”.

The skill of asking Powerful Questions brings the tool of “pull” to your work. When you create a safe environment, in which it is ok to ask without knowing the answer, in which people can get curious and access their own creativity, you set the conditions for people to “pull” the help they need and to invent their own solutions. These may be different, but possibly also better than your solution, because they come from the richness of on-the-ground experience and address what is important to their own success.

Once you learn this skill, you will find endless opportunities to use it: while pair-programming, during design sessions, when a critical problem surfaces, when you meet customers, when making decisions, helping a new colleague join the team, in retrospectives… pretty much anywhere you want to learn, or teach, or make good decisions!

In this one-hour workshop, you’ll - learn to spot common habits we all have, that make our questions fall flat - discuss with others, to understand the subtletles that make a question more powerful to effect lasting change. - learn an exercise that you can use with your colleagues, to teach this skill. - design on one experiment you will try at home or work, to ask more open questions.

Facilitation will be in imperfect but perfectly understandable German :-)

Deborah Preuss abiggerga.me, Karlsruhe

Deborah kindles the potential of individuals and teams into flame with her warm and intuitive coaching approach. Her passion is to help changemakers increase meaning and joy in their workplaces worldwide. Ever keen to collaborate, Deb’s co-creations include the Play4Agile conference and the FearlessJourney game designed there; the viral AgileCoachCamp unconference, reproduced dozens of times worldwide since 2008; and the international Stoos movement.

Deb is an ICF certified life coach whose multicultural journey spans five decades, two continents, business, government, the fine arts, and multiple human and computer languages. Deb is a Canadian expat living in Karlsruhe with her husband Ilja, two cats and far too many unread books.