So many questions, so little time.

Today we had an inspirational strategy session with Dutch learning guru Wim Veen. In preparing for this session I puzzled on how to make sure we were asking the most important questions to Wim. I thought, since we prioritize our product backlog based on value, why not do the same with the questions we wanted to ask.

First I asked all the stakeholders and Wim to send me three questions he would like to have answered during the session. The first part of the session consisted of a presentation on our company and product, followed by a short presentation by Wim on his vision on the future of learning. Before the session started I had put all the questions on the upper right corner of the whiteboard and I allowed the team to write down additional questions that came up during the presentation.

What came next was sheer beauty
I asked the team to get to the board, have a look at the questions and to select the most important questions in order to discuss them. What happened next was neither what I anticipated, nor what I had planned. The team self-organized around the board, took a sticky note from the upper right corner, placed it at the center of the whiteboard and started to discuss the question with Wim. Then one of the team members took a marker and started scribbling notes next to the questions. At the end of the 2 hour session the team had worked trough the most important questions and even mind mapped the results on the whiteboard. I guess this shows that self-organizing teams do not only apply to developers, but to stakeholders too.