After first connecting at an Agile training course in Malta, we made a deal to form a learning organization for two to drive our personal development. To push through the discomfort of trying something new, we started with a small, but meaningful, experiment to post on Linkedin once per week for a year.
We managed to stick to it, publishing more than 52 posts in that first year. The positive response we received to our experiment led us to discover the power of visuals and, ultimately, unlock our mission: creating The Visual Agile Coach.
We started speaking at conferences and on podcasts, collaborating on projects with Linkedin thought leaders, hosting workshops, and eventually, we secured a book deal, leading to the Visual Agile Coach Playbook.
This Playbook captures key learnings from our ongoing Visual Agile Coaching journey about how visuals can truly spark engagement and make the workplace a fun and productive place to be. Such insights are particularly useful in today’s workplace, where teams are distributed around the world, often working asynchronously across time zones.
In this article, we’ll highlight specific tools (templates) from the book that leaders, teams, and individuals can use to reduce the “distance” between colleagues, stay engaged, get involved, and reach their goals. Our goal with each template is to help maximize your time — by, for example, ensuring that each meeting is as worthwhile and useful for each person as possible (and that each meeting, indeed, needs to be a meeting!). It’s also to help individual workers discover their own strengths and skills, so that they can bring their best selves to work every day, ensuring that the team environment empowers them to do their best work.
15 tools to engage individuals, teams, and organizations
The Visual Agile Coach Playbook features over 25 tools that comprise the Toolkit, which is designed to promote engagement in the modern workplace. The “tools” are much more than just fill-in-the-blank templates — they offer a range of resources from quick tips to case studies, explainers, and visuals to help you make the most of them.
Below, we’ll dive into 15 tools from the Toolkit that we’ve recreated in Miro because of how they help inspire teams to work better together and enable individuals to figure out how they can bring their best selves to work, too.
For individual information workers
1. The Personal Growth Rocket
Inspired by the Learning Zone Model, the Personal Growth Rocket follows the trajectory of comfort, fear, learning, and growth, helping you focus on your strengths and not your weaknesses. By encouraging you to identify your passions, interests, skills, and hobbies, it’ll help you boost your positivity, break out of your comfort zone, and achieve your ambitions.
What makes it different from many personal development plans is that it focuses on what you are good at, not what you’re inexperienced or disinterested in. What’s more, it can work for self-coaching for an individual or at the team level.
2. The 4 Dimensions of Me
This is a bright but simple tool for a complicated subject: ourselves! Inspired by the Wheel of Life and the Johari Window, The 4 Dimensions of Me tool helps individuals and teams navigate the tricky topic of figuring out what they want to share about themselves with teammates.
In fact, being told to bring your full self to work can create pressure — even if it’s meant to be a positive thing. Maybe there are things people aren’t ready to share. Our tool encourages authenticity and psychological safety, as users can create a wheel with items in the open (choose what to share), closed (choose what not to share), obvious, and “I’ll tell them when I’m ready” sections.
3. The Personal Development Canvas
We love canvases, so we wanted to create one that was unique, simple, useful, and inspiring. Use our Personal Development Canvas to logically set out all the components of your personal development, piecing them together into a comprehensive big picture
While some canvases have a fixed layout, this one can be tailored to your needs. You can use it at any time, whether you’re starting a new job, learning a new skill, or just want to reprioritize your current responsibilities. Across the top is a timeline or roadmap; the middle is your “why” or mission; the left is your plan; and the right is how you’re going to get there. It’s truly up to you to shape and adapt how you wish.
4. Traffic Jam Backlog
This tool was inspired by the phrase “go slower to move faster” and the 8 Different Ways to Organise Your Backlog template from Anthony Murphy, product coach and Founder at Product Pathways.
It’s human nature to try to do too much, too soon, and all at once. In doing so, work can slowly grind to a halt like a motorway in rush hour. To ensure work flows smoothly, sometimes the best thing to do is less (all at once and at the same time). The Traffic Jam Backlog enables individuals to visualize the volume of their work and determine which tasks to prioritize or park for now.
5. The Piste Map for Growth
At the heart of the Visual Agile Coach Toolkit is the Agile Growth Mindset, a quest for continual learning and development. The Piste Map for Growth, just like a real piste map, provides structure for progression, from green run novice to off-piste mastery — in whatever field you choose (not just downhill skiing).
We don’t advise throwing yourself headlong down a black run. Instead, use the Piste Map for Growth to plot your development journey with progressive step-ups, requiring new skills, new experiences, and ever greater proficiency.
For high-performing teams
6. The Team High Performance Builder
Teamwork is at the center of Visual Agile Coaching and this tool was designed to help teams shoot for the stars, together. An aspirational roadmap, it helps teams define what high performance means to them — and then how to get there.
Together, you’ll: agree on your high performance mission; break it down into its component parts; figure out your gap to high performance; visualize your current and future states; allocate owners to get to each step; and get working on becoming the best version of yourselves.
7. The Alignment Flight Path
This tool, part of the Team Toolkit inspired by Tuckman’s Stages of Group Development (“the forming, storming, norming and performing one”), is for the “norming” phase, when the team comes together and starts to bond.
We imagined the best form of teamwork — an aerial display team (like the UK’s Red Arrows). After all, who isn’t impressed when the individual planes converge on one flight path in perfect alignment? It’s a feat that requires skill, trust, and practice, and this tool is designed to inspire the same in your team.
8. Problem-solving No Mystery
Based on a well-known board game, this tool helps teams solve big problems with high energy, creative thinking, and collaboration. But instead of a suspect, you have your colleagues, and instead of a murder mystery, you have a problem to solve using teamwork, analytical detective skills, and problem-framing and problem-statement tools.
Players will learn that problem-solving is much more successful when it’s a team effort. While the game was originally imagined as a real-life workshop, you can take the game online and use breakout rooms and virtual whiteboards.
9. The Team Reward Staircase
Part retrospective, part learning exercise, The Team Reward Staircase is all about celebrating successes. Because we believe that happy teams deliver better outcomes.
Whether a task or project is coming to an end or your team simply needs a boost, set up your Team Reward Staircase. It’s still okay to discuss learnings and mistakes, but keep on a positive trajectory. Enjoy positive anecdotes and award some prizes to anyone who deserves (or needs) one!
10. Team Bounce Back
Disagreements happen. This is a fact of any team or organization. They can happen within teams or across them. And the worst thing you can do when there’s an issue is sweep it under the rug.
The Team Bounce Back template is all about uncovering the “why” — the root cause of the issue, which is far more important than just treating its symptoms. When you acknowledge that problems happen, you can start to recover from them, and how you recover and learn from them is what’s important.
This exercise includes Lean techniques, conflict resolution methods, and soothing visuals to help teams bounce back from conflict. Ultimately, it should help you make better decisions as a team and reduce the risk of future mistakes.
For collaborative, cross-functional organizations
11. Meeting Solar System
We’re on a mission to make all meetings a positive, productive experience, starting with the Meeting Solar System. Because we know that meetings are controversial, especially in hybrid and async environments.
In your meeting “solar system,” you’ll affix your sun — the purpose of your meetings — then you’ll plot your meetings and assess them objectively: Does every meeting add value?
This gives you a chance to really evaluate your meeting cadence and agendas, ensure that invitees know what’s expected, and make the most of everyone’s valuable time.
12. The Stakeholder Radar
This battleships-based tool makes identifying stakeholders and assessing their levels of engagement fun!
In our experience, stakeholder management can be overlooked and is often put off to one side for another day. But with the Stakeholder Radar, the sense of playing a game can increase engagement and team play, adding energy to an activity that previously might have felt like a chore. Use it when you’re starting a new project or team to help scan your environment, identify your stakeholders and get them onboard.
13. The Stakeholder Engagement Mirror
The Stakeholder Engagement Mirror helps users proactively engage, develop, and improve stakeholder relationships through empathy.
Stakeholder management often infers a power imbalance. We try to create more balance and mutual understanding with this tool’s mirror visual, which can be especially useful when you’re moving from stakeholder management to stakeholder engagement, and to make sure that your team’s needs are aligned with those of your stakeholders’.
14. The Grid Start
Inspired by Formula 1 (and also the phrase “car crash”), The Grid Start helps teams figure out interdependencies and cross-business responsibilities. while avoiding crashes and pile-ups between people and teams.
Its purpose isn’t to create the type of competition that drivers experience on the track each week! In fact, it’s designed to create an environment where everyone has a chance at achieving success and safety; it’s an opportunity to get off the starting line together.
15. The Diversity + Inclusion Maze
Diversity and inclusion are as unique to a team as the individuals that make up that team. So, it’s important that a team can have open and honest conversations about what diversity and inclusion mean to them.
The Diversity and Inclusion Maze helps teams navigate these discussions and, in turn, boost their performance by harnessing the power that a diverse and inclusive culture brings.
Visual tools: the key to unlocking your innovation potential
Whether you’re trying to solve big problems, celebrate wins, figure out your north star, or simply understand yourself or your colleagues better, visuals can excite, create empathy, make people think deeper, and ultimately, spark the type of innovation that organizations need now more than ever.
Olina Glindevi: Passionate about helping people unleash their creative and communicative potential using visuals as a collaborative tool, Olina Glindevi is a qualified Agile practitioner with experience in Agile Coach, Scrum Master, and Release Train Engineer roles. As Co-Founder of The Visual Agile Coach, Olina combines her dedication to Agile with her creative qualities, speaking at international conferences and delivering training to help people explore using visuals in their own Agile practices.
Ben Walder: With over 25 years’ experience as a change and transformation professional, co-founder of The Visual Agile Coach Ben Walder has a strong track record in Financial Services and FinTech. Starting out in project management and progressing through program management to Head of Change, Ben always seeks to make a positive difference for all involved in delivering change.
