In short, yes. We have cohorts who effectively create a Navigator Backlog that they keep up to date and prioritise so the Guide can come prepared with exercises, activities and tools to elaborate on certain topics.
We sometimes identify a couple of extra topics that the sponsors or delegates are already aware of that are outside of the learning objectives of the Explorer and Adventurer workshops. There’s no reason why we can’t build those in to the Navigator Sessions in advance before signing off on the Pathway.
If in doubt get in touch with one or more of our Licensed Guides to discuss this more.
There are a few benefits to leaving this proportion of the Pathway undefined:
It is emergent learning. As mentioned already, our Guides are experienced practitioners and coaches as well as trainers who can react to the unpredictable and provide real value in the moment.
It helps establish habit. A huge part of the philosophy of our Pathway approach is to help our learners get into a habit of continual learning, application and reflection. By having a Navigator session every 1-4 weeks helps establish a ritual and after a while this becomes an unconscious habit of continual improvement.
It is pull-based. Agile approaches are more “pull-based” than “push-based”. We tend to pull what we need when we need it (features, materials, stories, learning) rather than predict what we will need in advance.
It spreads out the learning. As well as allowing for reflection on previous learning it avoids learning overload by spreading it out over time.
This can be flexibly agreed with your Licensed Guide and each cohort can decide on a different approach based on their circumstances. Ultimately though there are 15 hours worth of coaching sessions that can be used. Most cohorts tend to have one session per month and may even spread them out over longer than six months. Some go for fortnightly sessions.
Some topics are quite easy to predict in a way because some topics stand out as more important than others in the Explorer Workshop. It almost becomes inevitable then that we use a Navigator Session to explore that in more depth or detail.
Other topics emerge that sometimes surprise me. We’ve run Navigator Sessions on the following (these are not exhaustive):
The Navigator Sessions are a set of unscripted sessions built in along the Pathway where we don’t push content at you but rather meet you where you are and coach you on the specific challenges you have been tackling or are about to tackle in your unique agile transformation.
A two-day course is never enough to achieve a deep level of understanding. This is why we’ve developed this pathway programme:
Access to Video Modules & Smartphone App
Access to the Agile Mastery Community
Two Day Explorer Workshop With Free Book
Live Monthly Half-Day Navigator Modules
Live Two-Day Adventurer Workshop
The idea of mastery comes from an American educational psychologist called Benjamin Bloom.
Bloom recommended that rather than teaching students to recite data or answer a specific, tailored test, students should be encouraged to develop a deep and full understanding of what they are being taught through as much exposure to contextual information as they can.
Benjamin Bloom focused on Mastery
Each of our Pathways is a cohort-based combination of:
Adapted from the NATIONAL Institute of applied behaviour science learning pyramid
Despite the alternative certification organisations offering advanced training paths, they haven’t proven to be effective.
Less than 2% of Certified Scrum Masters go on to become Advanced Certified Scrum Masters and 4% of PSM I students advance to PSM 2 at Scrum dot Org.
This isn’t necessarily a problem apart from the fact that the learning objectives for those base level certifications are very low. They effectively equate to an introduction to Scrum and the role. They certainly don’t help people represent a concept or skill and relate it to unfamiliar situations.
How often do you refer back to your training?
Agile is relevant to complex domains; situations where the past is not a reliable indicator of the future and requirements and technology are rapidly changing. In these situations, learning processes and standard responses to a set of given situations are not appropriate.
It is not a case of learning rules or repeatable ways of working. People cannot come to a training class and be taught the right way to do things in every situation. Instead we need to help people learn how to make sense of the situation, sense the context, understand the nuances and make coherent judgements.
This is where the continuity of the learning relationship and the temporal element of the Pathway program comes in. People can learn, apply, reflect, respond. Together with their learning cohort and their Guide. Over time, based not on classroom scenarios but their real-life scenarios.
Mastery Matters To Us
“This book is full of fantastic insights into how to be a great scrum master as opposed to just a good one.”
Helen Gregory – Amazon Customer