Exploring the Unique Format of Agile Coach Camps | Paul Boos

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In this episode, Paul Boos, an Agile coach at Excella and program director of Agile Coach Camps at Agile Alliance, discusses coach camps and their unique format. He shares his journey of becoming an Agile coach and explains how coach camps differ from traditional events and conferences.

Paul works with executives and teams to develop pragmatic approaches to achieve enterprise agility applying Lean, Lean Startup, iterative approaches, and portfolio management techniques. Paul speaks on many Agile topics at conferences and events. He serves on the organizing committee for all of the Agile Coach Camps within the United States.

Takeaways

• Coach camps are unique events that offer a self-organizing and open space format for participants to explore various topics related to coaching.
• The origins of coach camps can be traced back to the idea of creating a space for hallway conversations and leveraging the principles of OpenSpace.
• Coach camps provide an opportunity for participants to learn from each other, share experiences, and make connections with like-minded individuals.
• The experience at coach camps is conversation-based, with participants proposing topics and engaging in discussions rather than attending presentations.
• Hosting coach camps within organizations can be beneficial for addressing organization-specific challenges and fostering collaboration among coaches.
• Coach camps provide a collaborative and supportive environment for agile coaches and other professionals to share knowledge and learn from each other.
• Participants come from various backgrounds and roles, including scrum masters, consultants, managers, and sociologists.
• The camps cover a wide range of topics, from technical skills to humanistic approaches, allowing participants to explore different areas of interest.
• Key takeaways include letting go of predefined expectations, making connections with like-minded professionals, and being open to new experiences and perspectives.

Connect with Paul

• Regional Camps: https://agilecoachcamp.org/
• Worldwide Camps: https://agilecoachcamp.net/ 
• Website: https://www.excella.com/ 
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulboos/

Connect with Vit

• Website: https://vitlyoshin.com/ 
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vit-lyoshin/ 
• X: https://twitter.com/vitlyoshin 
• Other: https://linktr.ee/vitlyoshin 

Timestamps

(00:00) Intro

(08:43) Origins and Evolution of Coach Camps

(10:51) Agile Coach Camps Experience

(15:27) Learnings During Agile Coach Camps

(20:07) Requirements and Specifics to Agile Coach Camps

(23:11) Facilitation Techniques for Agile Coach Camps

(25:42) Remote Agile Coach Camps

(30:17) Attendance of Agile Coach Camps

(32:53) Hosting an Agile Coach Camp within an Organization

(35:33) Who Come to Agile Coach Camps

(41:44) Challenges Coaches Have During Agile Coach Camps

(45:09) Scheduling and Locations of Agile Coach Camps

(50:17) Advice to People Who Want to Participate For the First Time

(53:20) Advice to New Agile Coach Camp Organizers

(54:58) Coach Camps Alongside Traditional Conferences

(58:37) Other Open Space Type Events

Transcript (Edited by Vit Lyoshin for better readability)

Vit Lyoshin (00:02.081)

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Vit Lyoshin Podcast. And today’s guest is Paul Boos. He is an Agile coach at Excella and also the program director of Agile Coach Camps at Agile Alliance. Welcome, Paul.

 

Paul Boos (00:22.734)

Thanks, I really appreciate it.

 

Vit Lyoshin (00:25.409)

So I invited you today to talk about coach camps. This is a very interesting topic and many people don’t know about it. And I would hope that we could cover topics like or questions like what this is, what people can expect from them and how is it different from any other events or conferences that people usually go to or traditional events that they go to.

But before we jump into the conversation, could you please tell a little bit about your journey, about how you become a agile coach and innovation coach?

 

Paul Boos (01:06.958)

Sure. So I went back many moons ago. After graduating from college, I went into the military. And then from there, after flying for a bit, got into IT while still in the military. Did your typical stint of hey, developer, sysadmin, bit of analyst, became a project manager, program manager. While I was in the project manager, program manager role, I started learning about agile approaches and introduced some of those to one of my teams. The actual first one I ran across was actually one called Tracer Bullet Development. It’s in the book Ship It, if you’re looking for that. So not one that most people know about, but definitely under the agile umbrella has a very much of an XP flavor.

After that, I learned about Crystal then Scrum, XP, Kanban, and so forth. And so I’ve had wide exposure to a bunch of different approaches as a practitioner. Then I went into the government and they were trying to implement Scrum. And I basically had project managers that I actually helped become Scrum Masters with training and some mentoring and stuff.

Did a stint there, then went on to EPA, did mostly Kanban type work there, because I was running a maintenance group. And sort of got a little tired of the government gig type thing. I will say then in this particular case, I had a manager that was not very supportive of agile approaches. I didn’t really understand them. And so a chance to move out, I mean, after looking around in the government for a while and not really finding anything I really wanted to do, I had a chance, I noticed, to become a coach.

I’m going to come back to coach camps in a second because that’s a significant part of why I chose to do that. I had friends that were coaches that were advising, you could probably do great as a coach. So I had an opportunity to go coach and I ended up coaching in the government space at DHS, US Citizenship and Immigration. And from there, I’ve been doing coaching now for over 10 years, I’m probably, I’m coming up on 12 years this coming November. So I’m doing pretty much nothing but coaching. To come back a little bit to coach camps, the first coach camp I went to was while I was still a government employee. In fact, that was the only one there that carried the title branch chief compared to, you know, software engineer or, you know, coach, some of them carried the title coach.

Other people didn’t really were doing coaching but didn’t really realize they were doing coaching until they went to camp. And that was the first camp I ever went to in 2008. And it was, it was a life-changing event, to be honest with you. I made really good friends there. Made some people I just chatted with and never really saw them too much again. A lot of other ones I kept in touch with for, you know, years and still keep in touch with a good number of them.

And so, which is really great. I mean, that’s, you know, making these lifelong connections is really great, especially in your industry. I think that’s something that doesn’t happen very often. You don’t get that at a standard conference or anything like that.

And, you know, after that experience, I got approached by a couple of very senior coaches who have been doing it for a very long time. And we wanted to put something together. They were interested in doing it in Raleigh. We weren’t able to pull one off the very next year. So 2008 was the first one. As far as I know, there were no camps in 2009, but several people were trying to pull things together. And then in 2008, I am aware there was at least one in Canada. We had one in the US and I believe there was one in Germany. And then from there it just exploded. So there are camps all over the world now.

I’ve tried it for a long time there. I was involved in every US camp that was set up. And then just to sort of round out the, how I got into the coach camp things and the initiative and the Alliance in 2015, one of the board members of the Alliance said, Hey, we think there, you know, there would be a really good idea that if we could get a member initiative around coach camps. But since I’m acting as the gentleman, Declan Whelan, who I’d met at the first camp that brought the idea to me said, since I’m on the board, I really can’t do something like that. It’s a member initiative, not a board initiative. And so if that interests you, would you be interested in putting in a proposal on how you would want to run that? So I put in a proposal in 2016, and we kicked off the actual initiative for coach camps with the idea of that initiative, trying to help other camps get started for those that hadn’t gotten started.

Like I said, there were ones all over the world, but there were still other ones that needed help or people wanted to do them and were struggling a little bit. And then just to round out the history in 2019, I approached the board and said, one of the things we’ve sort of lost in coach camps that we used to have in the 2008 camp was that a lot of people were from around the world. What had sort of happened when you had US camps, camps in Germany, camps in Norway, Canada, they tend to be very regional. You know, yes, some Canadians sometimes cross the border for us. Sometimes we cross the border for them. But for the most part, everybody’s a little more insular. Europe’s a little bit different because they’re so close together. But that’s not true. Like Australia, they have like four camps. But so for them, leaving their state is a big deal because it’s such a big country.

So that was the thing with the worldwide one. So we tried to get that worldwide feeling again. So that’s more or less a little bit of me and the history of the camps. I have more things about the camps too that are really good. I was not involved in the setup of the first one.

 

Vit Lyoshin (07:38.305)

Okay, you were a participant. Yeah, that’s great and thanks for sharing your story and a little bit of the history of camps. But where does this idea come from? Who first thought about this format, this idea, and how is it originated?

 

Paul Boos (08:06.702)

Yeah, that’s great. So two people that I still somewhat keep in touch with, Nuresh Jain out of India and Deb Hartman-Prowse out of Canada came up with the idea. They were, I think, at one of the large agile conferences and chatting a little bit about how all the good conversations occur in the hallways, and one of the things that they realized, just like Harrison Owen, is that OpenSpace was kind of designed to produce something that was more like the hallway conversation as opposed to the formal presentation agenda type thing. It was dealing with the emergence. And so they decided, well, let’s see if we can run a camp. And I guess they knew a few people. And a gentleman, you know, offered some space up in Michigan, out in the Ann Arbor area, in the community college. And so the very first camp was there. They reached out to the Alliance, to my knowledge, got a bit of seed money to hold it, paid for a few things, found a facilitator, and he had nothing to do with the software industry. He was an open space facilitator. And he actually used open space to help solve problems in Haiti. Which was quite interesting.

I actually rode with him when I arrived at the Detroit airport. He arrived around the same time and we had coordinated and I caught a ride with him over to the camp and it was kind of fun chatting with him and what his history was. So, that was the very first camp. I was just a participant and learned quite a bit, and made some connections.

 

Vit Lyoshin (09:58.689)

Can you tell us more about what is the experience like during these coach camps?

 

Paul Boos (10:07.15)

Yeah, so when you arrive at a coach camp, it’s very different than a standard conference. The agenda is blank. You start off in a circle and you know, you have a facilitator introduces you to the four principles and the one law of open space, or now five principles and one law.

Like whenever it starts, it starts. Whenever it’s over, it’s over. And one I love is the law of two feet or the law of mobility that you can move where you’re getting the most learning or contributing. So they introduced it to that. There’s usually a theme around any open space event, particularly coach camps. We’ve always tried to have a theme. That theme then sets a tone, but it doesn’t control anything.

Usually, it becomes part of the invitation to get people to arrive. And after all of that occurs, you have a big blank area of here’s the time we have and the spaces we have set aside for you. You create the agenda and you literally go up and fill in sticky notes or cards and introduce the topic you might be interested in and your name and you post it into a time area that you want to start and a space that you plan on holding it in. And usually, you know, the facilitator will have told you that maybe some spaces have tables, other ones are just sitting around a flip chart or whatnot. And your only obligation at that point, if that’s what you proposed, is to be there and host and facilitate the discussion. You know, sort of hold the space.

And I love that because I found that the best topics are often the big questions that you have. And people who have expertise will want to share their expertise and help you. And other people who have questions will come and show up. And even if nobody has any expertise around something, like it’s a hard question that maybe nobody’s encountered before, people will show up and want to contribute by asking things about the context and learning more and maybe trying to invent ideas that you can experiment with stuff. And so I find that really, really useful. I’ve gotten more learning out of coach camps than just about any other kind of event that’s training or conference-oriented. 

 

Vit Lyoshin (12:40.065)

Yeah, and it is usually just verbal, people when they propose topics and then they go to their little rooms or spaces or whatever and they just talk to each other and it’s a conversation-based event. It’s not like one person presenting something or speaking, right?

 

Paul Boos (12:59.086)

Right, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Sometimes there’ll be exercises, you know, around things. Like I remember the very first camp, there was a gentleman there who wanted to share a game that he uses to help people learn about different perspectives. And so his facilitated session was teaching people how to, well, was playing the game, then teaching people how to facilitate the game and what to do with pitfalls and things like that. And it was really cool.

Some things are very, very conversational. We had one of the Coach Camp Worldwide we had after COVID was at the Nashville Zoo. And since the event was in the zoo, that allowed us to walk around the zoo. So a few people would choose to have walking events and walk around the zoo, look at the animals, and have discussions, which was really, really cool.

Generally, we provide flip charts so people can record things. And then, you know, in the evening we might, you know, each camp’s a little different, but quite often there’s an evening news, share out different things, and we have the postings, take pictures of those, try to, you know, some camps will try to get that formalized and get it posted online so that people, other people can see what happened. So it’s a little bit dependent on how the organizers want to run it, what the spaces allow, and that kind of stuff. But there’s a lot of variety.

 

Vit Lyoshin (14:27.457)

Yeah, it’s pretty flexible. People can pick and choose how they want to cover these topics.

And then my next question is what kind of learning people can expect from this? Are there any related to their professional development or just in general any topics that they can bring within the theme that you mentioned?

 

Paul Boos (14:54.19)

Yeah, so I think the first thing to realize is that if you’re looking to get something specific out of a camp, like you have a specific question or, you know, it’s sort of up to you to make sure that topic gets covered. If nobody else is proposing it, you propose it. You drive your own learning in an agile coach camp, which I find a very beautiful thing. I don’t think there’s any time I’ve ever gone to a camp that I’ve not had a topic in mind. Sometimes I end up not proposing it because other ones attract me more. But generally, I have a topic in mind that I’m interested in chatting about and learning about. And quite often I find there are many other coaches that are there that want to learn the same thing.

I’ve even found when somebody proposes, let’s say they’re a brand new coach, maybe they were just, you know, from scrum master to being a coach, for example. Or maybe they’re even a brand new scrum master and they know that part of their job is to coach within a team or they’re a manager that wants to coach. They’ve got questions and they might be very, what we experienced coaches might say, well, that’s pretty naive question. Why would I want to go to that? Well, quite often you find that that naivete is not as naive as you think it is. There’s nuances that you didn’t know about within their context and having to explore that, you learn quite a bit about  how would I react to what this person is dealing with, you know, kind of thing. And I find that extremely interesting.

Likewise, sometimes people want to invent things too. For example, at the 2016 camp, April Jefferson and I were sitting around and talking about different ways we could come up with gamifying the idea of creating a backlog. And so we invented a whole game around that called Pass to Perfection. You can find it on Tasty Cupcakes now. But it was an invention by her and I, right? We just had a problem space we wanted to explore. We wanted to make it more fun. And we learned a lot about how to iterate on a game, gamifying something, not necessarily software.

So anything can happen there with right people in the space, right? So anybody can bring up the idea and solve the problem. And if you have a problem, it’s better to be the one who asks others to come join you and explore it and find solutions and things like that.

 

Vit Lyoshin (17:52.161)

I remember my experience when I was there the first time, the only time I’ve been there. I saw people going and picking topics, putting them on the board and I was sitting with my empty head and saying like, okay, what am I going to talk about? And then I was just sitting there for five minutes and then ideas just started popping up in my head and I’m like, okay, let me go write a couple of things. Maybe something happens. Maybe somebody will come join me to talk about that.

 

Paul Boos (18:14.158)

Yeah, and that to me is one of the beauties of open space. You know, which is from what I know, every coach camp is run with open space. If you look at the way the initiative is written for the one that we’re helping other initiatives, we don’t write it where we require open space, but we do require a lot of the things around the way that open space is run. Like we want the agenda to be emergent. We don’t want it to be preconceived, right? Which would make it more like a standard conference. We want it to be an open invitation. We don’t want it to be like a close that we only want experienced coaches or we only want, you know, people that are in this particular domain. That’s not the purpose of what we’re trying to do for the initiative, right? But we don’t demand that you do the open space. We just demand a lot of the parameters that open space brings to the table.

 

Vit Lyoshin (19:16.481)

So there are some requirements. Are there any other specifics for holding one, like you mentioned, a couple right? You have to have an emergent agenda. You can invite anybody who’s willing to participate, not only coaches. Anything else is there?

 

Paul Boos (19:37.006)

Yeah, so just for clarity, that’s if you want help from the initiative. If you’re trying to run one on your own, I guess you could probably break the rules and call it a coach camp. Although it probably wouldn’t really fit the spirit of it. But to get back to requirements, I mean, there’s not really that much required per se. I will say there are things that I’ve seen where some camps don’t work as well as others.

For example, when people ask me about a venue, I will say to try to get a venue with natural light. Because if you don’t, every camp I’ve been to that’s been low energy, has been one that’s like in a cave of a hotel. You know, it does not have natural light. And it’s a correlation. I don’t know if it’s a true causation, but I can remember the one in Raleigh, which is the first one we put together in the US, we were sort of in a cave area of a Marriott, I think, or a courtyard. And we had a pretty energetic, you know, facilitator. But the energy of the camp wasn’t the same as 2008, which had a lot of natural light. And then, so when we put the next, and that was 2010 when we did the one in Raleigh, and in 2011, we went to Columbus, Ohio, and we had a community college there, and it had oodles of natural light. And it was super high energy. And, you know, our facilitator was great too which helped out a lot as well. But, you know, it just, it’s every time I’ve been to one, you know, low energy tended to be, you know, no natural light. And that just seems like a weird thing, but that’s the one thing I advise.

The other thing is I advise people to look for a facilitator that is passionate about just holding space and not trying to do too much guidance on people because the facilitation for open space is very, very different than for like a standard; like if I’m going to facilitate a course and I have exercises set up and things like that, it’s a very different type of facilitation. You’re just there to kind of hold the space open, you know, go around, make sure people are not dominating a conversation. You want to make sure that flows of conversation are occurring. Being there to be gentle reminders of things.

 

Vit Lyoshin (22:18.145)

I see. Okay. What about some other techniques then open space, maybe people tried and have shared their experience or maybe you tried.

 

Paul Boos (22:30.318)

I haven’t heard of anybody try anything other than open space. I do know mentally in my mind, I’m interested in trying something around maybe World Cafe style, where you might have, instead of having a singular theme, maybe we have like three or four themes and people rotate through themes, you know, over a period of time. You know, I think that would be interesting and you allow the topics to emerge within the themes that are set around. I think that would make for an interesting camp and still fit that emergent agenda. It would have a tiny bit more structure, but not very much more. I am also somewhat confident that there probably are a few different types of liberating structures that might be able to fit into something like that, although they tend to be more facilitated exercises.

There are some out there that allow a little bit more open-ended-type things. So there might be some experimentation to do there. Or you would quite often see lean coffees, for example, at conferences, before the conferences. I kind of wonder if there might be a way of injecting lean coffees into being in a camp, as the way the camp runs.

So I think there’s some things that could be experimented with. I’ve not seen anybody go through and do that experimentation. Open spaces just work so well. I think people just feel that, you know, they don’t want to, I guess you could say this is where the risk aversion to coaches may fall. It’s like, we have this thing that works really well for setting up self-organization. Why would we want to screw with that?

 

Vit Lyoshin (24:18.881)

Yeah, don’t change if it’s not broken, right? People enjoy it so continue with that.

 

Paul Boos (24:21.934)

Yeah.

Well, I think that’s the other thing too. I mean, open space. One of the reasons I think it’s latched on for coach camp and a few other different events too, is because it’s really a big thing about, you know, self-organization. It just has enough guiding constraints. I mean, it has so few, but it’s just the right amount that people can self-organize.

 

Vit Lyoshin (24:49.761)

Yeah, did anybody ever try to do this remotely?

 

Paul Boos (24:54.798)

We have run this remotely. Agile Coach Camp Worldwide has been run three times remotely, actually. So when COVID hit, we moved Agile Coach Camp online. We used some spaces with Miro, and that worked really well. The second year, we did it again. COVID’s still going on, still ran it. And I will say what was really interesting about the phenomena of both of those is we were able to get people that normally could not make a coach camp due to the expense. Because it got to be a lot cheaper of an event. We still had a little bit of a cost, but it wasn’t very much. And we also had to accommodate a lot more time zones, too, doing it remotely.

I did it the year, well, also the one year, the first year we came back and sort of pair it and did it as a pair that seemed is now that people were coming back, it seemed there seems to be this thing that’s cutting down the number of people showing up for physical camps and cutting down the number of people that are showing up for virtual camps. So it’s kind of like a weird thing. And then last year I was hoping to do a virtual one, but there didn’t seem to be very much energy online for it. And quite frankly, I didn’t have as much energy myself to try to run a virtual one if nobody else is that interested. I kind of needed the energy to feed off of and wasn’t getting it. So I didn’t.

 

Vit Lyoshin (26:27.169)

was wondering how the whole energy level and the whole conversation is different when you’re remote versus when you’re in person because you can move around easier, you can see people’s reactions, and people can break down into smaller groups. Remote is kind of, you know, not necessarily going to work best for this case.

 

Paul Boos (26:55.598)

Yeah, so mechanic wise, what we did, and I think it’s worthwhile to chat a little bit about the mechanics of it. So we had a central place where people would come to besides Miro, we had used Zoom and we also had channels going on in Slack. So if something went south, we had a way of communicating, so we had a couple of different ways.

And so in the main room is where we would set up the space for the marketplace and everything. And then what we told people, we actually set up sessions to be only 40 minutes long, as opposed to, and if you wanted to continue, you wanna keep the conversation going, the only thing you would be doing would be saying we’re gonna stay in the same place. And the reason we did that is we asked everybody to go out, sign up for a free Zoom account, because they give away 40 minute sessions for free. So 40 minutes became like the time box that people could, you know, would say, now, if you wanted to go longer than 40 minutes, we said, that’s no problem. Just tell people before it drops that we’re going to continue the conversation. Just come back here again. Right. Kind of thing. And we, you know, we gave them a space on Miro to record things just like their virtual flip chart and let them work that way. I will say that, you know, having been underneath the Alliance, one of the things that we do ask folks to follow the code of conduct of the Agile Alliance. And when you go remote, there’s a little bit more considerations like how are you going to handle certain things from a code of conduct standpoint, because it’s harder to witness it and things like that. So there’s some considerations around that that probably add a little complexity to it. For us, we always tried to make sure we had a couple organizers in the main room so that if somebody wanted to report something they had a place to go to, we would just put them into a breakout room, have a conversation, and then make a decision on what we’re doing regarding that. But since we didn’t control any of the other Zoom breakouts, it wasn’t like we’re using Zoom breakouts for the sessions. Because you want things to start and end at various points, and that just made it hard to manage from a technology standpoint. And we don’t want it to be a burden on the facilitator either.

 

Vit Lyoshin (29:26.337)

What is the attendance on such events?

 

Paul Boos (29:32.91)

So yeah, so for the remote thing, we ran three sessions for the three different time zones. And I would say we varied between 30, 40 people to 60, 70 for the first time we did it. Second time was probably 30, 40 to maybe 50, 60 for the most. And then the third time where we were running side by side.

 

not side by side, but during the same year as the physical one, I think we had more like five to 10, and then the largest session was maybe 20 to 30. So just to give it, you can see that the decrease, once we moved, people started going back to being in person, people were more interested in getting the in person one. Although the, again, the number of people were a lot less than we’ve had in the past.

 

Vit Lyoshin (30:14.209)

Okay.

 

Vit Lyoshin (30:21.249)

Yeah.

 

Paul Boos (30:29.485)

And just to give you a feel for how that contrasts. So using some of the U .S. camps in particular as an example, since there are more data points for that. The very first camp was probably about 50, 60 people maybe. That feels about right. And camps vary between 30 and 40 to about 120.

 

Columbus was very large. I think we were about 150 and 120.

 

Vit Lyoshin (31:00.129)

Okay.

 

Vit Lyoshin (31:05.121)

Mm -hmm.

 

Okay, yeah, so it’s a decent size and you know, if everybody brings some topics and their experience that’s good.

 

Paul Boos (31:16.366)

Yeah, to me, to me, that’s approaching an upper limit. Not that there’s an upper limit to open space or anything, but one of the things I think you get out of coach camps is making connections with people, you know, and, you know, they’ll be the people you’ll seek out at a conference to go talk to. Right. So and, you know, you don’t really I think once you get to really large, like.

 

Vit Lyoshin (31:22.593)

Yeah.

 

Vit Lyoshin (31:27.777)

Mm -hmm.

 

Vit Lyoshin (31:34.593)

Yeah.

 

Paul Boos (31:43.246)

particularly if we were going to use something, it would probably be the tribal number, Dunbar’s number, if you’re familiar with that. Probably don’t want to get too much larger than that because you’re not going to really make those connections.

 

Vit Lyoshin (31:55.169)

Yeah, yeah, that’s right. When it’s too many people, then it’s hard to pick and choose who to talk to and so forth. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. So talking about different styles for coach camp, what do you think about hosting one coach within the organization with the same people, basically?

 

Paul Boos (32:03.31)

Right.

 

Paul Boos (32:20.206)

Yeah, so I think that’s, I think it’s a great idea. First of all, particularly if it’s a very large organization, right? You’re getting, um, you’re getting perspectives. The problems are going to be unique to that organization and it will allow, it gives coaches space to solve some of those problems. Cause that’s going to be a lot of the, I would imagine that would be a lot of the topics that come, that come into play. I’m having, we’re having this problem with this program. You folks that have other programs, have you experienced this? How’d you solve it? That kind of stuff. Um, I think that.

 

Vit Lyoshin (32:37.441)

Mm -hmm.

 

Paul Boos (32:50.19)

I think that’s a big positive. Um, I think a negative could be, um, since everybody works for the same organization, they may, that may also have come with a little bit more of a constraint, I’ll call it mindset. You sort of got a culture within the organization. You’re not getting outside influences. I do think that could be a downside, um, to it. Um, I would still encourage somebody to try trying it because I think it’s still valuable. And a lot of coaches, you know, particularly if you have a.

 

Vit Lyoshin (33:05.665)

Mm -hmm.

 

Paul Boos (33:19.566)

If you’re an organization that has a mixture of some people are consultants that are coaches and other people are internal employees that are coaches, I think that could be quite valuable because you’re outside people that are coming in with different perspectives. And particularly if you’re bringing in new people from time to time, that’s gonna be helpful. That could be a really interesting thing to do.

 

Vit Lyoshin (33:43.233)

Yeah, another challenge could be that they have their own, like you said, kind of biases and then within organization too, right? They used to doing certain things in a certain way for so many years. And especially if their bosses come to the events too, they may be a little bit feeling like, you know, not that they don’t have like psychological safety or something like that, but it could be a little bit pressure if you have…

 

supervisors in the same group.

 

Paul Boos (34:14.318)

Yeah, I think that would create a bit of a challenge for the facilitator to make sure everybody’s on the level playing field, right? And feels like they can speak their mind and stuff like that. I think that’s a very important point. When you normally go to a coach camp outside of the organization, you don’t really have too much to worry about for that, right? So you can kind of speak your mind and everybody else is just a peer of yours that works for a different organization.

 

Vit Lyoshin (34:20.001)

Yeah.

 

Vit Lyoshin (34:24.705)

Mm -hmm.

 

Vit Lyoshin (34:36.947)

Yeah. So.

 

Vit Lyoshin (34:44.353)

Yeah, yeah. What about in general participants to coach camps? Like if you break down by role or something like that, who come into those most frequently? Like is it…

 

Paul Boos (34:58.51)

So most everybody that comes to coach camps definitely feels like they carry the coach as a role or at least a consultant as their role. Quite often we do get people that are scrum masters. A few times we get managers. We’ve had somebody that came that was a sociologist, which was really interesting and she had some really cool valuable techniques to share. And then we’ve had somebody that…

 

Vit Lyoshin (35:03.937)

Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

 

Vit Lyoshin (35:16.065)

Oh wow.

 

Paul Boos (35:26.51)

Before camp, one camp in Indianapolis had a little bit of a session beforehand where they had a person that deals with doing learning games and stuff do it sort of like a training workshop beforehand. That was kind of interesting. I wish he had been a more of a participant throughout. I know at a Canadian camp, I went to Henry Mintzberg, who is an academic for organizational development and organizational psychology and stuff like that.

 

Vit Lyoshin (35:40.385)

Hmm.

 

Paul Boos (35:55.31)

He was there for a period of time. That was really interesting. You know, just talking with him is just, he’s just really, really, really valuable. He has a lot of books out. I definitely recommend reading some of them as well. So going back a little bit, one other thing, the closest I’ve seen, just as a, just as a side note to a coach camp within an organization in 2013, we had a coach camp in Atlanta.

 

Vit Lyoshin (35:59.297)

Mm -hmm.

 

Vit Lyoshin (36:10.145)

Yeah.

 

Paul Boos (36:25.71)

that was sponsored by Leading Agile. And I’m not sure the word got out as well as other camps had. So most of the people were from Leading Agile and it felt more like a Leading Agile event as an internal coach camp for Leading Agile, which had an interesting dynamic. So one of the things, one of the dynamics I would say is that when somebody,

 

Vit Lyoshin (36:38.753)

Hmm.

 

Paul Boos (36:52.622)

proposed a topic and they happened to be a little higher up in the organization than others, people tended to gravitate to that topic. And I also noticed that a lot of the people that were maybe more junior in that organization didn’t propose topics. That didn’t affect any of us that were outside of that organization whatsoever. And I also noticed that the law of two feet didn’t seem to apply as well. It seemed like people gravitated to those.

 

Vit Lyoshin (37:16.545)

Yeah.

 

Paul Boos (37:19.918)

And again, I think that’s just an influence that if you were, everybody had been inside, it wouldn’t be an unnatural dynamic. But when you are, you know, a mix like that, and the majority of the people are from one organization, I mean, not just a number, but, you know, like when we had it at Excella, where we had like five people here at Excella, I think when we had, that’s not a majority.

 

Vit Lyoshin (37:40.129)

Yeah.

 

Vit Lyoshin (37:47.233)

Yeah.

 

Paul Boos (37:47.374)

we were talking like easily two thirds of the people were from Leading Agile. And that again, you kind of expect some of that natural gravitation, but it didn’t seem like there was much pull for other parts of the, you know, getting with other coaches, which I think was a little detrimental for those other coaches. They didn’t get a chance to make those connections and maybe hear some outside perspectives, maybe because they don’t have very many events where they get the…

 

Vit Lyoshin (38:08.929)

Mm -hmm.

 

Paul Boos (38:12.974)

explore stuff internally and that’s what they felt like they needed to do. I don’t know what the dynamic was there, but it did feel a little weird. So.

 

Vit Lyoshin (38:16.897)

Yeah.

 

Yeah, maybe exactly. Maybe they don’t have much opportunities to go somewhere or maybe they just decided all to go to this one event. We have Agile DC, for example, and majority of my colleagues went there all at once. It’s a different type conference, but still people go in bunches like that.

 

Paul Boos (38:44.014)

Well, I can, and I could see, you know, they’re a consulting firm, you know, they maybe don’t have a chance to do like, uh, something like that internally. And so that, that became that fulfilled that need for them, but it, you know, but the fact that they were trying to run it as a U S camp made it feel a little weird. So.

 

Vit Lyoshin (38:57.697)

Mm -hmm.

 

Vit Lyoshin (39:02.721)

Yeah, and for situations like this, maybe some ideas from how we run retrospectives in Scrum could be applicable when establishing some maybe more restrictive rules to how to treat your supervisors or junior people versus senior people and somehow maybe breaking those biases or I don’t know, but…

 

Paul Boos (39:29.518)

Yeah, like I think a good example would be an unwritten rule that management comes up with. We are not proposing topics. We don’t propose topics, right? I mean, it would be similar to some camps we’ve gone to where there’s been large numbers and especially if when we ask, is this your first camp? And, you know, and but it’s a large camp and there’s like, let’s say one third that are sort of new. We sometimes invite the new people to present their topics first.

 

Vit Lyoshin (39:38.081)

Alright, something like that. Yeah.

 

Paul Boos (39:59.15)

before inviting, allowing people to invite the topics from, you know, more seasoned people to coach camps. So like I would be last. In fact, Mark Sopala, Mark Sopala and I used to have this running contest of who went to more coach camps.

 

Vit Lyoshin (39:59.521)

Mm -hmm.

 

Vit Lyoshin (40:08.609)

Yeah. Well, you’ve been to all of them, yeah.

 

Yeah, that’s funny. Yeah, so I guess some restrictions like this could be applicable in different situations. Same as not…

 

Paul Boos (40:29.614)

Yeah, I think it would be something set up that you would want to set up. You wouldn’t want to burden the facilitator with that per se, but you would want to set up that rule within an organization if that was going to happen that way.

 

Vit Lyoshin (40:44.257)

Yeah. So, and since this is like designed for coaches and most participants probably will be agile coaches or other type of coaches, what are some of their challenges when they attend coach camps? Being around the same experts all day long.

 

Paul Boos (41:06.414)

Well, you’d be surprised at the variety of expertise that people walk in with though. So for example, some people are much more into the humanistic side and know a lot more about, you know, how clean language and doing inquiry and those kinds of skills, those softer skills. And other people come in with very hard technical skills. I, you know,

 

Vit Lyoshin (41:30.913)

Mm -hmm.

 

Paul Boos (41:36.398)

how to write good unit tests or maybe mob programming and stuff. And you’ll see both of those emerge at some camps. I’ve seen a group go off and go through and show mob programming to people and how it works and maybe even set up a mob for a period of time. And other folks go off and they talk about clean language the entire time and how it can help. Both of those are really, really interesting.

 

Vit Lyoshin (41:43.777)

Hmm.

 

Paul Boos (42:05.934)

And then there’s lots of stuff in between, as you can imagine, talking about organizational design or, you know, maybe systems thinking, you know, as another one that has shown up in the past. So I think it’s, I think even though we’re all technically carrying the same agile coaching role, everybody comes in with such vast differences of experience. Some people working with programs, some people only work with one or two teams, you know, you know, that kind of stuff.

 

Vit Lyoshin (42:16.065)

Mm -hmm.

 

Vit Lyoshin (42:34.273)

Yeah, so it’s everybody’s experience basically takes over after the title and they have different use cases, different scenarios, they can bring their personal experiences, that’s where all the main benefit is there.

 

Paul Boos (42:50.062)

Yeah, exactly. And everybody and everybody’s work when they go in and they start doing things that is generally very, very different. Um, which I guess could be, again, going back to the inside, the organization, that could be a little bit of a downside. If you have a quote unquote standard approach or process or something that how you roll things out that might dilute that to some degree, right? Um, you might dilute some of those extra experiences that people might even have.

 

Vit Lyoshin (42:59.297)

Mm -hmm.

 

Vit Lyoshin (43:09.569)

Mm -hmm.

 

Vit Lyoshin (43:20.833)

Yeah, yeah. And most people who work together, even maybe different teams, but within the same organization, it’s still kind of very similar to each other because you are already kind of talking with them and learning what their teams are doing that maybe you should be doing. And it comes naturally within the organization. If you go with and do this with outside organization, then of course you’re going to hear things first time.

 

Paul Boos (43:37.262)

Yeah.

 

Vit Lyoshin (43:49.089)

and that’s more beneficial to do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

 

Paul Boos (43:51.47)

Yep. Yeah, there’s a lot, there’s a lot to be said for that, that outside experience coming in. Um, you know, just getting some number of people from outside can be very, very helpful. I mean, I think one of the things I would encourage, if you were going to run one inside, it probably would behoove to have people going to an outside coach camp, you know, and bringing some of those experiences in and discussions in. So.

 

Vit Lyoshin (44:05.121)

Yeah. So.

 

Vit Lyoshin (44:18.689)

Mm -hmm.

 

So what is the schedule for the coach camps? Is there like once a year? What is the difference between regional versus worldwide?

 

Paul Boos (44:33.262)

Yeah. So generally most camps are held in both region or worldwide yearly. Um, there is agile coach camp .org, um, which is the, which is a site that Nuresh runs is where people I’d say a good number of people that are running camps post when their camps going to be, um, that, and then, you know, generally this, you know, a lot of places are on a cadence.

 

Vit Lyoshin (44:40.577)

Mm -hmm.

 

Paul Boos (45:03.118)

You know, they have it like every May or something like that. Some people experiment with different times of the year. In the U .S. when we were running it, which was a little different from what other countries were doing, is we tended to pass the baton on to a different person to run it every year in a different host city. I think this past two years here in D .C. has been the first time I’ve seen us have a camp, a U .S. camp, where that’s been, you know, in the same place.

 

And I don’t know, there might be still camps going in other spots in the U S, um, you know, with COVID that kind of like shut down everybody from communicating as much. Um, and a lot of camps don’t need help. So they’re not reaching out to me. And I don’t really, the way I would learn about them is going to agilecoachcamp .org too. So, um, for, for the worldwide one, um, so agilecoachcamp .net is where we keep our information updated right now. It’s still shows last year’s camp.

 

Vit Lyoshin (45:49.025)

Okay.

 

Paul Boos (46:02.03)

We’re in the process of trying to find a venue in Costa Rica. So this is the first time that we’re trying to take it outside the US as an experiment to see how it goes. Again, one of the learnings I had when we went virtual is that there were people from other parts of the world that would like to participate in this and that have growing agile communities. But because of the cost to get to the US, adding it on top of big camp, being in an area that’s expensive where

 

Vit Lyoshin (46:11.457)

Mm -hmm.

 

Paul Boos (46:31.246)

You know, the big conferences that just becomes unreasonable for them financially. So I’m trying an experiment of going to, you know, outside the U S to try to cater that. And then actually what I hope will happen was we’ll spawn having a regional camp there. You know, that it’s, you know, yeah, right. New country. And so Costa Rica, the reason that I chose that is I’m hoping I can still get a core number of people from the U S to go down. Um,

 

Vit Lyoshin (46:31.585)

Mm -hmm.

 

Vit Lyoshin (46:36.225)

Mm -hmm.

 

Vit Lyoshin (46:49.057)

Yeah, it’s a new country.

 

Vit Lyoshin (46:59.425)

Mm -hmm.

 

Paul Boos (46:59.918)

You know, it’s only a few hours flight. Quite often in a lot of cases is one hop. Same way with Canada. You know, we’ll have it in San Jose. And it makes it easier for people from South America and Central America and maybe some of the islands to actually make it over. So they won’t have to go through the United States to get there. They can, you know, go straight, go straight there or maybe pass through another more regional hub to them like Panama City or something.

 

Vit Lyoshin (47:06.945)

Yeah.

 

Vit Lyoshin (47:18.369)

Mm -hmm.

 

Vit Lyoshin (47:22.625)

Yeah.

 

Paul Boos (47:29.646)

So.

 

Vit Lyoshin (47:29.857)

Yeah, okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, that’s a great location.

 

Paul Boos (47:32.59)

And then if this experiment works well enough, we’ll try an experiment maybe in Portugal next year. That’s sort of like my thought and that to help make it easier for Africans to make it up, but also still be able to count on some European participation. Need a little bit of core to make sure, you know, people that experienced it before. So.

 

Vit Lyoshin (47:38.657)

Hmm.

 

Vit Lyoshin (47:44.001)

Mm -hmm.

 

Vit Lyoshin (47:53.025)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. And since you don’t have like specific designated facilitators or not facilitators, I’m sorry, speakers, so people kind of have to bring their own experience and their own agendas. So, and that’s also like, you have to have that core of people who always go or who’s really active in the community.

 

Paul Boos (48:14.446)

Yeah, it’s, it’s nice to have a few core people that show up that are coach camp junkies. Uh, I’ll call them like myself. Uh, and so they, you know, they, they break their, they’re constantly going around and maybe even going to more than one camp. You know, I generally try to make both a U S camp and, and, and I run worldwide. So I’m always making the worldwide one. Um, I’m trying, I’ve before COVID hit, um, well, as COVID was hitting, I was supposed to go to the.

 

Vit Lyoshin (48:20.097)

Hehehehehe

 

Vit Lyoshin (48:29.569)

Mm -hmm.

 

Vit Lyoshin (48:36.801)

Mm -hmm.

 

Paul Boos (48:43.534)

Coach Camp in Portugal. Um, that got, that kind of got, I did go to the virtual version when they had it, but I, I was hoping to go to the in -person one and I’ve been to a Coach Camp Canada. So that’s, uh, and I do, I think it’s great to be able to, you know, to shift around a little bit and see what’s going on because every country or region has a different set of cultures and, um, problem sets, you know, different laws and stuff that come into play that sometimes we end up interacting with, right?

 

Vit Lyoshin (48:45.633)

Mm.

 

Vit Lyoshin (49:07.136)

Mm -hmm.

 

Paul Boos (49:13.038)

So.

 

Vit Lyoshin (49:14.177)

Yeah, we’re talking about running one within an organization. Same thing applies to running within a country, right? Or region. That’s exactly what happens. Culture kicks in and other factors. Yeah. Okay. That’s great. All right. Do you have any advice to people who want to go first time and experience it and like how to prepare yourself and anything maybe?

 

Paul Boos (49:26.574)

Yeah, exactly.

 

Paul Boos (49:39.982)

Yeah, so I think if I were going to, so first of all, I will use the open space then get prepared to be surprised. I would also say prepare to make friends for at least some friends or colleagues for life. You know, I would say those two are going to be particularly true. So that’s something I think like I, when I went, I didn’t expect that at all. I didn’t, I mean, I didn’t expect that I would be.

 

Vit Lyoshin (49:56.289)

Mm -hmm.

 

Paul Boos (50:09.902)

keeping in touch with people that were halfway around the world and even expanding on that network through them. That just didn’t expect that. I do think in order to prepare yourself, I think one of the things to think a little bit about is let go of having to have everything predefined for you ahead of time. I think…

 

Vit Lyoshin (50:17.441)

Yeah.

 

Paul Boos (50:35.982)

I think a lot of people go in and they’re expecting, I’m gonna learn this, I’m gonna learn this, I’m gonna learn this, I’m gonna learn this. And yes, you do, you can drive your learning to learn some of that, but in some ways you wanna let go and go with the moment. Somebody proposes a topic, it sounds interesting. You’ve got two feet, you can go there, and if you’re not getting anything out of it, use your two feet before even the session ends. Maybe go to your number two spot, right? I know I’ve done that. And…

 

Vit Lyoshin (50:59.297)

Yeah.

 

Paul Boos (51:03.438)

That actually changed the way I go to regular conferences. Now I don’t sit there. If I go into a session and it’s not interesting to me that much, I usually make sure that I know the way there’s a door. And I, you know, likewise as a speaker at a normal conference, I don’t get upset when somebody walks out on me. I’m like, yep, whatever it is, I’m not answering their mail. I don’t want them to sit here and be unhappy. So it changes, it changes your attitude a bit.

 

Vit Lyoshin (51:08.577)

Thank you.

 

Vit Lyoshin (51:21.281)

Yeah.

 

Vit Lyoshin (51:27.489)

Friday.

 

Paul Boos (51:29.934)

The other thing I would do to prepare is at least think a little bit about a topic or a question that you have, right, that you’re coming in with. Something that will drive a little bit of your learning, right? And if you’re unable to come up with something that’s okay, but I do think it helps a little bit if you sit down and say, you know, what’s been bugging me the last, you know, you could do this like the day of showing up, like the drive in or the metro ride in or however you’re getting there.

 

What’s something that’s been bugging me this last week that I don’t know how to solve, for example, or I would like to have somebody else’s honest feedback on how I’m doing something. I could throw what I’m trying and I don’t have to worry about the fact that they’re my boss or where to get back to my boss or they’re my client. I could upset them. You’re going to get away from all those people. You’re going to get a chance to actually present something to somebody else that you can talk on the side and be more frank about and take advantage of that.

 

Vit Lyoshin (52:03.745)

Mm -hmm.

 

Paul Boos (52:29.294)

So.

 

Vit Lyoshin (52:29.313)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, those are great things and anything for people who actually like to organize it maybe any advice to them.

 

Paul Boos (52:37.422)

Yeah, so number one, even though the Alliance right now is struggling financially and we can’t give a lot of financial aid to help camps out, still reach out on the initiative because we still can offer like specific advice and things like that. I mean, that’s for sure. You know, we do have an organizer of Slack. It’s not super active or anything, but it is a place where you could ask some questions and stuff. You know, a few of us are monitoring it.

 

Vit Lyoshin (52:52.033)

Mm -hmm.

 

Paul Boos (53:04.238)

We can guide you to helping you find a facilitator, for example. You may even find that one of us wants a volunteer or something like that to be a facilitator. So you can certainly get that kind of assistance, like helping you figure out how to market it and those kinds of things. So that would be one thing. I do think thinking about a theme is, you know, I’ve had a few people that say themes don’t feel that important because,

 

Vit Lyoshin (53:22.273)

Mm -hmm.

 

Paul Boos (53:33.518)

When people start posting the topics, they don’t seem to be that connected to the theme. And I would say that’s true, but the theme also becomes an attractor, particularly if you’re trying to attract people that don’t necessarily carry Coach in their title. I think that’s important to have a theme that becomes that attractor. And again, I’ll harp on to the end, natural light, plan a venue that has natural light and has the right kind of space. You know?

 

Vit Lyoshin (53:46.849)

Mm -hmm.

 

Vit Lyoshin (53:50.657)

No.

 

Paul Boos (54:02.094)

both for your breakouts and for your common space. So.

 

Vit Lyoshin (54:04.993)

Yeah, okay, yeah, those are great. And yeah, next time there is one around, I’m definitely going to be there because I really enjoyed that experience. It was something new and something unexpected. And as you said, I made a bunch of connections with people who I still talk to and that’s great. That’s much better than a normal conference, I would say. So…

 

Paul Boos (54:33.742)

Yeah, yeah. And that, you know, you’ll find like if you do go to a normal conference, you’re going to, and you find that one or two of those people are going to be in attendance, they’re, you’re going to seek them out. So you’re going to go and want to talk to them for a while and just catch up with them and see how they’re doing and see what kind of problems they’re coming up with. You’ll wind up having coach camp conversations on the side in the hallway. So, I mean, I go to the big, I go to quite often have gone to the big agile conference.

 

Vit Lyoshin (54:43.009)

Yeah.

 

Vit Lyoshin (54:54.945)

Right. Yes, exactly.

 

Paul Boos (55:00.718)

I think I spend most of my time in the hallway talking to colleagues and stuff from coach camps. So.

 

Vit Lyoshin (55:03.009)

It’s funny, I think I checked out this Agile 2024 conference and they have bunch of spots for open space now where people are just go to that slot and who knows what happens there. It’s open space, they self -organize, they discuss something. So they may be already learning from this and saying, okay, let’s do a bunch of mini coach camps throughout this week and see how it goes.

 

Paul Boos (55:31.79)

Yeah, actually, I was just assigned that I was talking to the Agile Alliance director yesterday. She and I had a short conversation and she was wondering what if we had a she’s there. She’s trying to postulate how they reinvent a little bit to to attract people into more people into the conferences and stuff. And one of the things she said, what if we gave a track that the track was really your coach camp

 

Vit Lyoshin (55:59.649)

Mm -hmm.

 

Paul Boos (56:00.462)

people that are going to that would be, what would that look like? And she just asked me to think about it for a bit. So I find it an interesting and intriguing question. I don’t know how well it would work alongside. I’ve had actually another conference I ran had some concepts from OpenSpace mixed in with a standard conference. And I actually sought out another coach that had made a remark that,

 

Vit Lyoshin (56:06.593)

You try.

 

Paul Boos (56:30.446)

Open space doesn’t work really well when there’s a competing agenda conference going on. People for whatever reason feel the magnetic pull to go to the other one and only deeply experienced people from open space do that, but it stay in the open space thing. But there’s this weird dynamic. So I actually had a conversation when I was setting up the other conference to see if I was violating her, what she was thinking.

 

Vit Lyoshin (56:48.609)

interesting.

 

Paul Boos (57:00.43)

So, and I ended up not, but it was an interesting comment. So I’m always curious when I see that, because I’ve seen the big conference try to run what they call an open jam on the side, for example. And I don’t know, sometimes it works really well, and other times it doesn’t seem to work well, and it might depend on who’s in attendance that has open space experience.

 

Vit Lyoshin (57:00.673)

Yeah.

 

Vit Lyoshin (57:16.449)

Mm -hmm.

 

Paul Boos (57:30.094)

and that they might gravitate to that. So.

 

Vit Lyoshin (57:30.625)

Yeah.

 

Yeah, I think that really depends on that as well. If people can go and self -organize and have benefit from it and provide that feedback to the conference organizers and say like, yeah, that worked great. So maybe that’s what it is. Yeah.

 

Paul Boos (57:48.462)

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and I think there’s, I won’t say that the number of open space type events are increasing, but there are a number of other open space events that are not necessarily coach camp. And so they’re not focused around coaching, but they do focus around other things like, uh, I know in the Northwest and over in Northern California, maybe Southern California too, there’s like agile, agile open, um, type concept, which is an open space.

 

Vit Lyoshin (58:15.104)

Mmm.

 

Paul Boos (58:17.773)

And that’s anybody of any experience in Agile that you could be brand new in it and you’re just one starting out or maybe you’re really experienced, but whatever, you can go there and have conversations and stuff like that. Less about coaching and it doesn’t get in this like how to help people. So, very often. Another one that I’ve been to that is a little more invitation only because it’s just small is the retrospective facilitators gathering. That is a great.

 

Vit Lyoshin (58:29.633)

Mm -hmm.

 

Vit Lyoshin (58:46.081)

Okay.

 

Paul Boos (58:47.406)

OpenSpace event it actually lasts a whole week and so an open space event where you’re actually rolling and creating topics every day and Rolling a whole week. That is just absolutely mind -blowing It’s just absolutely mind -blowing You know, so that’s a that’s that’s another event that I found really useful and then there’s one that’s

 

Vit Lyoshin (58:58.561)

Mm -hmm.

 

Vit Lyoshin (59:04.353)

Yeah.

 

Paul Boos (59:17.39)

pretty much associated only with games, Agile games, particularly learning games called Play for Agile. And there’s also a Play for Agile North America. That’s another one that is also really kind of a fabulous event to go through. I have gone to both retrospective facilitators gathering and the Play for Agile North America. And again, they’re very focused topics, but they’re really, really mind blowing in a way. Would I replace Coach Camp with those? No.

 

Vit Lyoshin (59:21.121)

Mm -hmm.

 

Vit Lyoshin (59:26.241)

Mm -hmm.

 

Paul Boos (59:45.902)

because I kind of like the more general coach camp. That’s why I run the initiative. It’s my passion. But would I attend those events? Absolutely. If I’ve got the time, money, energy to get there, I usually will try to make it there as well.

 

Vit Lyoshin (59:46.593)

I’m going to go to bed.

 

Vit Lyoshin (01:00:01.761)

Yeah, that’s on my bucket list to go to one of those agile game events and see how they work and what I can learn from that.

 

Paul Boos (01:00:12.302)

I can say what’s wonderful about that, just as a side note, is I know I’ve taken prototype games and gotten feedback on them and been able to actually mature them. So.

 

Vit Lyoshin (01:00:21.121)

Yeah, yeah, that’s great. A lot of many, many different opportunities for learning, for networking, and this is what like some people ask like, hey, where can learn stuff? What book do you recommend or anything? Like forget books, go to these events. You will learn much more. Book takes time to read and it’s very specific topic. So.

 

Paul Boos (01:00:45.006)

and you learn about the books you should be reading at a coach camp. Quite often there’s a book reading list of what you’ve been reading lately.

 

Vit Lyoshin (01:00:48.161)

Alright, alright. Yeah, yeah.

 

Vit Lyoshin (01:00:54.433)

Right, yeah. I mean, we are in that profession that requires a lot of reading. Any professional should be educating and expanding their knowledge and reading books and stuff and confidence. So, anyways.

 

Paul Boos (01:01:07.374)

But I do find it really good when you’re getting recommendations from colleagues that they can tell you. So.

 

Vit Lyoshin (01:01:14.721)

Mm -hmm.

 

Yeah. Okay. Well, that was a great conversation. Thank you very much. Um, it’s, uh, great to know about coach camps and I hope people will like it and go there and participate. Um, so thank you very much for your time and I hope we can talk more about this in the future. So yeah.

 

Paul Boos (01:01:37.198)

Yeah. Be glad to, and I, I’ll just put in a little plug. If anybody’s going to be at agile and beyond, I will be there and I would love to talk to you about coach camps, you know, find me and we’ll, we can chat about it there if you’re going to be in Detroit for it. So.

 

Vit Lyoshin (01:01:52.833)

Okay, cool. Yeah.

 

Paul Boos (01:01:54.158)

I’ll get that plug out there so people can at least look for me if they want to chat more about it.

 

Vit Lyoshin (01:01:59.265)

Sure, yeah. Well, I put some links to the description as well so people can easily connect with you and find you. Great. Sure, thank you, Paul. Yeah, thank you very much. Talk to you later. Bye.

 

Paul Boos (01:02:06.734)

Awesome. Thank you so much, Vit. I really appreciate you being on here.

Okay, bye bye.