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Deb Pontes is an agile coach with expertise in using OpenSpace Agility to lead lasting organizational change. The key to unlocking the magic of hyper-productivity is team empowerment which ultimately increases engagement and productivity. Empowerment at the team level is not as easy as it sounds. This is not a one size fits for every organization or for every team or even for every individual. The work to unlock this at the organizational level has to be approached from the bottom up and from the top down. Each individual on each team has a part in shaping the culture of the organization. The leaders of an organization play the critical role of authentically authorizing team autonomy and empowerment. The only way to get control is to give it up! This may not sit well with every leader. OpenSpace Agility provides a time box and structure for teams and organizations to experiment with processes in service to find the right size of bounded authority to best serve the organization. The balance between doing and being is important to note. In a corporation, the pendulum often swings heavily toward the doing. This is also a hallmark of modern life; the pendulum almost always swings toward doing. How often do we find the elusive time to just enjoy the moment? There is a growing need in the broader culture outside of organizations to take the time to be. Meditate, exercise, breathe deeply, and be happy! When we get this balance right, the doing naturally leads to the elusive hyper-productivity. In the context of organizations, Agile (Manifesto) principles are the guardrails that allow the organization to fine-tune the balance between doing and being. You often hear the goal in an Agile Transformation is to move from doing Agile to being Agile. This is of course in service to the organizations, but on a grander scale, it is in service to the human beings who are much happier when they are not in a system where they are human doings.

Harold Shinsato is a management consultant, coach, and teacher. He has been programming for over 30 years and helped found Montana Code School and develop and deliver their curricula including a 12-week web development boot camp with 95% post-class job placement and $30K annualized salary increases for our students. Harold is co-author of the “OpenSpace Agility Handbook”, and co-authored software patent 6108698. He has over a decade of Agile experience that includes bringing eXtreme Programming to software teams, being a Scrum Master, giving presentations at Agile conferences like Agile 2011, Agile CultureCon, and AgileOpen events, and multiple pieces of training from Agile Learning Labs & the Agile Coaching Institute. Harold is certified as a Scrum Master with the Scrum Alliance, and as a coach with the International Coaching Federation. Harold cultivates culture change through “social technologies” that include Open Space Technology (OST), unconferences, co-active coaching, and applying Agile Software approaches to non-technical issues for clients like SAP, Intuit, Capital One, MIT’s Medicine Hackathons, the University of Montana, Oregon State University, the Agile Coaching Institute, and more. He has years of Open Space facilitation experience and sits on board of the Open Space Institute and founded and serves as Executive Director of Montana Agile Culture House which has facilitated culture change in Western Montana through public unconferences.

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