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Happy Weekend

I hope you all are having a lovely weekend! don't forget in the mad rush of life to stop, be still and always be kind.

(Pic courtesy: Pinterest)

Staying Positive: Youtube Channels and Blogs I read every week (Pt 1)

Hello there, I hope you had a good weekend.

I don't know much about your weekend routine, for me weekends are the time I usually destress by detaching….this is also the time I use to learn and grow and browse and tinker.

This year is in a lot of ways life changing for me because staying positive consistently is the greatest gift I am trying to give myself. And I get my fair share of help from the books, blogs, podcasts and Youtbe channels I watch. 

So, thats what I thought I will share with you today. This is part 1 of the post. 

YouTube- This is my guilty pleasure. I pretty much have more than 50 channels subscribed to and watch them every night and mornings as I get ready to take on life. Depending on my day and mood, I will choose what I watch. There are of course some favs that I don’t miss and thats what I am sharing with you today. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

Lavendaire - Eileen’s channel is all about being your best version and ways you can achieve it.

She also brings in her personal stories and has a wonderful dreamy aesthetic that makes it a wonderful experience to watch. I also love listening to her podcast. For her website click here. 

Kalyn Nicholson- A lifestyle blogger, Kalyn talks about her travels, lessons learnt along the way and general fun stuff  and how she keeps her self motivated and positive. Also a podcaster, she brings in positive vibes and a fun lively way to impart wisdom. Click for website here  

Pickup Limes  - Sadia a registered dietician whose channel is about minimalism, food, health and simplicity and being positive amidst it all. She recently had 

million subscribers and moved to a studio space and her journey has been amazing to watch and so is her lifestyle. For her website and health tips click here   

1. Marie Forleo - If you need a pick me up anytime of the day, suffer from self doubt and have dreams hidden from the world- this is the channel to watch. She brings in some wonderful guests, powerful in their thoughts and wisdom that you will want to save the episodes  bookmark them and listen to them a thousand times till its instilled in you like a second brain. She defies situations and circumstances and talks about how she grew her business and how others can do as well.

Lewis Howes - His channel is all about interviews with personalities you know and don’t, however in every single interview the discussion is simple, to the point and something you can always take notes on and implement later. I have gone through a lot many of his interviews and is obviously subscribed to his channel. These interviews need attention and are best heard when you have sometime to sit down or when you commute, the meanings are lost if you are listening while multitasking- its not your background music score that you want to leave unattended. If you are looking for some more info, please click here 

Rachel Talbot- A lifestyle blogger, she is all about DIY, positivity and managing her life with family, kids, a

business she recently launched, a singer (look up itunes), her simple recipes and tending a new house. She oozes calm and happiness and positivity and her channel is my mood fixer anytime of the day. If you are trying to find content and meaning in simplicity, she is the one to watch out for. Website link is here.

Claire Marshall- I would lie is if I didn’t mention her, I watch her often. She is a beauty blogger, however she is not just an expert about beauty and lifestyle, she dabbles in wellness and talks about her own struggles to find meaning in life. I particularly enjoy her creativity and editing style, watching her independent spirit and wonderful positivity through the episodes of life. For website, click here 

Rachel Aust - an Australian who is a fitness freak, a minimalist and her unique style of filming will keep you occupied. She talks about fitness, her wellness

journey and diets like keto. I watch her channel primarily for her styling and the amount of work she happily puts in the range of multiple things she does successfully. Find her website here 

So, thats it for today, let me know how you recharge and what you like to do on your weekends.

Part 2 of the post will be about my fav blogs, so watch this space. 

(Pic courtesy: taken from the blog of the featured Youtubers)

Happy Weekend

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Change Management & Scrum: Gamification Perspective

This is a guest post by Madhavi Ledalla.

Introduction to Gamification

I have been studying about Gamification for a while and after having been part of several change initiatives, I started appreciating how the game design concepts can be used for change initiation and management. Gamification involves using game design elements in non-game design contexts. Gamification plays a very key role in increasing the employee engagement. The gaming elements and concepts behind the game design framework used to inspire people to get to the next level of the game play can be applied to non-gaming context as well to engage and motivate teams to reach to the next levels as deemed by the organizations.

There are many games in the industry which use simple game mechanics that include extrinsic rewards like badges, points etc. However the versatility of a gamified system depends on how the intrinsic motivators are exploited by providing real-time feedback to the players to reinforce the desired behavior. The key success of a gamified system is based on how effectively the gaming elements are used for engaging, rather than a means of showcasing extrinsic rewards. The desired outcome of a gamified system directly correlates to the motivation of the players involved. The idea of gamification and the universality of its application bring in a completely different dimension of thinking!

Game Design Framework:

The game design process typically goes through six steps as cited by “Kevin Werbach”, which are detailed below:

Now let us try to understand the typical steps involved in Change management and then look at how game design steps can be used as a tool for change management.

Change Journey steps:

Any general change initiative whether it relates to agile transformation or not requires the following activities to be done at a minimum in most of the cases, though there could be exceptions depending on the context and organizations.

• Identify the need for charge and define the desired state?
• How will it affect the organization, leadership and teams?
• Assess the organization readiness for the change?
• Figure out who will lead the change?
• How will the change initiative be facilitated?
• How will the change participants be engaged and motivated?
• Initiate the change.
• The communication strategy.
• Inspect and adapt the change initiative based on the feedback.

Change Management and Gamification

Having said this, I think that the game design process steps can be mapped to a change management process. In fact, the game design process may be used as a change management tool depending on the context, though it may not be applicable always.  Here is how I see them both map to each other as shown below.

Having worked with a couple of agile transformation initiatives, I think the game design process steps can be used to initiate agile transformations too as it is all about change management.

Gamification and Scrum

There are several agile frameworks like Scrum Kanban, XP that can be used at the team level during the delivery and execution, depending on the context and the problem domain. I have been using Scrum from few years, and was thinking of doing something different to create more engagement and fun! Since I was reading on gamification, I thought why not I gamify the Scrum framework!  As I started working on it, I was surprised to appreciate that Scrum is already gamified to a larger extent as I describe it below.

Scrum can be considered as a collaborative game play framework where team members engage with each other every sprint to deliver business value. Any game should have clear goals and rules- and every sprint has this. The gaming environment must provide constant feedback that helps players change their strategy all along the way and the sprint ceremonies are in fact meant for this! The ceremonies and artifacts in Scrum are nothing but the activity loops. For example, the burndown charts, Task boards- Daily progress indicators, Definition of Done, frequent feedback from Product Owners during the sprint, are typical examples of engagement loops used in a gamified system. Similarly the Sprint reviews, retrospectives, release burndown/burnup charts can be considered as examples of progression loops in a gamified system.

In my opinion, I think the concept of basic gamification is already embedded in the Scrum Framework to an extent. This is my comprehension based on what I read and understood about gamification, while I was figuring out avenues to apply this concept to Scrum teams.  However there is always a scope to add more elements to gamify the existing framework by using customized information radiators to maximize the team’s engagement by providing lots of feedback that will help them look at the current state and inspect and adapt!

My two cents

I would summarize by saying that we can always gamify the existing system to make it engaging by using data analytics, visual radiators, maturity levels and feedback loops. A word of caution is that too much focus on extrinsic motivators like the points, badges, rewards, levels may lead to teams getting pressurized to attain levels and may end up in misusing the gamified system and eventually start playing with the numbers!

Would be glad to hear from readers if any of you tried gamification while working with teams! Looking forward to learn from your experiences!

If you are interested in Agile, you can read more here.

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