From Dungeon Master to Scrum Master with Yon Borthwick

This week’s guest on the Agile On The Mind podcast is my dear friend Yon Borthwick.

Yon is a team coach who has worked with teams and individuals within different coaching modalities including Integral Development Coaching, Internal Family Systems, ORSC (Organisational Relational Systems Coaching) and many others. He is currently working as a senior team coach at the Boston Consulting Group.

As well as his coaching and team leadership interests, Yon has been the ‘Dungeon Master’ for our weekly Dungeons and Dragons (DnD) group which has been meeting (nearly) weekly since the beginning of the pandemic.

If you don’t know what the means, don’t worry. Yon explains what Dungeons and Dragons is, as well as the allure of fantasy role playing games in general. I wanted to invite Yon onto the podcast to discuss the similarities between running a DnD game and being a Scrum Master for a team. Yon has a deep understanding of both team dynamics and the theoretical underpinnings of telling a fun and compelling collaborative story.

This was an incredibly rich discussion about how the skills of collaborative storytelling can help a Scrum Master work with their team.

Some of the main takeaways for me:

* asking the team ‘what kind of story do we want to tell about this work in the future?’

* understanding different team roles and skills

* the joy of failure, learning, and improvising

* after work challenges asking what the ‘loot’, ‘level up’ or even ‘injury’ might be

* how to give your team and team members the setup to tell a great story between them

There’s way more, and I’d love to hear what you enjoyed from it. If you enjoyed this episode you can subscribe to receive a free weekly blog or podcast into your inbox with explorations of agility and cognitive science. If you really really enjoyed it, you can upgrade to a paid membership and support me to continue this work.

I’m going to take a couple of weeks off over the new year, happy holidays and looking forward to hearing from you in 2025

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