Ba — A sense of togetherness — Amplified by Music
Ba — the Japanese idea of shared space and emergent knowledge — as a way to understand what makes great agile teams different from co-located ones.
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When teaching SAFe (The Scaled Agile Framework) we talk about “Ba” — the sense of togetherness and connectedness that amplifies the performance of teams and larger groups (e.g. Agile Release Trains).
This week when visiting Leankit (To teach an Implementing SAFe 4.0 SPC4 class to their Customer Success coaching team) I had the opportunity to see their Sweep ceremonies (Sweep ~= Program Increment) — a Demo and Business Context event for the whole company.
The sense of “Ba” — people having fun together, enjoying their week together, working towards the company’s mission, was in the air.
What amplified it was great music mixed by Alex Glabman. Both the choice of background music and “walk up” music as each speaker took the stage complemented the atmosphere perfectly.
It was only fit that the music was played from another source of great “Ba” inspiration — Spotify…
https://open.spotify.com/user/glabman/playlist/71H8FVAXMlPrIlJopelcN9
For deeper discussion of “Ba” I recommend Em Pretty Campbell’s new book — Tribal Unity.
Oh, and I also delivered a short talk about SAFe, what I’m seeing in the market/industry around it, and the new mapping of LeanKit to SAFe 4.0 I was involved in creating. Can you guess which song was my “walk up” music? :-)
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/key/8PAsseFY2TNcJy
SAFe overview slides
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