Learn by Teaching
Photo by Krissy Venosdale
Take what you've learned and teach it to someone else--when you do this, your depth of knowledge increases. It reveals your understanding of not only the what, but also the how and why.
I recently attended the Coaching Agile Teams class taught by Lyssa Adkins and Michael Spayd, and one of the activities was to explain an agile framework [e.g. scrum] to two classmates. Lyssa gave a demonstration that was much like her overview of scrum video, and our goals were to really try and to push ourselves to find our weak areas in our understanding of the agile framework--I knew that I went outside my comfort zone in my explanation of scrum for a business audience when I realized that I forgot to explain the role of the Scrum Master. It's an obvious oversight, but in the moment of teaching, it slipped my mind.
Scrum is fairly simple, but it can be difficult to teach. People often want to describe it as a methodology or a process, but it is neither. Scrum is a framework that describes roles and rules; it is based upon values and facilitates people in a low-prescriptive way. The Scrum Guide holds the definitive description, and it takes a deep understanding to explain it to someone else effectively in under 10 minutes.
