Often, people joke about an agile coach’s affinity for post-it notes. And it’s true – it is difficult for me to imagine how I would do my job without post-its. It hardly ever happens that I do not have a pack of post-it notes within an arm’s reach, and it hardly ever happens that I moderate a meeting without using any post-its.
However, I believe there is a deeper meaning behind this:
Once, I was told that the meeting moderator’s pen is like a modern scepter. Whoever holds the pen in a meeting also holds the power over the meeting. Whoever holds the pen is the primary decider when it comes to what will be written down and how it will be written down. There are many ways in which a moderator can (more or less) subtly manipulate a meeting to elicit a preferred result, simply by presenting the results in a certain way.
This changes completely when the moderator hands post-it notes and pens to the meeting’s participants. This is effectively a handover of power, and the moderator fully retreats into a facilitator role. And this is a deeply agile concept – to not hold on to power but to give it to the team.
So I actually believe that the heavy use of post-its is just another expression of an agile mindset.
AgileEvangelist 