The garden of practices

Principle:

Consider practices as seeds that you can put in your seed stock. 

When you decide to test a new practice, pick a seed and plant it. 

Your practice is considered at the status 'planted'. It will grow each time you visit your garden ONLY If you used the practice and you still consider it as useful. Then you will pass it to the status 'germinated', 'grown' and finally you will put it in your 'garden' (the list of practices you use regularly in your team and you consider useful). 

At any time, you may consider a practice is obsolete: Put it then in 'the compost' but the rule is: When you put something into the compost, you must get something from the compost. It means you must learn from it, and find new seeds! 

In a workshop or in a team routine:

Go though each step of the process, starting from the right ('Flourished'):

• In the 'flourished' stage, ask team members if they consider some of the flowers (team practices) as faded (obsolete). If the team agrees on one or some, move them to the 'compost' stage and launch a quick brainstorm to get lessons learnt (what did we appreciate in the practice? What worked well? What didn't work well?) => Collect then new ideas of practices and put them in the 'seeds stock'
• In the other stages 'grown', 'germinated', 'planted': ask the same two questions: "Did we use the practice? Do we consider it as useful?" If yes, move it to the next stag; if not, you can decide to give it a new try (keep it where it is) or to give it up (move it to the compost.)
• If the 'planted' stage is empty, the team may choose a new practice (seed) to test. Perform a simple vote, and move the selected practice into the 'planted' stage. Nominate a team member to put in place the practice (if need be).

Use a virtual (iKanban, wekan, Trello) or physical (post-its) Kanban tool to materialize this process. And when your garden is flourished, be proud of it and show it to your colleagues. (see attached template)