What is Athletic Development?
‘Athletic Development’ is a simple but effective professional routine that develops a stronger team culture and stimulates the delivery of higher-quality output, but more importantly, higher-valuable outcomes through continuous training and alignment. “Excellence” in craft and collaboration is central to Athletic Development.
Essential to the Athletic routine is that it involves frequent personal interaction and continuous (daily) training.
It comes with a step-by-step guide; simple to implement and master, that stimulates an ‘athletic’ mindset in the professional domain.
Oh, and naturally is free and open to all!
The term ‘Athletic Development’ is earlier defined in the sports domain as:
“The systematic, sequential and progressive development of all athletic qualities in an integrated manner to develop the complete athlete. It incorporates a balanced development of all components of physical performance: strength, power, speed, agility, endurance and flexibility” — Vern Gambetta.
This powerful definition is broader than ‘agility’. We adapted athletics to the professional domain of product / project development.
Athletic Development emerged by passing through the stages of “shu, ha, ri” exercising Scrum. It may be considered emergent to it. We certainly don’t value our approach over other practises and frameworks such as Scrum; it’s athletic, not elite. We are proud that our experience with Scrum have allowed us to come to this design.
“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” ― Pablo Picasso
Through agility we have come to value:
Teams — Athletic
over individuals and interactions — Agile
over processes and tools;Better experiences — Athletic
over working software — Agile
over comprehensive documentation;Coalition — Athletic
over customer collaboration — Agile
over contract negotiation;Continuous training and alignment — Athletic
over responding to change — Agile
over following a plan;
The Athletic format
Athletic Development is completely free and open to the community; who are actively involved in its design and implementation.
The format is simple, but strict:
— 4 recurring events: Prep, daily check-in, check-out, recap.
— 4 roles: Athlete, coach, captain, spectator.
— Collaboration takes place from one location: The Arena.
— Progress is organised in: Tracks, Sprints, Steps.
Get started?
Athletic Development and Arena are free and open. It doesn’t require licensing, courses, exams or certification.
Download the Guide to Athletic Development
We do care about active participation. So if you care to join us on Slack, and let us know what you think, be it positive or negative — any input is extremely valued by the Athletic community.
