SCRUM Repurposed — How A Mastermind Accountability Circle Helps You Learn Faster
Together we can go far, fail fast and develop an unshakable intention about life
Free Ressource: Download my bullet point summary (pdf)
Intoduction
A Mastermind circle is the pinnacle of accountability partnerships. It consists of a small group of people that regularly meet and discuss their progress and challenges as they move towards their individual goals. The group might be united by a shared impact, visions or values.
If you seek to live an intentional life, you might at some point form a strong, active alliance with a group of like minded people whose intention it is to grow as a person. Regardless of how foreign this concept is to you, it is not unlikely that you are in a position to transform part of your social circle into a Mastermind by following the structure I share in this article.
I will share 4 steps on how you can organize and plan your own Mastermind. This requires that you already know 2 to 4 other people that are willing to join you in this endeavor.
If you only know 1 other person, then an accountability partnership is better suited for you and can provide immense value to you and your accountability partner.
A Distinct Tribe For Growth
As humans, we’ve always moved in tribes. In our daily modern life, we belong to plenty of communities, online and offline. However, when compared to a mastermind, most of these alliances are weaker in their purpose amd requirements.
To illustrate this, let’s look at a few examples of typical communities: You could attend a weekly jam session that is serious about everyone giving their best but less demanding about the consistency of showing up. Another example could be the football team you are part of. It’s just that the intentions of drinks after Sunday Football are not about helping your career progress but about supporting each others overall life and the enjoyment thereof; even though you can propably land a job more easily from that network of 20 people than from a shared linkedin post. But I digress…
A Mastermind is about accelerating the speed at which we experiment, fail and recover while we adapt to the changes in the world. All this while we are intentional about creating the life that suits us, our relationships and our desired impact best.
Having An Ice Cold Swim With My Accountability Partners
Structuring Your First Mastermind
Step 1: Choose Your Area of Focus
Your Mastermind can focus on several areas of life: Think business, where you and your partners are each building and growing their enterprises at the same time. Alternatively a mastermind could be embedded in a corporate environment as a supporting strucutre for leadership to meet up regularly in an effort to align and sharpen their decision making with the values of the company. Other areas could be community building, physical fitness, or your personal finances.
As a self-organizing structure the choice is yours. You can select multiple areas at once or a specific one. Although I always recommend being as essential as possible to maximize the value received!
Step 2: Determine Your Meeting Frequency
The frequency of your accountability catch-ups depends on the support you require and how well you know each other.
The suppport you receive has a positive impact on your course correction as you move towards your goals. In addition, you will experience being challenged in your patterns of thinking and in your behaviour. Receiving accountability also helps you break free from your illusions, which are mostly fears or blind optimism.
I also mentioned that how well you know each other is relevant for your meeting frequency. This holds true especially in the beginning phases: Imagine your start a new job with a new group of colleagues and you only see them once a week. This would feel very different from seeing them every day. Maybe you have experienced both scenarios before and remember how much longer it took to create a trusted bond when you saw each other less frequently.
Well, this is no different for your Mastermind.
For your first Mastermind, I recommend weekly meetups regardless of how well you know each other. This is because it will also take you some time to get acquainted with the new headspace you share. A Mastermind requires you to show up very intentional and adhere to a rule set. Similar to how SCRUM product teams take their rules so serious that there’s a referee (the Scrum Master) who gets paid just to make sure the team stays on track. Since you won’t hire a referee, you’ll have to distribute their tasks amongst each other, take responsibility and be serious about growth.
Step 2: Online, Offline, Hybrid
As any meeting, your mastermind will be most effective in person. However, if this is not possible for some or for all your meetings, then it might be necessary to move online. I do not recommend Hybrid setups within the first 6 weeks of your new Mastermind due to the interpersonal chemistry likely being challenged by communication issues. If one person has to go online, it’s best if you all meet there. For the rest, offline setups offer more possibilities to enter immersive experiences together. Before your actual mastermind meeting you could take a cold plunge, go a walk or have lunch together. Co-create your rituals to help you get into the right state of mind, and walk through a portal of accountability and progress together before being hands-on.
Step 3: Preparation Your Meetings With SCRUM
For your meeting preparation, you can take a page out of the SCRUM playbook. As mentioned before, SCRUM is an agile project management framework that helps corporate teams achieve their goals together.
The reoccuring retrospective meeting (also called retro) is designed to help teams reflect on their previous phase of work (usually a 3 week interval). During each retro, there are several questions that each member reflects on that translate well to your Mastermind Group:
1. What went well?
2. What could be improved?
3. What do I want to do differently next time?
In addition, it is neccessary to define the matter you would like to discuss with the other members. Ideally you pick one of your blindspots. Or you opt for the biggest challenge you are facing, either at the present moment or in the near future.
To prioritise this is very important, as your Mastermind is a jewel. A source of advice and wisdom. So you don’t have to make the same mistakes someone else made, or you can learn about which tools and workflows they use to make progress. Experiencing this benefit should inspire you to take your partners’ expertise and background into account when choosing your weekly topic of discussion.
4. What aspect of my journey do I want to focus on in the discussion with the other members?
It is crucial for the success of your mastermind to reflect on these questions ahead of time, either on the morning of the meeting or on the day before. When it comes to the time between your individual reflection and the actual meeting, it is incredibly helpful to enter a state of deep work and undisrupted focus to be able to show up your most prepared not only with regards to the notes in your notebook but also subconsciously. Because our creativity, sincerity and authenticity relies on a strong intuition and presence of mind.
You can read about how I enter my focused zone here:
Tai Chi, Chamomile and other ways to enter a focused zone in distracting times
Here are my 4 most effective ways to get in the zone for writing, working and (yes..) sleeping.medium.com
Step 4: Meeting Structure
Each meeting follows a precise structure with predetermined timings and agreed upon speaking rules.
The timings determine how long each member of the Mastermind gets to share and discuss their matters at hand. Share in succession of one another. For starters, when receiving feedback from 2 others or more, 15 to 20 Minutes per person is optimal. But I encourage you to play with that time to see how much sharper you can get if you have less time.
Within each 15 minute time-frame each member shares the answers to their questions. Mind you, this is not a monologue! The questions serve as a guideline for the speaker who becomes an interviewee as he is being challenged and prompted by the other members. This will allow him to explore his doubts, fears and belief systems more deeply.
Because of this flexible set up, the conversation can be compared to semi-structured interview in User Experiece Design.
Closing Advice - The importance of intentional dialogue
Beyond this, it is imporant for a serious dialogue to form in which the other members, through their questions, keep the speaker on topic and in line with his original intention of what they wanted to discuss. Similar to a coaching conversation, the questions should be open and encourage the speaker to come up with solutions for challenges by themselves. A Mastermind is a wonderful opportunity to practice this form of active listening without imposing your opinion, world view and biases on the other party. If this concept is new to you, a tip I would like to share with you is to phrase your ideas and suggestions as questions.
To illustrate this, imagine the following Mastermind dialogue in which Member 1 shares one of the challenges they are facing:
Member 1: “I’m struggling with keeping a list of clients at some central directory that is not an Excel sheet”
Member 2: “You need to try Hubspot!”
Instead you can phrase your suggestion as a question:
”Have you considered online CRM platforms?”
In this example member 2 suggest a specific solution to member 1 which may not benefit them as much as one would assume. An alternative way for member 2 to share this insight from their source of experience would require at least two changes: Firstly, they would have to generalise the solution into an overarching domain (Hubspot becomes CRM). Secondly, they would impose themselves less by phrasing their suggestion as a question.
In reality, you might still have the initial thought of suggesting Hubspot because it arises from your valid experience. But for the benefit of ourselves, and the other person across from us, it is wise to take a moment to think about how we can phrase our suggestions in a more neutral way.
Doing so could benefit both parties hugely, as the speaker might come up with a solution that is just as good as ours or even better if viewed through the lense of a specific use case. My fictional dialogue ends with member 1 learning from member two and not voiding their learning opportunity either:
Member 1: “Yes, I have tried Klavyo and was disappointed. Someone told me there’s a way to connect Zapier with Google Sheets, ever heard of that?”
Member 2: “No I haven’t. I was about to recommend you Hubspot but might look into this zapier thing for my newsletter subscribers. Thanks!”
We are eager to help each other and be a “good” accountability partner! However, sometimes the best help is given by providing the other person enough space between pauses in narration to leverage their own capacity for problem solving.
If each member of your Mastermind does their best to communicate well, then you will benefit greatly from your new accountability alliance — guaranteed!
Do you have any learnings and insights of your own to share about Masterminds and coaching? Kindly share them in the comments!
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