Book Reading Meeting: Improving Agile Knowledge

Portuguese version

I work as a Scrum Master for a major communication company in Brazil.
Our department (R&D) has a program for the creation of, among others, a Content Management System (CMS) able to achieve success in responding to all demands from the newsrooms.
We have 7 teams using Scrum. The whole team comprehends up to 45 people.

Given this scenario, a constant concern I have is to improve the knowledge of everyone on the team (including my own) about Agile tools and methodologies.

We, the ScrumMasters, have recently decided to adopt a practice which has being generating good results, including process improvements: a one hour meeting, twice a week, in which we read and discuss a previously selected book on some Agile subject.

We have started with Henrik Kniberg's - Scrum and XP from the Trenches - because, despite being a pretty simple book, it is an excellent book that everyone had already read. It would fit well for it could serve as a good guide to cover the bulk of Scrum practices (This book covers well the practices, but is admittedly superficial about theories, principles and values). 

It's desirable that every participant have had read the book, or at least the previously agreed upon chapters. For this book in particular, it was not necessary to make prior notes because a fast reading right there was enough to generate discutions, what is exactly what has being generating the best results. I'm pretty sure the next book we intend to read will demand more of us (I'll comment which book we selected in another post).

When we reach some point in which someone has a comment to make, we suspend the reading and let the debate happen. Normally we try to reach a consensus if what the book says is the ideal, afterwards we decide if tie is better than our current practices and why and, last but not least, we try to agree it it is worth to update our current practices (with actions and accountables).

The meeting has a few simple rules:

1. It should happen regardless the absence of some participants
   The objective of this rule is to generate rhythm. As soon as we started, we had only two participants, me and another Scrum Master. The lack of one of us invalidated the meeting, but as more participants joined us, it was possible to create the necessary rhythm. If at least two participants are present, the meeting should happen.
2. Timebox
   Keep the meeting within the chosen timebox. We chose to make it one hour, but decide what is best for you and attain to it, at least until everyone decides to change it.
3. Encourage the presence of representants of every Scrum role
   We now have Developers, Scrum Masters and Product Owners, no Manager yet, it would be very positive, nevertheless. Since every person can see the impacts over its own area of expertise in a cleared way, the discussions become richer and the decisions taken there are more easily implemented
4. Encourage Ideas Confrontation. Read the article Managing Confrontation in Multicultural Teams
   I do recommend you to read the article cited above, but if you are without patience at the very moment, the summary is somehow as follows: The confrontation of ideas makes new knowledge emerge. There are cultures where this is difficult because it is considered rude or simply impolite. If that is the case, the article recommends a simple practice: every participant writes downs their ideas and hands them to a representant who will defend those ideas. It is a way to depersonalize the confrontation.
   The tip here it to keep respectful all the time and do not interpret as "I lost this debate", rather interpret it as "I learned something new". I, for instance, have already lost, I mean, learned a lot of new things.
5. Register the discussion, conclusions and actions
   The register keeps the generated knowledge available to everybody,  clarify the whys of the decisions taken and allows the actions follow up.
   We have being using Confluence to register the meeting. The interesting part is that further discussions take place there, through comments.
6. Actions follow up
   This meeting's objective is to improve knowledge and align perceptions, however, it is also intended to generate process improvements, so it is important to keep an eye over the actions decided on the meeting, specially if they are being executed and if the results are what was expected of them.

I hope you can drop some lines with your opinion, suggestions and any related experience you've had. Oh, please, feel free to correct my English if you happen to see something simply wrong or that could be better writen.