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Meet The Speakers – Ilmar Käär and Andri Vanem

Meet Agile Saturday Tallinn XVI speakers Ilmar Käär and Andri Vanem (Eesti Energia), with a talk “Breaking Barriers at Eesti Energia: The Power of Organizational Agility“

Topic: Breaking Barriers at Eesti Energia: The Power of Organizational Agility


About the talk:
Eesti Energia, with around 5400 employees, is one of the biggest and oldest companies in Estonia. It began an agile transformation in its IT division over three years ago. Our IT community has over 300 members.

Our aim was not just to adopt a new approach, culture, and ways of working, but also to make the organization nimbler, reduce layers of management and make it flatter.

Come find out how this change has impacted our company, our aspirations, and where we stand on this ongoing journey.

About Ilmar:

  • Over the past 25 years, I’ve had the opportunity to work in various organizations across the Baltic and Nordic regions, including Eesti Energia where I’ve been employed for just over 5 years, currently as a Head of Business Technology and IT.
  • I’m inspired to work with my colleagues in fostering an agile mindset. It’s all about understanding, collaborating, learning, and being flexible to achieve results and provide value.
  • I like simple things, but achieving simplicity in concepts, ways of working and organizations is challenging, as it requires navigating underlying complexities and prioritizing what is truly essential.

About Andri:

  • Software products development has been my passion for quite a long time. Doing it with agile mindset is just a cherry on top of the cake.
  • Passion to do things differently to show there is a different way to do things and hate the sentence “we have always done it this way.”
  • I do not believe in hierarchy – we are all humans and best processes are always made by the experts in the field.

Meet The Speakers – Ilmar Käär and Andri Vanem Read More »

Meet The Speakers – Tommy Ågren

Meet an Agile Saturday Tallinn XVI speaker Tommy Ågren (Sweden), with a talk “Organizational design and complexity“

Topic: Organizational design and complexity

About the talk:

Today there are various frameworks and methods for scaling agile, which many organizations adopt as means to become an agile organization.

Many frameworks and methods are based on structures, design elements, and practices that we more or less take for granted as the recipe for organizational design and success. Structures and design elements can indeed serve as enablers for agility. However, in some cases they can also be misleading, especially if applied in the wrong context.

So how can we know if our design elements are providing a viable foundation for an organization to become more agile? What could be indicators for a good fit, and what could be indicators to be cautious and rethink?

To address this question, we need to become more aware of context and degree of complexity, and bear in mind what we are trying to accomplish by “being agile”.

About Tommy:

Tommy lives in Stockholm, Sweden and works as Senior Agile Coach or Change lead.
He has been working within the IT business for about 30 years in different types of roles (Developer, Architect, Scrum Master, Agile Coach, Change lead).
Over the last 20 years Tommy has been involved in and gained experience from different Agile change initiatives from types of organizations, such as Banking and Finance, Retail, Telecom, Industry, Aeronautical and Defense industry, MedTech, the Public Sector and more.
Tommy is passionate about organizational development and scaling agility. In his work he uses a broad spectrum of different frameworks, methods, and practices. However, he prefers to use these pragmatically as “tools” to solve real problems – not as own ends.

Agile Saturday Tallinn XVI will take place 15th of April 2023 and you can register through Eventbrite.
More information about
Agile Saturday Tallinn XVI

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Meet The Speakers – Cliff Hazell

Meet our third keynote speaker, Cliff Hazell (Sweden), with a talk “Beyond Copy Paste Agile”!

Topic: Beyond Copy Paste Agile

About the talk:
Today it’s common for company leaders to express a desire to be more agile, and many embark on expensive change journeys, to make their teams more agile.

After years on this journey fraught with “resistance” and lots of change, and yet seldom able to show results that are meaningful to customers or the business.

Part of the problem is the core assumption that the problems, and therefore solutions exist at the team level.

My experience is that to delight customers, collaboration is required between teams and departments. This focusing on the parts (individuals and teams) rarely improves the whole, in ways customers will appreciate or pay for.

We’ll explore this through three lenses.

  • Sapiens – How creating a healthy environment unlocked our potential.
  • Science – How to Improve our understanding of what works and what doesn’t.
  • Systems – How building effective interaction between teams produces more effective results.

About Cliff:
Cliff has made a career out of breaking down the obstacles that stand in the way of great work. He is often challenging the status quo in his quest to develop the right culture and systems for creation of excellent Companies and Products.

After a tour of addresses across South Africa, Cliff moved to Stockholm where he led a team of Coaches at Spotify for 4 years.

Now he Helps tech Scale-ups remove their Growth pains.

Agile Saturday Tallinn XVI will take place 15th of April 2023 and you can register here:  Eventbrite ticketing system.

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Meet The Speakers – Amir Peled

Meet an Agile Saturday Tallinn XVI speaker, Amir Peled (Romania), who will run a workshop “Antidotes to Team Toxins – Visual Edition”!

Topic: Antidotes to Team Toxins – Visual Edition

About the workshop:

Do you have experience with teams that resorted to unskillful communication occasionally or during some challenging times? You are not alone!

It’s time to acknowledge that when these unskillful communications persist without being addressed, they become toxic to relationships and eventually erode performance, trust, and morale within the team.

I believe that high-performance teams are not only aware of the existence of toxins, but they also recognize that they are present in their relationship, and they are willing to address them together. Those high-performance teams do understand that toxins are normal, and they are engaged in a constructive conflict with the intention to become a strong entity. However, in my experience, too often people who work together in teams with a different maturity prefer to avoid conflict at all costs by choosing not to address the conflict, pretending that it never existed, and sometimes even hiding it “underneath the carpet”.

In this practical and highly visual workshop (4 hand-drawn posters created by the speaker), we will expose the four team toxins that exist in all teams and their respective characteristics. The speaker will bring them to life with some real-life examples. Next, the participants will share with each other their examples from teams that they were part of in the past, followed by identifying our default toxin in a relationship (the speaker is going to model it first). Finally, we will cover the antidotes to team toxins and determine next steps for improvement.

Do not miss this learning and sharing opportunity!
You can help the team to take responsibility for toxic communication and to consciously design their own agreement for constructive conflict. They deserve it. And you deserve it too!

Learning Outcomes:

At the end of this session, participants will be able to:

  • State the 4 team toxins most people use from time to time
  • Comprehend how using them daily can destroy teams and relationships
  • Review the antidotes which counteract team toxins
  • Pick up an antidote and practice!

Amir about himself:
I became the first Scrum Alliance Certified Team Coach (CTC) in Eastern Europe in 2018 and served as a volunteer on the European Gathering Team (EUGT) for planning Global SCRUM GATHERING® Vienna 2019 and Global SCRUM GATHERING® Lisbon 2022. Additionally, I am a CTC Review Team Member and Women in Agile 2020 mentor. Lastly, I am also the founder of the first Scrum Alliance User Group in Romania called Agile Coaching and Beyond.


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Filips Jelisejevs- Also Cloud Latvia

“Got no Product Owner… What to do? .”

Product Owner is the helmsman of your galley. You can have the best rowing team ever, but if helmsman fell overboard, you will never get to the port! What do…? Story from trenches.

What are the strengths of agile development? How does a Product Owner contribute to those? What if a PO is not performing? Or can not scale? Or is altogether absent?

This is the real world story of our company, where through necessity we were forced to dissect and replicate the functions of the PO through a gamified voting process of direct stakeholders. More details and takeaways inside!

BIO: Filips has been a Scrum master and team lead for longer than is probably healthy.

To secure your spot, go ahead and register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/agile-saturday-xiv-registration-44994750510 

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Kati Orav- Creativity Catcher

“Visual thinking as a tool for productive conversations, meetings and processes.”

From this hands-on session you will get to know why, how and where to use visual thinking and practices. I will enhance your skills to doodle and give you a courage to use it in your professional life. After that you just fall in love with visual thinking and ask yourself “How did I even live without it before?”

Visual thinking is a tool for everybody who needs masterfully and visually communicate important messages, enhance meetings, project works and the creation of strategies. If you need to provide overview and shared understanding for teams and groups in all sizes, collaborate purposefully, communicate effectively and navigate in complexity then this session is for you!

A good leader must have the ability to create a free and open environment for dialogue where truly meaningful conversations take place. Nowadays we have less and less time for that cos there is so much information around us and problem-solving seems to become more complicated. It is therefore many leaders around the world have started not just to improve their conversation skills but also their visual abilities. Graphic facilitation is the practice of using words and images to create a conceptual map of a conversation. It is both process and product.

It is a great tool for making cooperation, processes and learning visible, to harvest, to see the common understanding and results. Pictures make people talk, share, ask questions, collaborate and, most important, understand and participate. The main emphasis of the session is to encourage the participants to draw and use simpler drawing techniques in professional life. Additionally, we learn to piece the drawings together in strategic contexts, how a picture can support important texts and how to create complete visuals- the templates.

Templates are the most interactive way of using visual facilitation. Templates are something that invites people to collaborate and participate. Can you imagine the situations where you want to do a project or a strategy but it is so complex that your team member just don’t get the whole picture.

Then you take a big paper and fill it with all of the elements with a lot of white space for everyone’s contribution. First- people start to see the overview, second- they can understand the structure, patterns and how things are connected. And third- they can start to fill it with their own ideas. What could be more fun and inclusive!?

BIO: I help people to fulfil their dreams. For that I teach them how to bring structure to their ideas by using simple pictures. One of the great missions in my life is to help people to find the courage to doodle in their professional life. I live in South-Estonia with my family. I am entrepreneur who dreams a lot but always asks how to make the dream come true. I love teaching and using visual thinking cos this tool and mindset helps me the most. I have made some books and have performed in TEDxTartu and many conferences in Estonia.

To secure your spot, go ahead and register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/agile-saturday-xiv-registration-44994750510 

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Liisa Schneemann- LHV

“Scaling agility in organizations – the big, the small and the in-betweeners .”

Can agility scale in organizations, and does size matter? LHV will share their experience in launching an agile startup-like new business venture in the UK in rather unsteady pre-Brexit times.

Last month, LHV launched their new business venture in the UK. As a new generation influencer bank, LHV will start integrating and linking together traditional banking with emerging financial services and fintechs. This requires a large amount of agility and flexibility from the organization and the team, as well seeing and leveraging opportunities in unexpected places and in seemingly less than perfect circumstances. The UK is a rather unpredictable business environment due to obvious Brexit concerns. This can bring about challenges that require adapting to constantly changing conditions and having a personalized approach to your customers.

Starting a new UK venture right before Brexit means swimming upstream when everybody is going with the flow or avoiding Britain altogether. Taking full advantage of the robust growth in the UK fintech sector can only be done with an agile startup mindset as well as business development process that allows rapid adjustments if and when needed. More than anything, launching LHV’s UK business resembles more to launching a startup within an already successful company, than a traditional corporation merely extending their operation across borders. During the session, we’ll explain how we apply agile business modeling in launching and developing our UK business and describe the obvious and less obvious challenges we are facing and overcoming.

Agility is not only for small businesses and startups, it’s a mindset you can take upon in all aspects of your business, teams, and organization as a whole. Agility is scalable, it’s for smaller and bigger companies alike, and for anyone who feels they’re in-between – hustling their way to growth and success. LHV’s UK business demonstrates well how bigger companies can leverage agility not only to grow their already existing business but also launch new ones and explore exciting unknown territories.

BIO: Liisa is the UK Product Manager for LHV, the biggest domestic financial group in Estonia. She has extensive experience in digital marketing and advertising, having held positions in media companies as well as agencies in the past. It is not her first PM role in LHV, she has previously also managed LHV’s integration of internal tools as well as client onboarding. Technology has always been in the center of Liisa’s work and continues to stay close to her heart.

To secure your spot, go ahead and register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/agile-saturday-xiv-registration-44994750510 

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Wilko Nienhaus- Vaimo

“Mob programming.”

“All the brilliant minds working together on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and at the same computer”. How we transformed as a team by working together on everything.

1. What is mob programming. Woody Zuill, co-creator of Mob programming calls it “All the brilliant minds working together on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and at the same computer”. It’s basically a “whole-team” approach to teamwork in software development.

2. Why The team’s technical lead found an article about mob programming and shared it with the rest of the team. The team has always been open to try new things and was already familiar with Scrum and Test Driven Development, so they decided to give it a try. At that time the team consisted of 3 persons, the technical lead himself and two other developers.

3. How we got started The team read up on the guidelines of mob programming, booked a conference room and identified a reasonably short user story. The user story was a new feature, part of the code-base they were already very familiar with. They wrote down a plan on how to implement the new feature and took turns at the keyboard.

4. How mob programming changed the team’s process The team followed their regular process, which had the following steps: Todo, In Progress, Code Review, To Test, Done. When they got to the Code Review step, they noticed they had already been code reviewing the code together from the very beginning. They had also been testing the new feature (both with TDD and manual tests), so the Testing step didn’t make any sense either. So they merged the work, deployed the new feature and moved the user story straight to Done. This allowed them to streamline their process where they now only have 3 states: Todo, In Progress and Done.

5. Strategies for working as a mob The talk will cover various strategies for reducing distractions, increasing focus and dealing with exhaustion from too much uninterrupted focus.

6. Learnings from Mob Programming The team will share practical learnings they made, which any team can learn from, even when not doing Mob Programming. The team was also fortunate enough to grow by 2 developers since starting mob programming, so will share how mob programming allowed new developers to adapt easily and even learn TDD in record time.

7. Manager’s perspective Finally we will add a short insight from the manager perspective, on how mob programming actually made the manager’s life easier, all while giving the team more freedom and autonomy.

BIO: CTO at Vaimo. Background as a Backend Developer. Worked with various teams in Vaimo from Product to Hosting to Internal Tools. Focussed on developing Continuous Delivery capabilities within Vaimo.

To secure your spot, go ahead and register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/agile-saturday-xiv-registration-44994750510 

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Hanno Jarvet- Jarvet Consulting

“How to be an effective Agile change agent.”

Hanno JarvetYou have experience in Agile methodologies, corporate change initiatives and want to take your Agile success to a new level. Either expand it further in IT or involve more of the business. Perhaps even make the whole organisation Agile. How should you go about it in a non-naive way? How can you find some contextually appropriate ways to move your organisation forward? Depending on the nature of your context and environment​,​ different parts of the Agile methodology ​are appropriate​ (but not sufficient)​.

This talk will help you choose ​a ​contextually appropriate approach. We will look at complexity theory to understand how to​ look at systems and environments ​and to act in​ a contextually appropriate way to avoid running fools errands and to pick the battles that can be won with the right tools.

– Do-s and Don’t-s of organisational change

– “Agile wars”: One process to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.

– BizSecDevOps? – Achieving organisational change or “transformations”

– Scaling the “what” before understanding the “why”

– Unintended consequences – Making change stick.

– Leading the unleadable.

– No innovation with Best practice imitation.

BIO: I help organisations improve performance.

To secure your spot, go ahead and register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/agile-saturday-xiv-registration-44994750510 

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Jelmer Koekkoek- ING Netherlands

“What are you prepared to give up? – A story about the agile transformation of ING Netherlands”

ING Netherlands was one of the first corporates in The Netherlands, and one of the first banks in the world, to adopt agile ways of working throughout the entire organisation. The transformation took place 9 months after it was thought of, in big bang style for 2,500 employees at the head office of the bank.

So what happened? Why did it work where previous attempts failed? What did we learn & what are our struggles of today? Most importantly if you want this for your own organisation: what are you prepared to let go?!

Jelmer Koekkoek has been part of the transformation process as an agile coach, and will share the exciting journey of a traditional bank transforming into what became a case study for corporates all around the globe.​

To secure your spot, go ahead and register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/agile-saturday-xiv-registration-44994750510 

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Ethan Ram – Playtech

Was it Worth It? Measuring the Success of an Agility Project in Business Terms


Transforming a company that is working in “”traditional”” methodologies to “”Agile”” is expensive: management attention, overcoming change resistance, cost of consultants and time spent on re-education and training. Is it worth it? Measuring success in business terms is hard but may be crucial in management buy-in into executing an Agility project.

How will it improve the bottom lines? Can we expect more lines of code to be written by less developers? Can the success of an Agility project be somehow quantified?

This session looks at statistics gathered in my company – R&D, QA, Support, HR and Sales have all contributed their KPI graphs – to try and answer this question. I’ll be presenting some enlightening graphs of before and after a major Agility project that covered many aspects of the company operations. Trying to explain the change both in qualitative AND in quantitative measures. Hopefully, making a clear business case for going Agile.

1. Executive motivations in an Agility project
2. Short overview of the Agile path taken in Videobet/Playtech
3. Looking at statistics gathered in R&D, QA, Support, HR and Sales
4. Making the business case for Agility

Learning Outcome
a. Serve as an example for an executive level Agility project retrospective.
b. Can be used as a tool in management buy-in for a company-wide Agility project.

BIO: Ethan Ram is the chief architect of Videobet, the Tallinn division of Playtech, developing one of the most advanced gaming platforms in the gaming market. Among his recent project he has led the Agile transformation of Videobet development and operations groups to work in Scrum. The project started late last year and is now past its climax. Before Videobet Ethan was working as the R&D manager of a web-based gaming startup where he transformed the development group to work in Kanban with Continuous Deployment environment.

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Priit Kaasik – FlowHow

Too many ways to improve Scrum? Take them all!

Many teams, from small to large, not familiar with incremental and iterative delivery methods, struggle with getting started, keeping the momentum and focusing at the right things. Right tools and technologies can help!

A brief summary of organisational development tools for improving the implementation of Scrum, complemented with a few real-life use cases, where these tools have been used in different organisations – number of teams involved, characteristics, effects, outcomes etc

BIO: 18 years in the field of international software industry, from small to humongous-sized companies. I have collected a few excellent achievements over the years, combined them with many more how-not-to experiences. During the last five years I have been focused on building tools of organisational development to smoothen the merger of technology and business.

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Jaan Pullerits – CyberCat Creations

Building microservices with Esticade framework

Easiest way to get started with microservices.
How to start using benefits of microservices without worrying about REST APIs, port mapping, configuring endpoints and firewalls or service discovery. We explore the benefits and pitfalls of Esticade framework and show how to achieve scalability, reliability and optimal performance with Esticade (and microservices in general), with minimal time and effort.

BIO: Developer for more than ten years, have been working with many technologies and languages.

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Björn Kimminich – Kuehne + Nagel (AG & Co.) KG

#NoComments /* about the worthlessness of comments in clean code */

What #NoEstimates is for agilists, #NoComments should be for all developers who <3 clean code!

Comments are – at best – a necessary evil” (Uncle Bob, “Clean Code”) – Over the years I gathered quite a collection of examples for bad code comments. The most precious gems among them I would like to share with you. You will listen in on developer monologues and dialogues, try to analyze cryptic bylines, experience different levels of UnCamelCasing(tm) skill and fight your way through a redundant, useless and misleading inline thicket. You will also hear about well-meant tools and plugins that should not even exist if the mantra #NoComments would be valued as it should be.

BIO: Björn Kimminich is working in the area of software development for Kuehne + Nagel for over 8 years where he is now responsible for Global IT Architecture. He is doing Clean Code trainings with Kuehne + Nagel’s globally distributed development staff since 2011. As a side job he lectures software development at the UAS Nordakademie where he teaches Java to engineering students as their first programming language.

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Jaanus Soots – Skype

My personal experience with innovation in product team


This is the story where I was against hacking in team but after 1 year became the innovation champ do push it across the company.
I got my new product and team who was willing to do hacking. As a product manager with full of backlog, delayed delivery and high pressure from managers I was against of any new distractions. But that how it started. After long journey and many complicated experiments we ended up with fantastic outcome. Lot of internal improvements, many new customer features in live and patent taken for one invention.

BIO: more than 20 years on IT field and last 6 years in Skype

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Hanno Jarvet – Jarvet Consulting

Defining and executing a portfolio strategy

How to come up with a successful portfolio strategy and how to execute it?
Hanno JarvetHow does a Chief Product Owner turn the company strategy into a portfolio strategy and build a suite of products and services to satisfy new and existing customers? What are some common pitfalls in aligning the organisational structure, governance, budgeting and legal issues and what to do about it?

In a perfect world everyone in our organisation knows what and why it should be achieved, has clarity around which decisions need to be made by whom and has the necessary competence, information, resources and authority to do it. Usually this is not the case. I will share practical examples, tools and models that I have used to help organisations make progress in executing their portfolio strategy.

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Kristjan-Hans Sillmann – Telia Eesti (will co-present with Alek Kozlov)

The agile journey of Telia Estonia: experiments and discoveries


How to deal with 150 projects on a waiting list, if they are on the same level of importance and urgency? How to help business overcome the fear of building only small part of their grand vision? How to grow intrapreneurship in the hierarchic and matrix organization and support the people in their new roles?
In this talk you’ll hear what experiments we had, what we learned from these, where we failed and where we succeeded.

BIO: “I have 16 years of experience in software development, I’ve been a developer and a project manager. For 11 years, I’ve also been a lecturer in Tallinn University of Technology.
For the last 2,5 years I’ve been responsible for IT development process improvements in Telia Eesti. In my view, improvements in IT development cannot be enforced, they can only be sold out to the leaders, managers and teams. I think this can be done by a Lean-Agile evangelist who will train, mentor and coach people.
My favourite topics are: Lean thinking, principles and practices; startup mentality in the enterprise; agile Product Ownership and scoping (eg story mapping); DevOps & continuous delivery.”

BIO: Alek Kozlov Product Success Catalyst and Designer. I love to see how people uncover innovation by finding very simple and elegant solutions. But even more I love to see how these innovations help to understand and spin new business models.

Kristjan-Hans Sillmann – Telia Eesti (will co-present with Alek Kozlov) Read More »

Ari Tikka – Gosei OY

From Tayloristic to Agile organization

What is common to Ford factories around 1900 and the collapse of Nokia Mobile Phones 2011? What leads most corporations towards Tayloristic organization? What is the other path to success?

“What is common to Ford factories a hundred years ago and Nokia about 20 years ago? In our session we explain the logic that takes the vast majority of leaders and corporations towards Tayloristic organization. We will also show the necessary and adequate changes to move from Tayloristic to Agile organization. Agile Adoptions tend to fall back to the old status quo. This happens for several reasons. First, a partial adoption introduces changes, which make the socio­techno­-economical system inconsistent and uneconomical. Second, partly because of the previous, the old status quo remains more comfortable for the individuals, and the new practices do not sustain. Third, the fundamental leadership assumptions have been cemented in the culture.
We will shed light on Taylorism versus Agile using several approaches: Ouchi’s theory of organizational control, Hackmann’s research on High­Performance Teams, Lean product development, Large­Scale Scrum, Complexity theory, history of Leadership, and our 20+ years of experience.”

BIO: After studying structural mechanics Ari built fault tolerant embedded real time systems for ten years. He has been full-­time organizational therapist since 1997. He has deep experience in organizational and group dynamics. He likes to explore and publish about patterns and unconscious phenomena in organizations. Ari is working with international Large­Scale Scrum (LeSS) adoptions, and contributing actively to the framework. In private life Ari listens to strange classical music (now playing), lifts iron, runs after the ball and tries to sit quietly in zen meditation.

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