I had the great pleasure to talk to Tony Ponton in this episode of Remote:af. Tony is a former radio host and it shows! In this episode, I talk about my background as a professional athlete and software developer, and how comparing my experience as a team athlete with individual sports such as Cros... continue reading

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson from the No Nonsense Agile Podcast in a conversation with Sandy Mamoli about building great teams: Why do some teams perform well and others perform poorly? The importance of skill, trust, respect, collaboration common purpose, constructive feedback and continuo... continue reading

The Challenge The IS team (Gallagher) had a hard time planning and working together effectively with other key stakeholders. Their existing governance process had only executive stakeholders, so communication and collaboration between team members wasn't so good, which made their work disjointed and... continue reading

The problem: I often struggle with clarifying expectations; where do you start, where do you stop? Teams often end up with too much or too little detail and big gaps in what people actually do. The solution: story map your expectations I wanted something that would give my sessions a structured fr... continue reading

The problem: It’s so boring! Someone joins the team: Maybe they come from another area of the business or maybe you just hired them. They might have worked agile in a previous job or they might have no idea what that means. Anyway you, the agile coach, now have to bring them up to speed so they are... continue reading

Self-Selection: The ultimate booster of autonomy and engagement Imagine, just for a moment, that I walked into your organisation and asked everyone to down tools for a day and get into teams of their choosing. That I asked everyone to choose who they wanted to work with and what they wanted to work... continue reading

An Above and Below the Line Model An organization’s culture is expressed through the sum of its language and behaviors. Negative behaviors have a palpable impact on teams and, in turn, the culture in which that team exists; one person belittling a colleague’s idea will make the recipient think again... continue reading

Back in the pre-COVID days, when we never imagined the future we now live in, I started to look into workplace culture and how it flowed through an organisation. While much has been written about this from many wiser heads than mine, my perspective was a bit unusual. It was when I sat in the toilet... continue reading

In 2016 I had a near death experience. I remember that day like it was yesterday. It happened at a beautiful place called Costa De Caparica, Portugal. I was a beginner surfer, having only 2 lessons in my whole life. I showed up at the beach excited, with a wetsuit on and my surfboard nicely waxed. I... continue reading

I often think I'm the luckiest person to be able to do what I do. I get to work with the smartest folk and solve gnarly problems with different teams. I get to help people do their best work together. What’s not to like? But when your job is to try and help people change the way they work, sometime... continue reading

At age 15 I found myself part of a team I had nothing in common with: people were at least 10 years older, they were a lot better at playing handball and we had nothing in common except for a love of the game. I felt very alone and inadequate, and just tried to hang in there practicing harder than I... continue reading

Why is it that we are still obsessed with the performance of the individual in our modern team-based organisations? Shouldn’t we measure and compare teams instead? Not for the sake of competing, but to learn from each other.... continue reading

1. What is self-selection? Self-selection is a way of letting people choose which team to work in. It is a facilitated process of letting people self-organize into small, cross-functional teams. It is the fastest and most efficient way to form stable teams and is based on a belief that people are at... continue reading

I don’t like the way I have been seeing the term mindset used as an accusation, as a binary assessment that someone is stuck in a way of thinking that they need to be shifted out of. Mindset is not an absolute term. It’s a way of understanding and thinking about something, manifested through behavio... continue reading