Every organisation I’ve ever worked with has suffered from ‘healthy tensions’ between roles turned nasty in one form or another. I’ve seen them lead to interpersonal conflict, team dysfunction, silos and productivity grinding to a halt. In general - bad outcomes all round.... continue reading

Assumptions, we all make them; the things that we take to be true without having the evidence to back it up. It can be all too easy, when faced with uncertainty and deadlines, to feel pressured into making quick decisions without that evidence; taking shortcuts by doing things the way we’ve always d... 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

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

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

I’ve updated the Opportunity Canvas by tightening up some of the language and descriptions and renaming the ‘Budget’ section to ‘Constraints’. Budget is a key constraint (how much is this opportunity worth realising or problem worth solving?) but I also find it’s worth explicitly considering others.... continue reading

Measures and metrics can be confusing; what do terms such as Leading, Lagging, Qualitative, and Quantitative even mean? when should you use them and why? It’s very hard to be ‘Data-informed’ in your decision making, if you are not informed yourself, on what these terms mean and how to apply them. I... continue reading

Business Agility is about an organisation’s ability to change and adapt in a complex environment. But what does it mean for a business to be agile and why would they do it? Most definitions dive straight into the what, and how practices can be applied within the organisation, but ‘being Agile’ is no... continue reading

The performance of an individual is much less important than you think it is. The way we measure, assess, evaluate and reward individual performance is no longer relevant in the modern workplace. We need to look at different behaviours and skills and instead consider the performance of the team. W... continue reading

How Travelstart used remote self-selection to create distributed teamsOnly five months after creating cross-functional teams Travelstart, a South African travel booking website, had a change in strategy and needed to rethink their team structure. From previous hackathons the company had experience w... continue reading

Sandy Mamoli and I recently attended the Business Agility Vienna Conference, where Sandy presented about Self Selection. (20 min video)... continue reading

The fastest and most efficient way to form stable agile teams is to let people choose their own team. This was a scary prospect when we in 2013 first considered handing over the decision making responsibility to the people affected. Fast-forward six years and self-selection has had a profound effect... continue reading

Getting to purpose - a quick path to creating a purpose statement . I recently found myself having to come up with a format on the fly for a new leadership team to create a purpose statement. Here’s what I did.... continue reading

Language We struggled a lot with the strange words and the weird legalese language. We decided to stick with it though because we realised that new concepts need new words. Otherwise we would impede learning. We did this in a way that we could still make fun of it though. This is part three of thr... continue reading