“Agile is Dead” seems to be the phrase of the day. Not really what you want to be hearing when Agile consulting is your bread and butter and you are fairly passionate about everything it encompasses - and know that fundamentally this sentiment is not founded on any logical reality. So I set out to e... continue reading

With the rapid pace of transformation in technology and work culture, it's challenging to predict what the future holds. It's clear, though, that new ways of working are emerging and they're here to stay. This workshop, based on Jim Highsmith's book "Wild West to Agile", attempts to do exactly that.... continue reading

Agile Australia continues to be a world leading conference, and having just unpacked our suitcases from our trip to Sydney, I am excited to share a tapestry of thoughts that we've woven together into six takeaways and insights. The conference was headlined by outstanding speakers including Steve Den... continue reading

During the year of 2017 I broke five bones (3 ribs, my collarbone and my wrist) all on separate occasions. I ride mountain bikes often (or at least I did until I recently had twins) and I love riding the steep, technical and rooty trails that Wellington NZ has in abundance.... continue reading

Are you tired of endless articles and books about how to create strong and healthy team cultures, cultivating environments where individuals have the support and freedom to do their best work, or tips on building high performing teams? If you answered yes to at least one of the above, then I have th... continue reading

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

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

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

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 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

With the wave of Agile ways of working quite a few new roles have been introduced to organisations: with basic Agile we’ve added Product Owner, Agile Coach, Scrum Master. Then the famous Spotify model added some extra roles to the mix like Chapter Lead and Tribe Lead. It’s easy to get lost in the ro... continue reading

I have been an agile practitioner for a while now and every year I learn new things and add practices and ideas to my tool belt. I have hundreds of these. The agile alliance has this Subway map of practices and I know there are MANY more out there.... continue reading

When we create a remote IC Agile course, a key objective is not to compromise on the interactive experience. This can be pretty tricky with some of the hands-on learning exercises we use, but thanks to the recent ‘make everything remote’ situation, we’ve adapted pretty fast! One of the exercises we... continue reading