How we created a networked organisation 5 Key take-aways Holacracy provides radical transparency and timely decision making at the right level. Decision making by consent is awesome! The freedom, autonomy and responsibility to achieve a clear purpose enables self-organisation. Holacracy will amplif...

Empathy is a good thing and understanding what your colleagues actually do can be a very useful boost to collaboration. When we work in cross-functional teams or with people from other parts of the organisation it is helpful to get an understanding of what they do, how they can contribute and what w...

Inspired by our squadification experiences at Trade Me and other large companies, Xero set out to try self-selection for themselves. People were asked to figure out who should be in which team and choose who they wanted to work with. Read our interview with Jordan Morris, a software engineer and Agi...

Guest post by: Jaume Durany, Agile Coach at Fairfaxmedia. This post originally appeared on fairfaxmedia.co.nz Boundaries are everywhere, always. And, as Jurgen Appelo explains in his book Management 3.0, a complex system can self-organise only when there’s a boundary around it. That is, every outbre...

One of the most useful tools when introducing Agile into an organisation is personal Kanban. It gives me unique insights into an organisation's culture and values, and helps me determine my next steps. As an Agile coach, the process of getting people into personal Kanban facilitates insights into ho...

Our book "Creating Great Teams - How Self Selection Lets People Excel" was published with Pragmatic Bookshelf last week. Yesterday, the first paper copies arrived. A picture of the calm and collected authors (David Mole and me). So, what's the book about? And why should you read it? Here's a brief...

A problem we were facing recently was that our teams perceived their own progress as not being fast enough and were developing a sense that they were not performing well. Sometimes it is useful to know how productive we are as an organisation and how our teams compare to teams in other companies. A...

... getting more stuff done At Trade Me we want to measure the overall health of Tech (that’s our team of 125 designers, developers, testers, BAs, and Squad Masters) to identify trends and to know if we are getting better (or worse!). We know that when we measure something it is a strong way of sayi...

Organisations get the best results when people can choose what they work on and who they work with. In that spirit we decided to let people self-organise into small, cross-functional teams called squads. Up until last week we had six established squads within two tribes the rollout had been purposef...

One of my current clients, a large government agency, have recognised that their current monothilitic waterfall approach doesn’t work all that well and are trying to decide whether to change their delivery approach to Agile or “just” Iterative (mini-waterfall style). Management have recognised that...

Last week I presented at WebDU in Sydney. The conference was excellently organised by Geoff and the Daemon guys and I met lots of interesting people. And I love Sydney! In short I had a blast. Apart from a workshop on user stories I presented on 10 ways to fail with Agile. Judging by the Twitter str...