When you picture a truly amazing team in your head, what does it look like? Now consider your teammates. Do they have the same picture? Really - all of them? The things people have experienced and read massively shape what ‘great’ looks like for them. The differences can lead to frustrations or peo...

“There is a difference between interest and commitment. When you're interested in something, you do it only when it's convenient. When you're committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results.” Ken Blanchard It happens often - something new comes up and it sounds exciting and we totally w...

Holacracy has great mechanisms to deal with governance and tactical issues. But what about the human side? What about relationships? What about our personal interactions in the workplace? Many have criticised Holacracy for not being complete, for being a system that only deals with the work and not...

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

Recently I’ve heard more and more stories of newly minted Agile Coaches crossing the lines between coaching* and counselling during 1:1 coaching sessions - that shit has to stop! It’s creepy, irresponsible and dangerous - mental wellbeing is not something to play around with. Since the roles of Agil...

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...

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....

Hello and welcome to the latest edition of our incredibly random, largely irreverent and loosely factual newsletter! It’s been quite a while since our last update and so much has happened! So get yourself something to drink and settle in. Here we go. New style Firstly, we finally decided we were gro...

There is a magical moment where a team gathers together to pause ‘business as usual’ and has a conversation to reflect on teamwork. It’s called a Retrospective. If done well, it helps to take a step forward. But a poorly held Retrospective is just another meeting that anyone barely wants to go to. O...

Agile FM - Sandy Mamoli on Self-Selection In this episode, Joe Krebs and I explore the topics of self-selection, self-organization and why this is so important for the culture of modern companies....

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...

Roles Figuring out all the roles and how we would work with them was lot of work to define and incredibly tedious to figure out - but ultimately well worth it. It provided some valuable insights into what our team was actually doing - an unanticipated side benefit! This is part two of three of my a...

For the upcoming Business Agility conference in New York Sandy has been interviewed for AgileAmped's Business Agility series. Sandy sat down with Agile Amped to explain Holacracy – a way to create a truly self-organizing organization – and shares examples of it in action. This episode of Agile Amped...

Recently a friend was considering introducing Holacracy in his company. He asked me what my thoughts were and while I was tempted to run screaming from the room in the same way you want to flee to a remote island when your mum buys a new PC, instead I blinked, swallowed, and we talked through my exp...

We have run Squad Self-Selection for two quarters in a row within ICONIC Tech and it has been wildly successful (99% of our staff either love it (77%), or like it (22%)). Our process included about 30 people and 5 Squads. We wanted to share our experience in the hopes of inspiring other organisation...

Although it’s been around for a really long time, Agile is still the newcomer on the scene for some organisations. But like the snowball rolling down the hill – it’s been growing larger and gathering momentum for some time – (and picking up all kinds of shit along the way) attracting more attention...