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....

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...

One of the highlights of the Nomad8 calendar is always #JAFAC. Where we create and curate the conference we want to attend, and then relish the opportunity to share it with the Agile community. So it was especially exciting to be able to run the conference again after a 3 year break. It felt differe...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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....

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...