Thoughts and conversation from our nomads.
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I get frustrated when I hear people talk about strategy, and then think they are done when they have come up with a vision and objectives. To me that is a mere platitude. I agree with Richard Rumelt that a good strategy is an “effective mix of thought and action”. Strategy needs both, but it also n...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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....
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
Sandy Mamoli and I recently attended the Business Agility Vienna Conference, where Sandy presented about Self Selection. (20 min video)...
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....
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...
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...
There are many approaches to carrying out planning. Here's what I use for situations that require any kind of planning at all - from working across organisational transformation to figuring out what to do at the weekend. I like it because it’s simple, easy to remember and it sets me up naturally to...
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...
I often teach Agile to people who have nothing to do with software development, such as leadership teams or organisations that operate entirely outside of the digital world. In this context I only teach the Modern Agile values (read more about the modern agile movement at modernagile.org)....
Role Expectation Mapping is a process described by the awesome Jimmy Janlén designed to aid collaboration and help a team work through mismatches in understanding of each other’s roles. I came across Jimmy's article recently when working with a small team who were struggling with what they could and...
Picture the scene: Your team is regularly coming together to focus on improving how they work but the same overarching problems seem to be the root cause every time. Worse still, these issues are perceived as being outside the direct control of the team. Your instinct and experience tell you that al...
As Agilists, our principles and values underpin the way we work and decisions we make. A good principle should be timeless and non-prescriptive enough to be valid across many contexts, but specific enough to add practical value and help us make decisions. I feel that one Agile Manifesto principle in...
I was asked to facilitate a session with a team of systems analysts who wanted to set their objectives for the next 6 months. This was a group of people who spent a large portion of their time embedded within project delivery teams. I wanted to use an approach that could address a number of question...
Process is expensive. Bigger teams, working from a distance, part time team members, and many specialists are all factors that lead to a more elaborate process. This might be obvious, but the more companies we get to know, the more we experience that this is something being ignored. This article is...
I created this guide with Sarah Blackie, to give an overview of Lean Agile Procurement (LAP), including the 5 core values and 5 core steps that underpin it....