Thoughts and conversation from our nomads.
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Peter Drury, the well known English football commentator, is famous for his witty, brilliant remarks which always appear to be spontaneous and off the cuff. "and Jesus heads home from the cross" (exclaimed Peter Drury, when Gabriel Jesus of Manchester City scored from a header) So I was intrigued w...
“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...
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....
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....
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
If you are in the tech world, you have probably had an interaction with an Agile Coach or any other agilist at some point of your career. Your experience is somewhere in a range from "Agile Coaches are annoying and useless" to "Agile Coaches are great partners and make things better". I have worked...
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...
How do you deal with your “is this completely bananas or ...” moments at work? How do you get feedback on your approach and interventions? How do you bounce around ideas among peers? Being in a leadership (coaches, scrum masters, product leaders, people leaders) role can be a lonely place. Often, y...
The AgileBI Podcast is presented by Shane Gibson and Blair Tempero. In this episode Tony O'Halloran talks to the guys about a range of topics including how he got into the world of agile, scaling, frameworks and his current area of interest: Plan Continuation Bias and how that affects teams....
Many organisations and teams around the world are currently figuring out what a distributed world looks like for them, and if having and supporting great agile teams remotely is even possible. The good news is “YES, it absolutely is, but it takes deliberate thought and effort”. Timely is a NZ-based...
Feedback is a funny thing. We crave it, get disgruntled if we don’t get it, and often get upset when we do get it. As someone who requests feedback on a relatively frequent basis, I have been on a journey from being a terrible receiver of feedback, to a much less terrible one. It’s something I am al...
I’ve seen more than 100 people leaving their companies and teams in the last 5 years. Sometimes they go to chase exciting challenges, get promoted or they're just looking for something new. Unfortunately when someone leaves the knowledge that they've created and gained leaves the organisation as we...
I’ve been meeting new people lately, work-related. And one of my pet peeves has resurfaced with a vengeance… people who don’t listen. Not just not listening, but basically just waiting for their opportunity to jump into the conversation and talk about their angle on whatever I just raised, as if the...
Do you ever get to the end of a day, week, or month and wonder where all that time went? What did you do? What did you achieve? Why do you feel so exhausted and yet your to-do list looks just as long, if not longer? Research has shown that people regularly take on more work than they are capable of....
I have been working for many years now. Around 20. And I have always wanted a manager who really cared about my learning as much as I did. For most of this time, I was just provided with courses and/or books that I wanted.. Now as a coach I hear regularly from managers that they want workers that ar...
“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...
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...
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....
I created the Facilitation Canvas as a tool to help facilitators prepare to run a session. We use it as part of our ICAgile team facilitator course. The canvas is made up of 8 boxes, each with an associated set of prompt questions that I have found work well as a guide when filling it out....
Working Agreements, Team Norms, Team Charters… Call them what you want, they’re great in theory but in practise they can be awkward to come up with and difficult to implement. Committing to “don’t be a dick” and “respect each other” is well and good, but it’s pretty much implied. We shouldn't need a...
There are so many frameworks, tools and techniques for prioritising out there, that it’s tricky to know which one to pick (I see the irony here). As far as I’m concerned, whatever you are prioritising, whether it’s what feature to build for a product, what project to undertake, or what you should st...