Do you need to clean out your organizational closets? Closets are where we store useful things. But they also tend to accumulate items that no longer provide value.I’m having new flooring put in on the second floor of my house, which requires that I empty all seven...
How do you create an environment for great work? Where healthy self-organization happens? You notice and shape patterns. Patterns are meaningful events that repeat over time—actions and interactions, outcomes and results. That might be teams that flail and fail to...
When leaders make a change, they want buy-in. But they way they present a change may prevent that. I had a conversation with a manager who wanted to improve communication between teams in his organization. While in theory all the teams were working towards the same...
In ecology, the process through which rocky ground becomes a forest is referred to as forest succession. I’m married to an ecologist, so I hear a lot about such things, and it occurred to me that we can learn about how to create sustainable change in our organizations...
Many job descriptions focus on skills—usually technical skills. Interpersonal skills may get a passing mention—“strong communication skills,” “collaboration,” or “teamwork.” But when you are filling a team position, you have to think both more...
In early 2020, we experienced one hell of a change when Covid-19 swept the planet. On March 13, I flew home from a workshop on the west coast. For the next three months, I only left my house to buy groceries. My status quo shattered, along with everyone else’s. The...
At one point in my life, I dreamed of owning a book store. I loved the idea of working in a book store, but the actual job was a poor fit. I had the skills to do the work. But it didn’t fulfill what I wanted out of the job. Here’s what I wanted: I loved...
In response to a tweet on the benefits of stable teams, someone asked whether I’m against changing teams (aka re-teaming) in response to business needs. I am not. I’m against churn. There are plenty of good reasons to re-form teams to meet organizational...
When you try something new, when to you expect to see results? How do you evaluate an experiment decided on in a retro to know whether your hypothesis was correct? This week I read a post that described a situation I see too often.The poster described a retrospective...
When making a change or fixing a problem, we consider the outcome we want to achieve—what will be different. People usually consider how to measure those outcomes. Will cycle time go down? Retention go up? Customer satisfaction improve? Clicks go through the...
