Conflict is inevitable at work. Sooner or later, people will disagree. Might be about what to test or how to implement a feature. Team members may disagree about what “done” means, or whether “always” means 100 per cent of the time or some thing else. If...
An old saw tell us, “You never have a second chance to make a first impression.” This applies to one-on-one introductions, but also to entering groups. When you join a new team–as a member or a coach–those first encounters shape future...
Not so very long ago, I made my living writing code. My colleagues and I did our best to understand what our customers needed, and to write code that was easy for other programmers to understand, solid, defect free. When our managers asked us how long it would take...
I’ve been talking about (and using) Human Systems Dynamics tools lately–Rally Success Tour, OTUG, Practical Agility and Retrospective Workshops in Stockholm. I find Containers, Differences, Exchanges offers my clients (and me) a useful way to see past...
InfoQ picked up my post, Team Trap #1: Messing with the Membership, and contrasted it with Mike Cohn’s advice that a PO, manager or scrum master who observes that the team is too homogeneous might stick a couple of new team members to increase diversity on the...
Conflict often feels persona. However, the source of conflict is often not. Different goals and priorities create structural conflict– which can then spill over into acrimony and blame. People focus on personal differences rather than the real source of...
A while back I was contacted by a potential client who wanted to “go agile.” But they wanted to do it in a deterministic manner. They wanted a plan, complete with milestones and dates–mostly indicating that other people had changed their behavior as dictated...
There’s a buzz about systems thinking in the software world these days. Systems thinking isn’t new. Jerry Weinberg’s An Introduction to General Systems Thinking was first published in 1975. Senge’s Fifth Discipline came out in the 90s. Still, we haven’t turned the...
Do you really have a team when someone keeps messing with the membership? One summer, long ago and far away, I was on a softball team. It would be an exaggeration to say I played softball, but I did participate in practices, showed up for games and imbibed of...
A team is a social unit, a group of people who work collaboratively to accomplish some goal. Every team is a group of people, but not every group of people is a team. I hear the term applied loosely–describing anything from a collection of individual...
