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...
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 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...
We are all experiencing change right now. Minor blips and stunning upheavals. Routines at home and work. Expectations, assumptions, institutions—all are up for grabs. People ask, “As a leader in my organization, what can I do? How can I support people through change?...
Baking may not seem related to the work we do. However, my experience teaching a friend how to bake bread highlighted explicit and implicit knowledge. And that has everything thing to do with learning new ways of working and organizational change. We...
Sometimes I meet teams who’ve adjusted or even embraced a change initiated by company leadership. They tell me how much benefit they’ve experienced. But, then say, “We’ve made all these changes, but our managers need to change, too....
When I say “work on system,” I mean influencing factors that contribute to patterns of events and interactions in your organization. Making work work better. So, how do you work on the system? Attend to creating an environment where great work is a...
Like many people, I’m staying home during a pandemic, trying to work, using collaboration tools. I’m having many Zoom meetings. In one such meeting, I was on a panel regarding remote retrospectives. One of the panelists posited that people from earlier...
Recently, while discussing how job descriptions and evaluation criteria impact collaboration, a director commented, “Behavior. That’s what we’re after. Behavior!” Her comment struck me as both familiar and very odd. However, the director’s comment did...
I recently sat down for an interview with Marcus Blankenship of Programming Leadership. We talked about my book, 7 Rules for Positive Productive Change, and how change plays out for people and organizations. You can listen to the full interview on Marcus...
Why does observation matter? Let me tell you a story.When I was a kid, we played a birthday party game called Pin the Tail on the Donkey. The game involved a large wall poster of a sad-looking, tailless donkey. The parent-in-charge handed out replacement tails and...
In my work, I draw on models, frameworks, and years of experience. Yet, one of my most valuable tools is a simple one: Curiosity. In an early meeting with a client, a senior manager expressed his frustration that development teams weren’t meeting his schedule....
When people set out to change their organizational system, they think about the desired future state. But they don’t give sufficient attention to what is. I call this blindspot the forgotten questions of change. However, change starts from where you are. You...
Captured from my keynote, Still No Silver Bullets, at Big Apple Scrum Day, May 17, 2016. The 7 Ps for Profound Change. I’d add an 8th question: What do you want to preserve?
Managers who have invested effort and money in training teams in Agile methods want to see team improvement–reasonable enough. I describe a handful of measures that indicate the organization is improving over all in posts( here and here. Some of these...
Someone I don’t know offered to teach me Agile Best Practices recently. I tend to think there are “generally good practices,” some of which are broadly applicable. In my experience, the search for Best Practices is often a search for Silver Bullets,...
Someone posed the question: Has Agile crossed the chasm?– a reference to Moore’s work on marketing. Agile is no longer the prevue of pioneers and visionaries. Agile shows up in the popular business press. PMI is all over it. The big...
