Happy Friday,Why is change so hard?One reason is that it takes time for folks to adjust to a new condition, and that time of adaptation is often unpleasant.Another reason, and the one I want to talk about today, is that we don't often pay attention t...
At this point, I think almost everyone has heard that research shows that motivated teams perform better than those who aren’t motivated. What is often less obvious, from what I can tell, is how to motivate teams and individuals.
Happy Friday,Earlier this week, a friend showed me a video in which a CIO explained how they view setting up analytics for an organization. In a nutshell, they said that while people mostly understand it as five high-level steps, he cautioned that cr...
I bet most of you are wondering what the word piseog is and it is pretty tricky to look up. I first encountered it in one of my favorite books, “The Once and Future King” by T.H. White. If you’ve ever watched “The Sword in the Stone” animated movie,...
Imagine you are setting off to win an ambitious car race. You assemble a team of folks with plenty of experience and lay out a plan.
Happy Friday,Today, my son won an award at school for exemplifying one of the character attributes they're trying to teach. The award was for assuming positive intent. As the principal explained positive intent to the school and parents, I had to hid...
Happy Friday!There's a very long-standing topic that folks have pretty strong opinions on, but rarely have I seen much consensus around, and that is how to organize teams and groups.I thought I'd write a bit about the topic from what I've measured an...
I often think about where large transformations go wrong in organizations. I’ve been through several “agile” flavored ones, and at this point, I think they’re mostly doomed to fail. That doesn’t mean that pursuing agility is a waste of time, but ther...
Happy Friday,I've been busy applying to conferences, and there is a topic that I feel I'm perfectly suited to speak on, but I always hesitate to submit the talk. The talk is about how to build really good teams that build bug-free software in 1/3rd o...
Everyone thinks they have the answer to what will improve things, and technical teams are often very vocal about their ideas. Yet, in my experience, many technical teams advocate for things that can be far more costly than what is happening today, an...
The book “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries swept through the product and business world in 2011, and it had a simple message: Organizations that learn the fastest win. He also brought the concept of Minimum Viable Product to life.
I’ve often felt like one of my natural talents or superpowers is how I prioritize features for products. Now, I know it is easy for anyone to feel that way, but there is a very sharp contrast between the backlogs I create and what most others create.
All over LinkedIn, my feed is full of people saying Agile is dead or that Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches aren’t needed. I understand both the sentiment and the clickbait nature of this kind of headlines. Though if it were clickbait, people would say...
In my last years of college, I took a lot of history classes, and I wound up loving them. So much so that I thought I should have pursued a minor. While this doesn’t make me an expert, I learned some things that stick out to me, and there is one I’m...