Is Your Environment Dumbing You Down?
I was talking with a colleague today who works in knowledge management and organizational development. He told me an interesting story about when he was helping an organization move from mainframe-based systems to browser-based systems over a decade ago. The ‘dumb-terminal’ operators had extremely low proficiency in web-browsers since most of them had never used browsers before. Over the next year they hired people who were rated as having much higher proficiency in using...
Read More3 Reasons You “Should Just” Go to PSL
PSL 2012 is coming up in May this year, I had the pleasure of attending last year and it was a life-changing experience. Here’s 3 reasons why you ‘should just’ go. You’ll learn to stop saying “should” and “just”: I worked with a company that had a problem with too many bugs. When a doozy would pop-up the usual all-hands-on-deck emergency meeting happened. The output was “we should do X to make Y not happen again”. Everybody nodded...
Read MoreWhy the Agile Community is Awesome
I was bummed to miss out on Agile Coach Camp in Columbus a couple weeks ago so I had to settle for enjoying the tweet stream. One such tweet that stuck out was this one: “The #agile community is too closed. We are doing intellectual incest, and congratulating ourselves for it.” ~@mhsutton #ACCUS“ I can understand and appreciate the comment, I’ve posted many times about how I think the Agile community is disconnected from the reality that organizations are going...
Read MoreCulture and People and Systems…Oh My!
I received my copy of The Re-Engineering Alternative by William Schneider a couple days ago. I’ve always been fascinated with culture and people (particularly MBTI) and how, IMO, they impact how effective you can be with Agile. Michael Sahota has written some fantastic posts about organization culture and I’m excited to read this book to expand my knowledge about culture. What I’m more interested is how those cultures develop, after all, it’s the people in your...
Read MoreLearn from Experience, Not Failure
I hear and read a lot of stuff about how teams and people must fail first in order to succeed. I’d agree with that. What I’d prefer to see come out of the Agile community is less of the holier-than-thou “thou shalt fail before succeeding” rhetoric and more of “learn from your experiences” phrasing. No, I’m not Mr. Sensitive, I like to think I’m Mr. Realist. Organizations don’t want to be told they must fail first in order to succeed....
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I'm an international speaker, author and change agent who is passionate about helping organizations discover more effective practices for managing work and people.
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