“A person soon learns how little he knows when a child begins to ask questions.” — Richard L. Evans Kids don’t know it yet, but they have the secret to arriving at better outcomes. A 3-year-old constantly asking “why” may be annoying, but let’s face it, they eventually lead us to rethink what we know. Our […]
Do you know anyone that’s ever had a bad experience with a government program, website, or service? Poor user experiences aren’t isolated to government interaction, but government presents a distinct challenge that contributes to this problem — the service isn’t competitive. What if we managed them as if they were? When We Don’t Have a
I have rarely met a manager that wasn’t swamped daily with meetings, emails, and fires to put out. If this is you, keeping your head above water is your primary objective day-to-day. Forget about being proactive, you can barely react to the unexpected, which occurs daily. This often requires early mornings, working through lunch, late
Many people think of 20/20 vision as having exceptional, perhaps perfect, eyesight. What it actually means is one’s acuity (sharpness at distance) is normal relative to others. We determine how well we see based on how well most people see. Agile maturity tends to follow the same logic, but should it? As we move into
Seeing Agile with 2020 Vision Read More »
I have a Beagle. His name is Charlie. This story of Charlie, and his bark, is going to help us think about our approach to problems and solutions. More specifically, this story about Charlie will reveal how easy it is to recommend the wrong, or less optimal, solution because we often focus on the wrong
Very few organizations need to be sold on Agile these days. It seems everyone has moved in that direction one way or another. The question is, are they going to Agile for the right reasons? The data1, as well as my experience, suggests that despite already “doing Agile,” many organizations do not understand what Agile
If you’ve ever worked outside of a high-performing team, you’ve seen all the symptoms of unhealthy conflict – such as undermining others, talking over people, and taking ownership of others’ ideas. For some, there is an insatiable appetite, a “need” even, to be right and to elevate themselves. When two or more people have this
Resolving Conflict: Understanding the Root Problem to Solve Read More »
Anyone that knows me is familiar with the question, “what problem are we trying to solve?” Whether it’s about the problem, or opportunity to capture, the point of asking that early in any discussion is to get folks off of thinking about solution and first onto why. In this post, I will open up a
What Problem Are We Trying to Prevent? Read More »
I recently saw a map trying to represent all of the Agile-related certifications that exist (as of 2019) and was blown away. I knew there were a lot of them, but the visual took it to a whole new level for me. Every Agile-related job posting I see has a requirement for one or more
The “Certification Economy”: Embrace It or Reject It? Read More »
In the book, Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, a story is told of a ceramics teacher that ran an interesting experiment. He told half his students they would be graded solely on the quantity of their work. The more they produced, the higher their grade. The other half were
