“Go to the Gemba” and the Power Distance Index
The two cultural dimensions that differentiate innovate and traditional cultures are “uncertainty avoidance”and the “power distance index”. Innovative organisations have a low power distance index,...
View ArticleManaging Serendipity.
Yesterday I was chatting to Marc Burgauer when one of us said “Leaders need to be facilitators, not decision makers.” Marc tweeted this and a small conversation ensued. Although a small thing, it is an...
View ArticleThe tragedy of Given-When-Then.
When all you have is a hammer, everything in the world starts to look like a nail. Twenty five years of doing analysis and helping others do analysis has shown me that there are at least three...
View ArticleShared vision as enabling constraint.
Transformations are hard. Transformations are even harder when only the executives know where the destination is meant to be, if they even know that. A shared vision One of the most important...
View ArticleWhence road kill?
One of the largest companies in the world has a saying “Its nothing personal, you are just road kill.” The message. Your career and reputation is destroyed. You are sacked. But, it was nothing...
View ArticleGoodbye Martin
It was with great sadness that I heard Martin passed away last night. My thoughts are with Lucy and his family. Martin and I were part of the LASCOT set. A group of Agile types that were drawn to each...
View ArticleThe London Agile Software Camerata
Gitte recently recommended this fantastic must-read article on Cameratas by Jessica Kerr. My only criticism is this statement: One camerata emerged inside ThoughtWorks (consultancy) in London around...
View ArticleThere are no stakeholders in (Scaled) Agile
A month ago a colleague of mine asked me about stakeholders in Agile. After a moment of thought I told them that there are NO STAKEHOLDERS in Agile. What is a stakeholder? In traditional development,...
View ArticleStress testing Skills Liquidity
Corona virus has raised the importance of Skills Liquidity or “key person dependency”. As well as managing the normal skill liquidity risk, organisations now need to consider the “summer holiday”...
View ArticleWrong-order-o-meter (An experience report)
About a year after implementing Capacity Planning ( aka Delivery Mapping ) at Skype, the product leadership team asked for reporting to support the process. Tony Grout, Lisa Long and myself...
View ArticleIntroducing Failureship – The dark twin of Leadership
The culture of an organisation is vital to its ability to change and acquire new capabilities so that it can adapt to new contexts. Whilst academics and thought leaders will tell you that culture...
View ArticleFailure Cultures Reward failure.
For over twenty years I have been reciting the mantra: “In agile, we fail fast to win early. Traditional teams are afraid to fail!” For many years I have been observing agile teams and non agile...
View ArticleaacennprrsTy and the failureship
I ran an exercise where I asked a group of executives “What is transparency?”. Take a moment, think what it means to you and say it out loud before you read the answer I gave. Transparency is when you...
View ArticleStep away from the office, and join the team!
Years ago I shared a table at a wedding with a primary school (Kindergarten) teacher. We were not surprised to discover that my job in technology was very similar to their job. Understanding behaviour...
View ArticleFailureship and EXPENSIVE, low cost people
One of the key differences between organisations with “risk managed” and “failure” cultures is the attitude towards talent. “Failure” cultures prefer large teams of “cheap” individuals who have little...
View ArticleThe failureship and turkeys voting for Christmas.
In some organisations, the individual succeeds if the organisation as a whole is a success. This is often where the organisation is at risk, either a start up, an organisation in trouble, or...
View ArticleWe need to talk about failureship.
Reading these failureship blogs, you may be mistaken into thinking that I am critical of individual leaders. The very name “Failureship” is deliberately provocative by design. The purpose of these...
View ArticleFailureship deliver things instead of value
The failureship deliver things rather than value. The successful delivery of things is normally under the control of the failureship, whereas successful delivery of value is often outside of their...
View ArticleWhy failure cultures hate Agile.
We have been discussing failureship for many years. It has helped us understand motivation, and helped us predict the behaviour of individuals and teams in a failure culture. One coach contacted me to...
View ArticleUNLIMITED work in progress
One of the most effective strategies that the failureship deploy to justify failure is the concept of UNLIMITED work in progress. The failureship justify Unlimited Work in Progress by stating that...
View Article
More Pages to Explore .....