Agile Complexification Inverter

There's a lot of talk these days in the tech sector about "digital _________" or a "______ Platform" - have you noticed it also?  I find this astonishing, as the world turned digital back in the 1980s along with disco.  And as for platform - well adding the word to shoes was a bad idea back then also. So what causes this echo from the past? I don't know - shall we investigate this over the next few months - the dog days of summer 2017? Summer is a season.  Season are cyclical - they come around again and again.  So this brings us to ponder... When do the days get longer and why?  Most people answer Summer.  And what's the longest day of the year (Northern Hemisphere)?  Right June 20th, the summer solstice .  And so the next few days the daylight is getting less and less - all summer long the days get shorter and shorter.  Almost completely backwards from what we thought we knew. Do you remember way back in 2001... when Steve Jobs ...

Do we mean the words we use - or do we just use them because everyone else does...  you know like the popular buzz word in corporate bingo?  Let's take the word Transformation , as in: "Hi team, I will be you Agile Coach - let's all do the Agile Transformation thing together.  Out the other end of this transformation we will be a changed company." Some definitions of Transformation: a thorough or dramatic change in form or appearance. a metamorphosis during the life cycle of an animal. (in physics) the induced or spontaneous change of one element into another by a nuclear process. In an organizational context, a process of profound and radical change that orients an organization in a new direction and takes it to an entirely different level of effectiveness. BusinessDictionary.com Some in the agile world are pulling against this trend... see Dan Mezick's The PUSH of Agile Causes "Trance Formations ". So stop that. And do these things,...

I'm taking Mezick's introduction course to OpenSpace Agility - thought I'd write a bit about what I'm learning. Unboxing the workshop - Your move Schrodinger. Day One: Beginning concepts - leaders have a duty to set direction and name constraints; yet stay away from telling how to achieve the goals.  Executives commits to holding first OpenSpace and Acting upon the proceedings.  And holding a second OpenSpace after a time box (100 days). A constraining forces in OSA will be the Agile Manifesto, actions and experiments should be judged by this definition and if seen to support it, be considered good. Another foundational concept of OSA - Self Management - defined as the behavior of a group to know and practice their decision making process (whatever that may be).  A good test is to ask 5 people how their group makes decisions - then count the number of answers - one general description of their decision making apparatus points strongly toward a self-managin...

Pondering some messages... both the implied, the implicit, the unintended, and the overt. What are the messages when a manager calls a meeting and schedules it for an hour... then repeatedly states that they have nothing really to talk about, and after the group does the appropriate amount of beating the horse, the manager states "I will give you back 20 minutes."? One overt message is the meeting is over you are dismissed and you have 20 minutes returned to you to get real work accomplished. Another implied message is that your time is not your own and now the manager is returning their time, time they require of you to attend their meeting, is now returned to you so do with it as they have done - spend it well.  [ Because anyone delusional enough to think that time belongs to someone, is just off enough to believe that one can spend time. ] The unintended message - the part that rubs me raw; like when manager's refer to people as resources (typically implying...

Concept of Product Development Flow "I believe that the dominant paradigm for managing product development is fundamentally wrong.  Not just a little wrong, but wrong to its very core.  It is as wrong as we were in manufacturing, before the Japanese unlocked the secret of lean manufacturing.  I believe that a  new paradigm is emerging, one that challenges the current orthodoxy of product development."  -- Donald Reinertsen Reinertsen goes beyond the advance ideas of lean manufacturing, what he calls Flow-Based Product Development. Scrum was sparked by a paper called The New New Product Development Game by  Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka (1986).  Are you seeing a synergy of ideas? Lean principle of Flow In the manufacturing world Toyota exemplifies the achievements one may obtain in 50 years of practicing a new mindset of principles.  Manufacturing deals with repetitive tasks predictable processes to produce component parts, hom...

What might it mean when the terms used in your Agile transition start to be applied to almost any fleetingly similar activity?  For example, the manager starts "inviting" the group to mandatory stand-up meetings, scheduled ad-hoc for the same day, with no agenda; at this "gathering" there will be a particular dynamic of communication, wonder what that style can best be described as...  Will it be anything like you wish at a team morning stand-up in the Scrum process that introduced the term? Is this a positive or negative indication of the perfusion of terminology? What is the positive aspect of people adopting the new terminology of an introduced framework? What is the negative aspect of this terminology being used to describe old and new behaviors as if they are similar. How should one address this with there supervisor? A conundrum I find myself wrestling with lately.  Do you have advice for me? A command performance for the Queen See Also: ...