Agile Complexification Inverter

I've been attracted to people that are self-aware of their own cognitive bias.  And I will have to admit that I'm not as self-aware.  Yet, I now have a wonderful mental model of human cognitive bias.  A tool to understand and categorize the many, many biases and the questions to inquire into my own preferences and biases. The article on Medium by author Buster Benson tells the story of his research and learning and the collaboration with graphic artist John Manoogian III - I suggest you read it. References:    Cognitive bias cheat sheet - Better Humans Wikipedia's list of Cognitive Biases Buy the Cognitive Bias Codex poster

How would you know if your organizations values that you and other leaders have worked so hard to propagate have become weaponized exclusion and status quo control devices? Certainly values are only positive - affirmations of our best selves. Could our values work against us? Yes.  And you may know it only after it is too late... your culture will turn toxic.  The rising stars you spend energy to recruit will say a few months, maybe a year or two and leave (happy to get out).  Or you will force them out within months, because they are not a "good fit" to your culture. This failure to "fit" is a sure sign.  Can the executives read the sign, does you HR department work to protect the status quo?  Hiring decisions use the "good fit" measure and then a few months after they made the mistake of hiring the employee they reverse the decision and fire for "bad fit." As a " journeyman " agilist I've made conscious decision to go into...

Time is something that puzzles me... I tend to "spend" a lot of time thinking about TIME. I don't truly know how to not "spend" time... if you find a good TIME-Bank, with a savings plan... let me know, please. I quickly calculated how much I will spend this year - 8,760 hours.  A few years ago I had a unique opportunity to spend about 8,772 hours while most of you only had the standard year - I spent New Years in New Zealand and got some extra... I think I spent it on the plane flight back to Dallas. Here's a great talk about how we use our time and what we may wish to consider doing with the very very little "free" time we have. The Time You Have (in JellyBeans)

Have you ever been in a situation where you thought the technique needed to move forward was one thing, yet the person leading (your leader) assumed something else was what was needed?  Did you feel misaligned, unheard, marginalized?  Would you believe that 54% of all leaders only use ONE style of leadership - regardless of the situation?  Does that one style of leading work well for the many levels of development we see on a team? Perhaps your team should investigate one of the most widely used leadership models in the world ("used to train over 5 million managers in the world’s most respected organizations").  And it's not just for the leaders.  The training is most effective when everyone receives the training and uses the model.  The use of a ubiquitous language on your team is a collaboration accelerator.  When everyone is using the same mental model, speaking the same vernacular hours of frustration and discussion may be curtailed, and alignm...

We are desperately searching for a term for people that connotes the best of human kind.  The creative, sensing, combinatorial synergistic, empathic solutioning persons that have yet to been labeled with a role name that works. Some of the old terms: Staff , Workforce , Human Resource , My Team , Army , Company Shakespeare created 1700 words in his time.  He mutated verbs to nouns, and vice-a-versa, transformed verbs into adjectives, and formed words from whole cloth never before heard.  This skill is rare, but there is a poet that can create the term we need in the twenty-first century. What should this term define? 21st Century Human Resource ; the generalizing specialist. Yes, but what more?  What less? Suggest your poetry in the comments, let us see if we cannot do 1/1700 as well as The Bard. By-the-way; who create the phrase "coin a word"? How Ofter do you use the 10 Most Cringe-Worthy Workplace Phrases? So, if you want your colleagu...

In the 1900s the automobile industry was the most important and innovation industry in the USA.  But one could question if this was good for our society in the long run.  And one could question if they actually innovated.   See Russ Ackoff's 1994 speech "You see, the automobile is destroying urban life around the world..." 11 minutes mark. In the early 1900s there were few automobiles, very little infrastructure created to support the industry.  For example the road system was still designed for horse drawn wagons and the wagon wheel (remember a steal rim and wooden compression spoke wheel).  The future  US Highways , or the 1950s Interstate Highway System at the cost of $425 billion were decades and many innovations away. There was no gas service station, there were however horse stables, farriers, and blacksmiths in each town along the roads.  There was no real "road map", there was no road naming system, like was created in 1926 - the United Sta...

Imagine two tribes, the first tribe is referred to by anthropologist as the Slackers .  The anthropologist refer to the other tribe as the Overloaders .  These anthropologist are a crafty bunch, they have devised various methods to study the tribes without the very observant members of the tribes realizing that they are the subjects of experiments.  In fact if we asked the astute tribal people if the anthropologist exist, the people would say no.  They would look at you funny and step away from you, giving you just a bit more personal space.  From the slightly safer distance the people may ask you, why would any tribe wish to have anthropologist.  What happiness could they bring to the tribe? Never-the-less, we know the anthropologist exist because we, dear reader, are pan-dimensional super intelligent creatures that do not live confined to the bounds of this page. These tribes collect berries of all types around their villages and transport thes...

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,...

Bees do a dance that bee keeper refer to as the Waggle dance... It is with great pleasure that you can watch and using the power of science have this dance translated into English. Bee Dance (Waggle Dance) by  Bienentanz GmbH What does this have to do with Scrum?  The power of a metaphor was well known to the creators of Extreme Programming (XP) - so much so, that it is one of only 12 "rules" that those really smart people decided to enshrine into their process.  It is also the most likely rule to not be mentioned in any survey of software development practices.  Unless you happen to be chatting with Eric Evens, and he may agree that he's captured the underlying principle in Domain-Driven Design, the Ubiquitous Language pattern . Have you ever observed a great scrum team using a classic tool of many innovative company environments - the physical visual management board (Scrum Task Board). The generic behavior for a small group of people (say around 7 p...

Polish Poet and Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska on How Our Certitudes Keep Us Small and the Generative Power of Not-Knowing “Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’” By Maria Popova  - BrainPickings Purely for the fun of it, Maria Popova drew Wisława Szymborska’s poetic island in a map inspired by Thomas More’s Utopia. Polish poet Wisława Szymborska (July 2, 1923–February 1, 2012) "explored how our contracting compulsion for knowing can lead us astray in her sublime 1976 poem “Utopia,” found in her Map: Collected and Last Poems ( public library )" -- Maria Popova UTOPIA Island where all becomes clear. Solid ground beneath your feet. The only roads are those that offer access. Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs. The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here with branches disentangled since time immemorial. The Tree of Understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple, sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It. The t...

Derek "QuikDraw" Lane & I proposed this session (2 sessions actually) for the Agile2017 conference (it wasn't accepted - oh well next time maybe).  Wonder if you'd like to come play in the OK Corral with us? SlideShare Deck Here's how it might go down...   Agile2017 Submission # 5835 And if you're interested... comment on this slide deck...  it's not the final answer.  In fact we may be sneaking bigger guns in to the corral under our dusters... SlideShare deck Abstract: Leadership Style Shoot Out :: Which style best works for this context - how will you recognize it? Where do you Stand Let's survey the audience's Leadership styles/preferences - we will use a standard reference tool (or maybe just make it up on the fly). Getting the participants up and moving and interacting with each other and the sub-set of leadership styles described on the four flip charts in the corners of the room. We will play a few rounds of the gam...

Now that everyone knows about Bill Murray's movie Groundhog Day - I love February 2nd.  It's my favorite , most enjoyable, beloved, cherished, esteemed day of the year.  And I don't need to tell you again how many LIKES I give this redundant day... so on to the story. Bill & Groundhog Well this happened about ten years ago, and about 6 years ago, or maybe it was 4 years past, and seems like we did this about 24 months ago...  or it could be today! The Agile Transition Initiative at the company has come upon an inflection point (do ya' know what that is...  have you read Tipping Point ?).  I'm not exactly sure of it's very precise date... but  Feb. 2nd  would be the perfect timing.   The inflection has to do with which direction your Agile Transition Initiative takes from this point into the future.   Will it continue on it's stated mission to "transform" the organization?  Or will it stall out and revert slowly to the stat...