Agile Complexification Inverter

You have not empowered a person by telling them "you are empowered."  This is a classic mistake in communication.  When one does this, they misinterpret their message, "I'm empowering you..." with the action that a verb such as empowerment requires to happen.  This person is taking a short cut, by giving the platitude of empowerment in place of any action that would be view by the other as empowering. "When told that they are empowered to do something; this message is actually interrupted to dis-empower the persons agency." How does this misinterpretation occur?  Why do we humans mess up this simple act of communication? Let's look at an example: For a few months I had been working with a new team of software developers at a large organization.  Like many organizations they had already done the agile/scrum thing and it didn't work for them.  Recently the leadership had built a satellite office and started from a very small pool of tenur...

Leadership desires - Info Radiators  What are the individual elements that make a Scrum task board effective for the team and the leadership of the team?  There are a few basic elements that are quite obvious when you have seen a few good Scrum boards... but there are some other elements that appear to elude even the most servant of leaders of Scrum teams. Team desires - Info Radiators In general I'm referring to a physical Scrum board.  Although software applications will replicated may of the elements of a good Scrum board there will be affordances that are not easily replicated.  And software applications offer features not easily implemented in the physical domain also. Scrum Info Radiator Checklist (PDF) Basic Elements Board Framework  - columns and rows laid out in bold colors (blue tape works well)      Attributes :  space for the total number of stickies that will need to belong in each cell of the m...

What are the affordances that are missing from the virtual task board?  There are quite a few. The perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson coined the term in the late 1970s to mean the relationships that an actor (person) can have with objects in the world.  Then Donald Norman popularized the term in his book " The Design of Everyday Things ." You may think these affordances don't matter much.  But after you have them (via using a physical task board) you will find they are sorely missing. I can: Hold a task and show it to you. Now you know exactly what I'm talking about. Many virtual task board have no way of denoting a selected task.  Pick a different task and hold it. Now I know you are talking about that one, but I'm still referring to the one I hold.  Move a task. The motion is the affordance. Not the before and after location of a task - don't confuse position with motion.  Pass a sticky note to you, now you have it and this denotes res...

A typical impediment sticky annotating the blocked task. Just making an impediment list is not good enough.  Yes, it is a start.  But only the start.  Raising impediments at the daily stand-up meeting shows that a team is mature enough to recognize that all problems are better solved in the light of day.  Problems are easier to solve when more than one person is working on the issue.  One of the first steps to getting multiple people working on an impediment is to make it known to the team. Yet this is the start, not the end of the process.  Yes many newbie teams believe that the Scrum Master's job is to resolve these impediments.  That is a wonderful misconception and will work for a while as the newbie team learns the power of an agile mindset.  But only the maturing teams learn that it is their job to remove these impediments. So what are 7 aspects on a great impediment card living on the top of your impediment list? Title - th...