Agile Complexification Inverter

I live in Texas, it comes with a unique flavor of people - my neighbors.  I was walking Malibu (my golden retriever) and stopped to chat with a neighbor mowing his yard.  I asked about his mower - an 80volt Kobalt electric push mower .  He liked it a lot, was glad he didn't have to store dangerous liquids in his home (gas & oil) and enjoyed the exercise.  I commented that the pollution from small engines was a significant source and that the internal combustion engine used in these tools was still based upon 19th Century technology.  I knew that he was a tech guy with a very large database company.  I was proud of his choice.  Like a true Texican, he remarked that was not his concern - that moving to electric was just moving the source of pollution from one place to another (his lawn to the power plant).  I suggested that that was true AND that the power plant was designed to deal with the pollution.  He ignored that info, I assume he was...

Have you had that conversation with the struggling team that wants to switch to Kanban?  They don't really know why - but they've heard that Kanban will be easier.  So why don't they switch processes? We are failing at Scrum, so let's switch to Kanban! Does that sentence make sense in your world?  I hear it quite a lot.  Well not stated that emphatically.  In fact, most teams don't know that they are failing at Scrum - but they are... it is such an easy process to follow - how could you fail? More Prescriptive -to- More Adaptive Cutting to the gist of the problem - a team that cannot complete stories in a sprint.... well they are failing.  You could ask why they cannot complete stories in the sprint.  There may be several legitimate reasons, typically it is an impediment beyond their control.  Something like getting "sign-off" from some stakeholders that the feature desired works as expected and doesn't break anything else.  When yo...

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...

I was working with a failing team some time ago.  I use "failing" to describe the outcome of the team - not the people on the team.  Are you OK with that description? An issue arrose in the stand up - a team member that was to verify the quality of a procedure did so and reported that there were a few records that didn't match expectation in the data set.  Upon inquire the number of records not matching was over 2000.  Most people acknowledged immediately the exaggeration - I could tell by the laughter.  After about 10 minutes of discussing the details of the problem - it appeared the team had a handle on the specific situation. I stopped the discussion and inquired if they could name the impediment.  One team member did a great job of describing the impediment as a _communication gap_ .  Wonderful - I could work with that - the problem had a name and it didn't include anyones Proper Name. "If the problem has a first name; we are going to hav...

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...

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: ...

What do these phrase have in common - what is their inherent consistent meaning? Zero Defects Take the time to do it Right Repeatability and Reliability Process Maturity Model Measure twice, cut once Six Sigma Rework is Waste, Lean processes remove Waste They are ironically consistent in their purpose to reduce variability.  Don Reinertsen will attempt to convince us that in the domain of product development (unlike other domains) variability may not be the enemy of good.  He will argue that it is the economic payoff-function of this outcome that is of upmost concern in design. Voltaire 's aphorism :   Perfect is the enemy of good. I'm in a group at work that is reading books on Agile software development topics to what purpose... well to learn I hope.  After Lyssa's book on Coaching Agile Teams  we turned the knob up to 11 with Don Reinertsen's Principles of Product Development Flow .  Since it's such a tough read, a dense book with so m...

Big Data for Little Problems -OR- What happens when the customer has better data about the service than the provider and has better networking, better press coverage, better clout, better market reach and reputations? (Feb 23) My good looking wife just spent 2 hours trying to straighten out Frontier's billing machine... it's not easy.  The amazing thing I observed for my recliner while sipping an adult beverage was her influencing techniques.  Now another amazingly disconsernation ( not a word ) is that Frontier has some awesome support people.  But oh-my-god do they have a tough job.  It's the system that has failed.  And they have to figure out how to make some legacy piece-of-crap work. But it's not going to lead to happy satisfied customers (testify). Her father, Jim, moved into the home with us in December, he loves Western movies, and is an encyclopedia of knowledge better than IMDB.  So we called up Frontier (our FiOS provider for 6 years) ...

Here's an interesting article by Patrick Lencioni: Virtual Teams are Worse than I Thought Dialogue on Distributed Agile Teams Pondering communication styles, our human ability to truely understand one another, and the tools we use that constrain these attempts.  Peter Senge evolved the concept of dialogue for learning organizations. Extending quantum physicist, David Bohm's ideas on three basic conditions necessary for dialogue: 1) All participants must "suspend" their assumptions, literally to hold them "as if suspended before us"; 2) All participants must regard one another as colleagues; 3) There must be a 'facilitator' who 'holds the context' of dialogue. DAVIDAKOONTZ · 11 MONTHS AGO Dialogue, as it turns out, is a very old idea revered by the ancient Greeks and practiced by many "primitive" societies such as the American Indians. Yet, it is all but lost to the modern world. All...