Agile Complexification Inverter

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)

So you have the new Apple Watch - yes, it's quite nice, and you love the convenience of all your notification right on your wrist.  Did you notice that when the VP was asking about the project, as you were describing the challenges you paused, lifted your arm, checked the latest notification that she was a bit put-out by the exchange.  Although you went on to tell her that your team had overcome the challenges with an innovative solution.  The VP disengaged in the dialogue and walked away.  Wonder why? What was the unintended message of your body language during that encounter? Did you signal that you were busy, late for an appointment, not interested in the conversation, that you were dismissing the participant - what did your raised arm and glancing at your watch tell the VP?  Is that truly what you wished to signal? We have had 10 years to learn to use a iPhone and now in meetings you will notice people signaling that they are prepared to engage i...

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,...

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...

I've made a transition from gray tones to living color - much like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (the first color motion picture). Dog Groomer's have a natural capability to accept a being for what they are and how they present, as well as what their humans may desire.  This is a wonderful ability - we should learn from them.  I had a great conversation with my local groomers at the Blissful Bark Dog Wash , about peoples expectations and inherent biases based upon look, job title, etc.  This capability of acceptance and a deeper level of judgement came to me as they asked about my hair color choices.  They told of the judgements that a dog groomer receives - one even equated the title's status to that of a stripper (good company if you can have friends in low places). From this and other conversation I've had as a result of a choice to live with more color, I've made some interesting observation about you people. You humans are preoccupied by noticing inconse...

Have you seen the new automobile vending machines.  It appears we could put anything in a vending machine.   So what would you put into the vending machine?

What parallels are there between Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and the state of the Agile movement's union? Lincoln was a primary figure at the dedication of Soldiers' National Cemetery , in Gettysburg. He did not wish to upstage the keynote speaker, Edward Everett , and so summarized in 2 minutes the principle of human equality as defined by the Declaration of Independence and the Civil War.  Do you remember, the keynote speech?  Few people do. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address : Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.  Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nat...

What does the value of Transparency really mean? Nextgov: How do you define transparency? Fung: My definition is quite a bit different from the conventional wisdom about transparency. A transparency system is designed to allow people to improve the quality of decisions they make in some way, shape or form, and it enables them to improve their decisions to reduce the risks they face or to protect their interests. Some of those decisions are about political accountability but some are in private life, like what food to buy or what doctor to go to. --  Archon Fung , professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government who studies government transparency. Does your company practice fair pay?  Here's what one worker brought to Google and made a difference in transparency at the search giant. Tell Your Co-Workers How Much You Make!     There's no law against it and it increases the chances you'll be paid fairly. Does the Agile Manifesto im...

What is your plan for being a better developer next year?  What's the technique that will repay your efforts many fold?  Testing - automated test to be specific.  There are all types of automated testing.  The agile mind set thinks of testing first, not in a reactive manner, but as a preventative and design effort. "For three years, The Container Store has been using application performance management (APM) technology from AppDynamics to locate bugs in the website, target them immediately and fix them. Sometimes there's a slowdown in a particular region. Other times it's from a certain database and often from a single line of code. Just this year, the Container Store upped its contract with AppDynamics, buying more software so the company can test new features before deploying them and minimize the number of live fixes necessary. "We said we want to be more proactive instead of reactive," said A.J. Azzarello, a quality assurance engineer at The Con...

Many companies have initiatives to become innovative.  There are some companies that don't appear to need a leadership sponsor to get competitive innovation - wonder why.  Perhaps they have some fundamental aspect to their organization that allows them to be creative.  What would be those aspects? Why It Feels Like We're Falling Behind It can take years to notice a life-changing invention.  - Motley Fool It took the world a few years to recognize that the Wright brothers had flown the first airplane at Kitty Hawk, NC (first flight in Dec. 1903 to 1908 public demonstrations). Here's my research on the topic of creativity. The musical group OK-Go! describes their process to achieve creativity - and the math behind the wonder and surprise they are reliably able to deliver. An awesome lesson in discovery - planning to play - to achieve innovation. Predicting Creativity in the Wild -- a research paper on the use of sociometric monitoring of teams by Sociom...

Agile Tetrahedron - ver 1 Who can explain the classic Project Management Triangle?  I've found that everyone has heard of it and uses it fairly well in a sentence. But when it comes to actually explaining the analogy to the triangle the struggles begin.  Some call it the iron triangle - as if nothing can stretch or shrink it's features once set.  I created a plastic triangle that was adjustable to illustrate the nature of negotiation of each of the sides. I want to move beyond the classic three variable problem of the project (scope, schedule & cost) and envision a model that describe the value that a project represents while maintaining the constraint relationship that these classic triangular relationships represent.  Enter the Tetrahedron - a platonic solid.  The tetrahedron has four faces, each face is a triangle, it is the simplest form of a pyramid with the base in the form of a triangle. Highsmith's Agile Triangle Jim Highsmith introdu...

Real leaders know how to draw an org. chart.  When did the leaders ego grow so big as to invert the  diagrams purpose and meaning? The  first organizational chart  (How information design solved a big problem for the Erie Railroad in the telegraph age) was a tree form describing the people and roles of the Erie Railroad with the executives at the bottom. Erie Railroad Org Chart By 1917 the org chart had mutated to the now traditional pyramid shape.  See Wikipedia article . A better alternative to the org chart is the Organigraph .  "The organigraph shows how companies really work. It uses symbols like stars, funnels, tubes, links and chains—in all, there are six specific symbols that represent how a company actually works." -- Building Business Value Blog   Here's an example: The secret to Walt Disney's strategy Organigraph . So do you see how the first Org Chart was both an organizational chart and an organigraph?  A...

I'm angry.  I'm as angry as a hornet's nest that just got hit by a rock thrown by a 10 year old that has no idea what they just did.  Oh, there may be no intent of harm, but someone is getting stung. Here's the current situation.  A 70+ year old person I know woke up a few days ago and fell in the bathroom.  We will call her M.  M was knocked unconscious for a moment.  M's spouse responded and called 911, the medics arrived and took M into the Forsyth County Hospital in Winston-Salem.  The medics were wonderful, very courteous and professional.  M was throwing up and had vertigo on the way to the hospital.  At the hospital she was treated and admitted for tests and observations.  When I talked to M, and she described the event it appeared to me that she had not had a stroke, they had done a CT scan and it was normal.  I'm not a doctor, and have no medical training, yet I've never played a doctor on TV. ...

December's issue of Harvard Business Review creates a compelling case for the concept of persistent teams. And hey, if they do it in the operating room, then there must be good science behind it. But heck, we don't need no stinking science, we just know it works, right? http://hbr.org/2013/12/the-hidden-benefits-of-keeping-teams-intact/ar/1 Harvard Business Review - Dec 2013

What philosophy do you use when hiring new members for the team? The tendency for many teams is to create an interview hazing process.  Requiring interviewees to run a gauntlet of silly questions, riddles, etc.  Is it not obvious that this will result in a poor hiring decision? If you ask an experienced, knowledgable HR person they can tell you how poor the hiring process really is.  Ask a researcher and they will tell you that it is one of the poorest business process for producing the desired results.  Yet almost every organization continues this tried, but not true process. Google, being a big data company has done it's own research on the topic.  Read the results. In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal Google’s Quest to Build a Better Boss There are many reasons people choose to leave a company, here is one top three list: Disengaged with organizational mission Lack of respect for co-workers A terrible boss Google found...