People don't resist change, they resist being changed. Awareness enables individual, organisational, and social transformation.
The team is at the core of agile practices and frameworks: "team of experts", "development team", "product team", "squad", etc. Software development requires the work of a team, as individual work can only get you so far. But is that assumption correct? To answer this question, I looked into organisational psychology and group dynamics research. The... Continue Reading →
Self-managed or self-organised teams is the premise for any Agile framework or organisation. But what does that mean? The meaning varies from organisation to organisation, and from person to person, but there is a standard definition for it. Let's look into it! Late J. Richard Hackman, Harvard psychology professor and one of the leading experts... Continue Reading →
A little under ten years ago I started to work with software developers. Coming from a business background, my predominant work was related to communication and relating. But I started to work with people who would spend more time in creating, designing, and building products. I had to relearn my entire approach to work, communication, meeting... Continue Reading →
I've been looking into how the traditional hierarchical, "command and control" management came to be and also at what motivates individuals and high-performance teams with the purpose to discuss the role of the manager in an Agile environment. Most of the Agile frameworks don't tackle this topic, which creates quite a few issues when implementation time... Continue Reading →
Try to google "what motivates employees", and you can spend the rest of your days figuring this mystery out, browsing through thousands of results. A short but comprehensive summary is found on Science Direct. You get the overview and information on what you read on next, if you want to go deeper into the subject. In... Continue Reading →
"Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers - a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars - and on up through university. On the job, people, teams, and... Continue Reading →
I've been hearing a lot of people talking about stages in teams development - forming, storming, norming and performing, so I jumped into figuring out (1) where this theory is coming from and (2) how valid it is today in connection to agile teams. The originator of the theory is Bruce W. Tuckman, who wrote a... Continue Reading →
Or how paying a bus fine made me happy, brought me nice conversations and revealed things about myself that I wasn't aware of... I forgot to charge my bus card, as I rarely use it. As my office is in the middle of nowhere, there's basically nowhere to buy any card so I risked it... Continue Reading →
The Undercover Economist, [Tim Harford, 2007] Is economics a dull subject, referring to complex data analysis, presenting not so exciting conclusions inaccessible to the general public? Tim Harford replies with a definite no and supports his opinion with The Undercover Economist, where he brilliantly presents his theories, based on thorough research and analysis, on hot... Continue Reading →
You need a big idea to build a lasting company. FALSE, just a very few of these companies were based on a grand idea, in fact some of them were built without any specific idea. The visionary companies need visionary leaders, of an impressive height and very charismatic. FALSE, the image of the charismatic leader... Continue Reading →
Agents of Awareness 