People don't resist change, they resist being changed. Awareness enables individual, organisational, and social transformation.
I was talking about feedback to a C-level of a startup the other day: "Criticism as feedback is a learned skill, but there are ways to warm up people to it", I said. "I don't think it's a good idea to call it criticism or negative feedback. It has quite a harsh connotation. I would... Continue Reading →
Some years ago our teams decided to commit to increasing their Agility (coming from a background of doing Scrum), with a focus on the Agile principles and living them every day. After workshops and discussions on the principles and how we can reflect them better in our work, I experimented with a model of retrospective... Continue Reading →
I've described in a previous post why the retrospective is the most important event you will run in an agile transformation. For the retrospective to fulfill its role, it needs to be effective: it has to happen in a safe space, the team needs to look into data and generate insights based on actual information... Continue Reading →
I've been living in Malaysia for over five years, working for a company that employs more than 60 nationalities. My first Scrum team had eight nationalities (out of eight team members) spread across all spectrums of cultural differences. My family is also multicultural (my son has Romanian-Malaysian genes, plus influences from Romanian, Chinese, Malaysian and... Continue Reading →
“All that is necessary for effectiveness is output judged acceptable by those who receive or use it, a team that winds up its work at least as capable as when it started, and members who are at least as satisfied as they are frustrated by what has transpired. The challenge is to generate ways of... Continue Reading →
Do you know all those books that teach you how to make your team great or how to push your team to rock-star performance? Toss them aside. You can't make the team great, says Harvard Professor Richard Hackman, a world-leader researcher in group performance, leadership effectiveness and self-managed teams. But, thankfully, there's a but: you... Continue Reading →
The team is at the core of agile practices and frameworks:Â "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 →
I started working with software developers a little under ten years ago. Coming from a business background, my predominant work was communication and relating. But I began to work with people who would spend more time creating, designing, and building products. I had to relearn my approach to work, communication, meeting settings and generally my... 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 →
Agents of Awareness 