People don't resist change, they resist being changed. Awareness enables individual, organisational, and social transformation.
Story 1: The Interview One hour before I had the interview I changed my clothes, brushed my hair, put on some makeup (my son's having night terrors was taking a toll on my face) and prepared mentally. I checked my internet connection, Google Hangouts, made sure everything was functioning. I was ready. The interview went... Continue Reading →
The retrospectives we ran with the tech teams became quite popular in my former company. The rest of the company got interested in running their own retrospective events, so we started running retros with marketing, social media, product launch, content team, films teams, etc. One complexity I encountered was when I was asked to run... 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 believe all Agile principles are equal in importance and they work together holistically: focus on customers, iterative development, self-organised teams, technical excellence, and continuous improvement. But this last principle is "more equal than the others": Continuous improvement is the heart of Agile. Without reflection, there is no learning, without learning there is no continuous... Continue Reading →
The fireball: my first feedback story It was one of my first jobs, the debut of my career. I was working for Procter & Gamble, in Bucharest. The Romanian branch had just opened a procurement center (intending to transfer all procurement activities from Brussels and Geneva) and I was employee number four of the new... Continue Reading →
Empathy and emotional intelligence emotional intelligence are the focus on management and leadership research. Not only that, but it's considered a core skill for just .. being human. The success of teaching children empathy brought the idea that adults can be taught too. Fortunately, there are a lot of tools to learn empathy, and here's... 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 8 nationalities (of 8 team members), spread across all spectrum of cultural differences. My family is also multicultural (my son has Romanian-Malaysian genes, plus influences from Romanian, Chinese, Malaysian and Indian... Continue Reading →
An Agile Coach wears many hats - coach, trainer, teacher, mentor, consultant, conflict navigator - but my favourite role as a Coach is by far is facilitating groups. There is an immense satisfaction in being the force behind group problem-solving, helping a group navigate through their issues or conflicts or get clarity and create ideas.... Continue Reading →
Scrum is currently the most popular product development framework. It's also the framework I used the most and I am most comfortable using. It's a simple framework, but not easy to implement. I am going to write a Scrum series, where each post will tackle a part of Scrum, with information on its purpose and definition,... Continue Reading →
