Year: 2024
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Drift to Waterfall
A typical scenario I encounter with teams that want to be more agile is when they slowly start slipping into more Waterfall ways of working. This drift to waterfall happens when the solutions teams come up with to solve their problems and end up negatively impacting the team’s agility and adaptability. Let’s look at some real-life examples that illustrate…
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One-Time Efforts
Organizations and teams constantly deal with endless problems during their work. Maybe it’s due to some natural, instinctual way humans react to problems, but the typical response I see teams take is to try to fix them with what I call “One-time efforts.” While appealing, one-time efforts are not well-suited to the complex problems teams…
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9 Golden Rules for Agile Teams: Principles to Improve Collaboration
In my time working with different teams and organizations, I’ve found myself repeating certain lessons that have proven consistently effective at helping improve how teams work together. I’ve started calling these my “Golden Rules.” These are principles that I teach to the teams and leaders I coach and that I also try to follow in…
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How Agile Coaches Can Empower Teams To Deal With Uncertainty
When someone asks me to define Agile, I often say it’s about moving forward even when you don’t have all the answers and instead embracing uncertainty and learning as you go. However, I’ve seen in the large organizations I’ve worked with struggle with this concept. Even if organizations want to be agile, they’re deeply programmed…
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Avoiding the Practice Trap: Fostering Genuine Agility
When organizations strive for agility, they often fall into the trap of adopting numerous agile terms and practices associated with popular frameworks like Scrum. While this approach generates a lot of internal activity, it often fails to translate into actual agility. In my experience, labelling and promoting certain practices as ‘Agile’ or ‘Important’ can be…
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Using Culture as a Lens to Solve Organizational Challenges
Years ago, when dealing with a team facing lots of interpersonal issues and a lack of safety, where people were not able to work together, and nothing seemed to work, I turned to the Culture Map, created by Dave Gray, as a way to help the team map, understand, and transform their culture. Since then, I’ve frequently…
Flow Focused 