Browse by topic area:
There's a lot here and if you're not sure where to start, here are some popular starting points. From these, you'll find crosslinks to even more topics. Enjoy!
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Neuroscience / Psychology
- Psychological Safety: An overview. For the science, see the SAFETY model. For Google's research into why it's important for high performing teams, see Project Aristotle. What happens when we don't have that safety?
- Anxiety and Stress: For the science, see Polyvagal Theory or a description of some neuroscience, illustrated with a bear encounter. To let go of that anxiety, see the Anti-Anxiety toolkit.
- Generally more about the brain: Cognitive bias, motivation, amotivation, why your brain needs idle time for powerful insights, systems 1 & 2 and neurotransmitters (chemicals) that drive behaviour.
- Language patterns: Logical Levels, a powerful framework for understanding why people behave the way they do. Why language is so important, and Clean Language, a specific language pattern that has excellent application for coaching.
- Leadership: The Ladder of Leadership — a framework for getting people to take more initiative. Autonomy and why it matters. And the problem of hero culture — revisited and covered in a recent book.
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How to improve...
- Meetings: The common problems with meetings. Improving the standup / daily coordination meeting. Retrospectives are covered in my popular video course Retrospective Magic. Then what if your people won't participate?
- Improving learning: with neuroscience and LEGO.
- Improvement: Continuous improvement in general. Understanding the metaphor of "lowering the water level".
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Flow of value
- Blocked column: Should you have one? The case for and against.
- Classes of service: Understanding how different work items should flow differently.
- Metrics: Flow metrics, probabilistic forecasting.
- Waste: Overview of waste. Understanding the cost of interruptions, and the kinds of waste that gets in the way of flow.
- Work in progress (WIP): Setting initial WIP limits. What to do when we're overwhelmed with WIP
- Metrics and Forecasting: All of these have their own category now.
- Technical practices: Continuous integration, TDD as design, ensemble programming, and poor code and the RAS.
- Ensuring we're building the right thing: Slicing stories and epics. Understanding the context of what we're building. Knowing how to prioritize that work.
- Something fun: The millennial whoop (includes a great video), and inattentional blindness — a video that will make you doubt your own perception.
- Recommended reading: I'm often asked for book recommendations.
Paltering: Lying by telling the truth
A few days ago, someone in my LinkedIn feed shared a screenshot of a post from X. My first assumption with any screenshot from social media (rather than a direct link) is that it’s fake, so I went and found the original. It was real, and it had been viewed 7.8 million times. The post said that OpenAI’s internal benchmarks showed GPT-6.1 Sol crushing Opus 5.5, with Anthropic struggling to keep up. The chart below it backed that up nicely: three coloured lines climbing over time, OpenAI’s green line sitting comfortably on top, Anthropic’s in the middle, Grok at the bottom.
Kingman’s Formula
Last week I was on a busy highway, crawling along, and we drove past a metered on-ramp, where there is a stoplight controlling how fast cars can get onto the highway. The person sitting beside me made the comment “that thing isn’t doing anything”, which prompted a conversation about what it was supposed to be doing.
When features go wrong
I spent last week in a hotel, where the bathroom lights were on a motion sensor. Walk in, lights on. Leave, and a while later they go off by themselves. On the surface, this seems sensible enough.
Election signs
A municipal election is coming up here in Kelowna, which means that election signs are now showing up everywhere. Let me be blunt, I hate these signs. Not just because they’re ugly, although they are, but because they’re manipulative.
Let the developers talk to the customers
When somebody asks me how to motivate their developers, one of the first things I suggest is getting them closer to the customer. It’s hard to be motivated when you’re working in a feature factory, doing one task after another and never getting feedback from the people who are using that software.
Correcting mental models: motivation and cargo culting
In the spirit of improving how we think, let’s consider a mental model I was working with that turned out to be almost completely wrong.
The Kano Model
Nobody has ever bought a mobile phone because it has a battery in it and yet nobody would buy one without. When categorizing new features, the Kano model is a way to organize them by how well they will satisfy the customers, against how much of it we need to implement.
It Told Me It Was Tired
While recently working on JiraMetrics, I ran into an interesting situation with Claude (the AI tool). Twice in the same session, it wrote a command that ran the linter, printed a list of offences, and then committed the code anyway. This shouldn’t have happened because there are rules in place to prevent linter warnings being committed.
Impostor Syndrome: You’re Better Than You Think
For years I assumed that many of the things I was good at were nothing special. When I was complimented on what I was doing, I assumed that anyone could have done it and that eventually people would discover that fact. This is the essence of impostor syndrome, a problem that is rampant in our field and probably in others.
Visualizing the right things
When we’re visualizing data, the point isn’t just to make a pretty picture. It’s to help us understand what the data is saying so we can make more effective decisions.