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.
The difference between fear and excitement
Tomorrow, I’ll be in Canada’s Glacier National Park, hoping to see grizzly bears in the wild. Grizzlies are a legitimate threat and for most people will trigger a fear response. My companions and I, on the other hand, are very excited.
From Hero to Leader
Do you feel that every hard problem lands on you? When something is urgent, or nobody else can figure it out, it comes to you and you get it done? There’s a real pride in that. There’s also a quiet exhaustion, and underneath it a frustration you probably don’t say out loud: “why isn’t anyone else stepping up?”
What the “hug of death” actually looks like
For the first time, this site was on the receiving end of what I know as the Slashdot Effect and is today more commonly known as the Hug of Death. This is when some bit of your content becomes wildly popular and all of a sudden you get hit with a volume of traffic that you’d never seen before. Let’s unpack what happened.
The bottleneck might be the air in the room
You gather your most expensive people into a room to make your most important decisions. Then, somewhere in the second hour, the room quietly gets worse at making them. Not the people. The room.
Retrospectives without improvement
I frequently hear teams say: “We talk about the same things over and over and nothing changes.” Every time, it tells me they’ve missed the point of the retrospective.
Done Done Done
Every team has some definition of done, whether it’s been explicitly documented or it’s just a verbal understanding. Some agreement that when the work gets to this point, we’re not coming back to it. For most teams, there’s a designated spot on the board that reflects that state of done.
Is breaching WIP always bad?
In a Slack conversation recently, someone asked “Isn’t it a big assumption that breaching WIP is always bad?” It’s a great question, and the answer is more interesting than it first looks.
Your teams aren’t broken
Companies sometimes bring me in with the mandate: “fix my teams”. Other times it’s not said quite that directly, but the message is clear. Leadership has decided that something is wrong with the people doing the work, and I’ve been hired to correct it.
Turn off your self-view
When COVID hit and we all switched to video calls overnight, everyone started reporting how tired they were at the end of a day of meetings. Part of that was obviously that we were in a pandemic and stress levels were high, and yet there was something in the video meetings themselves that made it so much worse.
The case for real collaboration
I recall introducing pair programming to a team years ago. During the first round of pairing it just so happened the the most senior person on the team (20 years working on the same code base) got paired with the most junior (recent graduate from school on her first job). Mostly likely everyone assumed that the senior would be hand-holding the junior through the exercises, and yet when we got to the debrief, there was a surprise.