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All of this content used to be spread over three different blogs at three different domains and it's now been merged into one. Why was it ever three? Because at the time it seemed reasonable that each of them was for a different audiences, and yet over time I've found that the lines between topic areas got blurrier and tended to overlap. So now they're all together in one place.

If you encounter things that seem broken, let me know and I'll get them fixed.

Browse by topic area:

Category	Formerly found at
Psychology & Behaviour	UnconsciousAgile.com
Flow, Kanban, Scrum	ImprovingFlow.com
Metrics and Forecasting	ImprovingFlow.com & MikesHardMetrics.com
Technical Practices	AgileTechnicalExcellence.com

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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!

• 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, default mode network, systems 1 & 2 and neurotransmitters (chemicals) that drive behaviour.
• Language patterns: Why language is so important, and Clean Language, a specific language pattern that has excellent application for coaching.
• 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".
• Flow of value
  • 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, and ensemble programming.
• 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, and inattentional blindness.
• Recommended reading: I'm often asked for book recommendationsbook recommendations.

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Building capacity when hiring juniors

My comments yesterday on social media about encouraging the hiring of juniors seemed to resonate. So let me tell you about two of the very best teams I’ve worked with. Two teams of juniors, that were freshly hired, many straight out of school and none of them having worked professionally for long.

Perverse Incentives: Coffee Badging

I learned a new term today: “Coffee Badging”. This is when a company has mandated that people be in the office, so they travel in to the office, swipe their badges, grab a coffee and perhaps talk to someone, and then head home again, where they remain for the rest of their working day.

Pull requests are not a quality step

I found myself quoting Deming in a question about Pull Requests (PR’s) today.

CI is not a server

We often hear things like “we’ve set up CI”, which makes no actual sense when you consider what CI is. It’s not a server or a tool, Continuous Integration (CI) is an ongoing practice whereby we keep the code continuously integrated. That sounds simple but has more subtlety than you might expect. Many places today that think they’re doing CI, actually aren’t, and as a result aren’t getting the benefit they could.

When we do everything right and it still doesn’t solve the right problem

The Choluteca Bridge, in Honduras, was built in an area known for hurricanes and other strong weather. It was designed to withstand the destructive force of a hurricane so when hurricane Mitch came through later that same year, it was no surprise that the bridge sustained only minor damage. Clearly, it had been designed and implemented well.

Improving Psychological Safety

We talk a lot about psychological safety, but most of it is platitudes: “It’s good. Do more of it.”

Horizontal scaling

When we think of scaling the work, we’re typically thinking of stories that are grouped within features or epics, which might be grouped inside even larger items. This is vertical scaling and is fairly common. There is another type of scaling, which we need to also consider, and that is horizontal.

Book recommendations

When the blogs were split across two different domains, I kept two different lists. They’re now merged into a single list over here.

Tuckman model of team development

I was once called in to help a team, six months into a three month project. Yes, you read that correctly. It was supposed to be a three month project and after six months they had lots of code but nothing that actually worked, and no end in sight.

Too many branches

Most companies have too many active branches in their code repositories. “Active” meaning we’re doing actual development on them.