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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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A developers job

This week I heard “A developers job is to write great software” and I disagree. A developers job is to solve problems for their clients. We have a tendency to get so focused on specific skillsets like “I write code” that we miss the entire point of why we’re doing it.

Kanban: Simple, but not always obvious

We meet a lot of teams who say they’re doing Kanban and yet are only scratching the surface and not getting the benefit from Kanban that they could. They’re moving some cards across a board and think that’s all they have to do. Because it appears so simple, it doesn’t occur to them to reach out for assistance. Why would I need training or coaching to move some tickets around?

Rebuild vs Refactor

I was recently talking to someone who had an old codebase that they just couldn’t work with anymore. So they rewrote it from scratch and within six months, the new code was just as bad as the old. They were no further ahead, despite having invested a significant amount of time and money. This is a common story and it doesn’t have to be this way.

Logical Levels

Robert Dilts’ Logical Levels Model (also called Neurological Levels), is a framework to analyze and understand human experiences, behaviours, and change. It provides a structured way of examining different levels of human experience and helps individuals identify and work with those levels to create effective change. It’s based on earlier work from anthropologist Gregory Bateson.

Motivation & Self-Determination Theory

We tend to over-simplify motivation into just two buckets: intrinsic and extrinsic. According to Self-Determination Theory (SDT)¹, there are in fact six kinds of motivation² and it’s worth considering the full range.

1. Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness by Ryan & Deci, 2018 ↩

2. SDT is a much larger model that encompasses more than just motivation. This chart is one part of the Organismic Integration Theory, that is is turn just one of six mini-theories contained within SDT. ↩

Keeping people busy

The Kanban Guide talks about optimizing the workflow for three different attributes: effectiveness, efficiency, and predictability. It talks about the fact that any optimizations we perform will be a balance across these three and that over-optimizing on one may make the others worse.

SAFETY model of psychological safety

When discussing psychological safety, we like to use the SAFETY¹ model from the Academy of Brain-based Leadership. Note that we’re not affiliated with this organization - we just find their model very useful when discussing the topic.

1. The SAFETY model is described in depth in the book Psychological Safety: The key to happy, high-performing people and teams by Radecki and Hull, 2018 ↩

Why we should stop using spikes

Spikes were an interesting idea that have become massively abused and it’s time that we just stop using them.

Steps to improving predictability

If you have a need to know when the work will be done or how much you can do in a certain period of time then predictability will be important to you. We have great tools like Monte Carlo for probabilistic forecasting but the truth is that the forecast we generate is only as good as the data we give it. Garbage in yields garbage out. So how do we improve our data to make it inherently more predictable?

Where should a tech lead start?

I was recently talking to a developer who had just been promoted to tech lead. They were asking what they should be doing differently now. I suggested the first things I’d focus on are that their job is now…