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, please let me know and I'll get them fixed.

Browse by topic area:

• Psychology & Behaviour (Formerly UnconsciousAgile.com)
• Flow, Kanban, Scrum (Formerly ImprovingFlow.com)
• Technical Practices (Formerly 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!

• 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.
• Recommended reading: I'm often asked for book recommendations.
• 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.
• Improving your meetings: Specifically retrospectives (my video course), and standups. What if your people won't participate?
• Improving learning: with neuroscience and LEGO.
• Flow & Kanban: Flow metrics, probabilistic forecasting, and understanding waste.
• Technical practices: Continuous integration, TDD as design, and ensemble programming.
• Something fun: The millennial whoop, and inattentional blindness.

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Risk Management

Yesterday I went on a guided hike to teach people how to safely hike through bear country. Specifically grizzy bear country. Unfortunately, we didn’t see any bears, but we did learn an amazing amount about them, and saw some spectacular glaciers and alpine terrain.

Gaming metrics

When I suggest that people will game whatever metrics we put in place, I’m often met with shocked indignation. We would never game the numbers! And yet we do.

OKR’s for Quality

The topic of OKR’s for quality have come up in multiple different contexts, across multiple clients, recently so perhaps it’s worth exploring.

Jira Metrics 2.12

I’ve released JiraMetrics 2.12, with a number of bug fixes, and a new chart that I’ll describe below.

Prioritization

There two different times that we need to prioritize work and we should be using completely different approaches to that prioritization, for each stage.

The big rewrite

I remember once having two back-to-back clients who had just rewritten significant systems in their environment. I asked why they’d chosen to rewrite the system from scratch rather than just fixing them as they were.

Scouting rule

We often talk about the scouting rule of “always leave the campsite cleaner than you found it”, or in a software context “always leave the code a little bit better than you found it”.

Quality

The theme for this week seems to be quality so let’s look at some different aspects of that.

Improving learning with neuroscience and LEGO

In a training, the goal is to have people learn. That should be obvious and yet we frequently see sessions where people walk out, having been entertained, but not having learned anything.

Knowing when to Quit

In general, none of us are as good at decision making as we like to think we are. In particular, there is one mistake that we make frequently and that’s not recognizing when it’s time to quit.