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:

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!

Hero culture

It’s fairly common to have a junior team of people, with one far more senior person leading them. This can be an effective way to grow skill across the org.

Mental Health and GenAI

I’m seeing more and more stories about people having mental health conversations with various GenAI tools.

Wait states

The metrics covered in our Flow Metrics Basics class show how to measure different aspects of flow, but those metrics don’t in themselves, show how to improve the flow. We’ll look at one way to improve now.

Playing the long game

If I was planning to disband my team this week and I only cared about what they could deliver in a couple of days then I’d be focused on making sure that everyone was doing that piece of work that they were most skilled at.

What aren’t we hearing?

A few nights ago, my son and I went for a walk at Dilworth Mountain Park to admire the sunset. At one point, I noticed that he had his hands covering his ears and I asked him why.

Cross training

When we see “fractional people”, people who are spread across teams, the most common reason is that they’re one of a limited number of people with a specific skill. There is a real cost to having fractional people in the environment, so when we consider how we could make the overall teams better, “cross training” is often brought up as an action. Let’s hold a training session or write up some documentation so that other people can learn.

Getting out in nature

There are real neurological benefits to getting out in nature. Let’s look at four of those.

Building the right thing

When I’m working with a development team, I’ll often start by having them walk me through what business need they’re solving for. I’m less interested in the code or the architecture until I’ve first understood what problem we’re trying to solve.

Using dates to motivate

I sometimes see teams that make up arbitrary dates to “motivate” the teams to get work done faster. Not only does this not work over the long term, it often makes things worse.

No single right answer

All too often we focus on a single problem and make statements as if solving this one thing will solve everything. While that one thing might certainly make things better, it’s never the only answer. Everything we do is within the context of a complex adaptive system and changing any one thing will have ripple effects everywhere else in the system.