Is Culture King?
"Culture eats strategy" "Once culture changes in the company everything happens fast." - Indra Nooyi - Pepsico CEO At the heart of any good Agile Transformation is cultural transformation. Or as Ken Schwaber said...
Posts
Strong vs. Weak Leaders
Weak leaders lock people into job descriptions. Strong leaders unlock people's full potential. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/weak-leaders-lock-people-job-descriptions-strong-full-vishnepolsky/ Excerpt: I was not qualified for my fist management job. I acted as such, and my team was not happy. I was too cautious to avoid mistakes and screw ups, and held my team back. My new boss called me into his office, and asked to close the door. He said - Oleg, I want you to make 5 significant mistakes a week. I was shocked. My boss was brilliant. He knew I needed to be liberated. Empowered, I went back and my team and I were set on fire. We launched first in the industry financial web site. We migrated clients to a new system. We moved data centers.
Agile Coaching or Agile Hurting
Wow... https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/agile-coaching-hurting-dahm-m-hongchai
Osmotic Communication?
One of the 12 Agile principles relates to the importance of face to face communication. Here's a great article from the Agile Times referring to "Osmotic Communication" which is one of the advantages of being colocated. https://theagiletimes.com/osmotic-communication-uses-subconscious/ "...The principle behind osmotic transmission and absorption of team members’ conversations implies that we acquire knowledge even if we are not an active participant in any particular conversation . Much like a song playing in the background, even if you don’t know the name of the song, if heard regularly over time, you may just be able to know the melody or lyrics without even trying to memorize them. How this actually is made possible is explained through the way our minds work on a subconscious level ..."
Planning Fallacy
Planning Fallacy is a formal term confirming that humans are - by nature - horrible at planning. The further out the planning horizon, the worse the prediction. Optimism bias, low-balling to gain project approval and just the fact humans can't predict the future all reinforce the need for the small increment, inspect and adapt feedback loop mindset of Agile. Heres some intriguing info from our friends at Freakonomics on the subject... Why Are Your Projects Always Late (And over budget)? http://freakonomics.com/podcast/project-management/
