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From our Agile friend, Adam Weisbart... The Bad News? Scrum is Really Popular! Excerpt: In many, many cases, orgs aren’t adopting Scrum because they believe in the values of Agility, they adopt it because they think they’ll magically get teams to do twice the work in half the time . The rest from Adam... I’ve been doing and teaching Scrum for over a decade. Each year I think we’ve hit “peak Scrum”, which gets me worried because I’ve seen Scrum help so many people and organizations. It’s transformative, and I’d miss its magic if it disappeared. But I’ve got some bad news… Each year, Scrum seems to get more and MORE popular. There’s no end in sight. “Wait… what?! Why all this doom and gloom Adam? It’s POPULAR!” One reason: Scrum is so popular organizations are adopting it simply BECAUSE IT’S SO POPULAR. …and that’s a horrible reason to do anything. In many, many cases, orgs aren’t adopting Scrum be...

If you ski, hike or live in or visit a cold climate, chances are you have been kept warm and dry by GORE-TEX(R)... That product is made by a company called W.L. Gore  https://www.linkedin.com/company/gore/ . They are a multi-national worth around $2.5 billion, lay claim to over 2,000 patents, have nearly 10,000 people, have been profitable in all 65+ years of their existence and much of the company works in a highly regulated (pharmaceutical) industry. They do all of this  without a management hierarchy . How does that work?: People choose their own work Leaders are those who attract followers Individual business units are small, self-governing and self-supporting At Gore, the prosperity of individual workers is determined by the economic success of their small business units (less than 150 people). This adult/adult or "peer pressure" based self-selection management model is also used in many successful Agile organizations. W. Edwards Deming (arguably the ...

https://hbr.org/2018/12/how-to-embrace-change-using-emotional-intelligence Harvard Business Review on using emotional intelligence to enable ourselves to embrace change: Changes at work can be emotionally intense, sparking confusion, fear, anxiety, frustration, and helplessness.  Experts have even said  that the experience of going through change at work can mimic that of people who are suffering from  grief over the loss of a loved one . Because change can be so physically and emotionally draining, it often leads to  burnout  and puts into motion an insidious cycle that  leads to even greater resistance to change . No one wants to be an obstacle to change, instinctively resisting any new initiatives or efforts. It’s not good for you, your career, or your organization. Improving your adaptability,  a critical emotional intelligence competency , is key to breaking this cycle. Fortunately, this is a skill that can be learned. In fact, in o...

https://weisbart.com/flowchart “Leaders that adopt scrum due to its popularity, or to ‘make their teams go faster’ without a deep understanding of the organizational change required to be successful stand a very good chance of doing more harm than good.  Seriously… They’ll just end up like me in that  bad ScrumMaster video .” ~Adam Weisbart

A misguided 'coach' I once worked with presented an entire organization with a Power Point slide that said whatever the dictionary defines as 'agile' is 'good Agile'. I coach my teams and organizations to be aware of the difference between "little a" agile (the dictionary definition) vs. "big A" Agile (Agile mindset from the Agile Manifesto). Forbes and ScrumAlliance worded it well in their publication "The Elusive Agile Enterprise". AGILITY VERSUS AGILE agility A property of an organization to sense and respond to market changes and continuously deliver value to customers. Agile An organizational approach and mindset defined by the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto, often practiced through a framework like Scrum.