Articles on Modern Leadership and Organization Change

Big picture planning looks like throwing darts right now. Spend a day with people working through Radical Uncertainty together. Ottawa, Nov 26

Learn how complexity tax undermines resilience through poor structure, slow decisions, and conflicting metrics. Practical strategies to simplify and strengthen your organization.

A fragile organization that goes faster will be knocked over in the slightest wind.

In most organizations, work spends more time waiting to be worked on, than being worked on. To go faster? Look for the queues

Most work items spend more time waiting than actually being worked on

Without stable, focused teams, there is no predictability in the system. Portfolio management is the art of keeping those teams fed.

When the Manager becomes the team's ScrumMaster, the essence of Scrum will rapidly disappear. Here's why combining these roles is a bad idea.

Are in office mandates helping or hurting your team? We examine the evidence on remote work and the hidden costs of forcing people into the office.

Instead of focusing on being Agile, create a shared vision of what improvement actually looks like

Data and metrics are not synonymous. Velocity won't help your team improve

Red-Yellow-Green reports hide detail instead of inviting conversations about where projects need help, suppressing problems until it's too late. Better alternatives insid.

The more the manager takes control, the more decisions they make, the longer wait times for everything

Traditional titles can be toxic at the team member level because they imply a limitation

Self-organizing teams require managers to support and develop, not direct and control

Agile transformation succeeds through participation, not enforcement from top management

Forcing change conflicts with the essential human need for autonomy

Is my specific role: QA/BA/UX/.. considered a Developer in Scrum

We've had requests for a single page that lists all the ongoing [Beyond Scrum blog

Seeing an organizational change map with seven to eight proposed major changes can feel

Both Vision and Strategy should be created with input from the whole organization, not just leadership

Define vision for change with a mix senior management, middle management, and doers

If nothing changes, the control focus of the organization will destroy the Agile Improvement

Grow a culture where frequent small changes are the norm as the pace of change increases

Your organization has decided to become more “Agile.” Why? As we learned in a previous

Don't let averages fool you. Assume bell curve for 10,000 people's wealth? Include billionaires, and it flattens. Cognitive biases fool us.

In 201x, the global financial markets collapsed. Reason: mortgages were given to people

Companies are starting to fall into a trap, and it goes something like this, “Our

An example of an Organizational Improvement Teams can using Scrum

Using Scrum for Organizational Improvement, remember to include the people on the gorund

prioritize value delivery over keeping workers constantly busy

To be successful with Scrum in the long term you need more than the basic framework.