Happy workplaces are social places where people connect with each other. To get your team to socialize, never force a social event on them. Rather provide the tools to enable them, and reward the desired behaviour as pointed out in this article.
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Organizations are ever-evolving, and just like humans evolve from an infant to an adult, so to organizations go through different development stages. This post summarizes these different development stages from red to teal.
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What makes Zombies, Run! such an engaging and evergreen game? How can we use the insights from this game and apply it to more serious work for better outcomes? This post takes a look at Zombies, Run! and then apply the top game mechanics to the work place.
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Organizations operating from a mainly teal paradigm have a flat hierarchy with self-managing teams. Self-managed, autonomous teams don’t, however, mean no more leaders. In fact, it requires leadership even more than ever before. Just in a different way. It requires teal leadership.
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The organizational structures we know were invented more than 100 years ago and are due for a rework. This post looks how an organizational structure in the future of work practically looks like.
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Emotional Intelligence makes the case for why emotions are a fundamental tool for success and possibly more important than IQ. It contains science backed evidence of emotional development and how emotional intelligence can increase your popularity as well as your success in business and relationships in general.
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A review and summary of The Tipping Point book by Malcolm Gladwell looking at how small things can result in big change.
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Scrum is good. It might even be the golden bullet you’ve been looking for. But just like no one medicine is the anti-dote to all illness, so too no one methodology or framework is the solution to every organization’s problems.
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Agile documentation is not that easy. There’s no right or wrong answer when it comes to what to document and how. It depends on more variables than what is possible to mention. The team, the project, the client, the organization and the relationships, to name a few.
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The process of user experience design can get complicated and involved and somewhat confusing. However, the essence of a good user experience is quite simple. Here's how.
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Scrum changed the world. But it is a process framework for developers and most problems I see are not building the thing right, but building the right thing. Efficiency is important, but even more important is to know your destination. This post aims to clarify how to include design into the development lifecycle for optimum productivity.
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Some of my best memories involves live music. When a group of talented musicians get together magic happens. But I'm not a musician. My art is the art of software development, which is strikingly similar to the art of making music. But it takes more than talent to create a great team.
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Crafting user stories that’s not too big and not too small is an art. Visualizing these parts and interactions greatly aids a shared understanding and reduces the errors as a result of missed or misunderstood requirements.
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Hybrid work is here to stay. But how do you engage part virtual and part on-site participants in the same meeting? This post introduces an inlusive warmer for your next meeting.
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Remote work result in zoom fatigue when you don't invest in relationships. This post delves into practical ways to connect digital and strengthen relationships when you are not in the same physical location. Because together is always better.
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Software development is often planned as a linear project with a start and an end. Yet, products expand and grow as the users evolve. Seeing it as a spiral rather than a line can be the difference between waterfall and agile. Here's an in-depth explanation of the essence of agility.
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Have you ever questioned why you do what you do, who you spend your time with, why you exist? After nearly a year of lock-down during the pandemic of 2020 I questioned the people, the things and the actions in my life. Here's my little rant.
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A blueprint to transform enterprise organizations into more agile, self-organizing teams, this book is a practical guide book filled with success stories, alternatives on how to implement such a change, and a bunch of tools.
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Ethereum has revolutionized the world. It took blockchain technology and turned it into an entire ecosystem. There are a lot of benefits to this, but there are also some downsides. This post outlines the good, the bad, and the ugly.
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If your system under test is too complex or complicated to adequately cover with test cases, or if there are simply too many variables to test within limited timeframes, consider adding playful test to your test strategy. This post looks at a structured approach to playtest complex systems.
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It's easy to get lost in the details when building or designing complex software. The Game Thinking framework combines the progression levels of game design with the lean startup model, agile user stories and the general marketing cycle.
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Like the Google Play Store though, there are so many choices that it’s really hard to know which one to pick. So I’m embarking on a little pet-project to curate the available DApps and try to make some sense from all the chaos. How do you choose the best one for you?
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Crypto is the new money. For the past few years a few pioneers have been rebuilding finance offerings into this decentralized world. Are we ready to replace centralized options for a non-corruptable alternative yet?
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Being locked down with nowhere to go can be challenging. Here's some easy things you can do to brighten up your day.
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Remote work is an advanced practice for responsible and mature teams. It can be challenging for teams not ready for remote work. This post outlines some of the risks of remote work and a few guidelines to get more out of your remote work.
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Play is one of the most powerful tools available for us to learn. This post outlines five fundamental rules of play and how to build a strong foundation that can turn anything into play.
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One of the biggest causes of not delivering is when the team is not aligned. But it's not complicated, it's as simple as ABC. This post explores the three most crucial (and simple) things that need to be in place for teams to be aligned in the workplace.
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Agile is an adjective, not a noun. It requires a different way of doing things rather than doing things differently. So many agile advocates get stuck in following the Scrum guide, missing the essence of agility and why it came to be. Read more to find out about a post-agile workplace what's next.
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A new paradigm in leadership is needed. It requires personal leadership development for everyone in the organization, not only a select few. Leadership needs to become a less scarce resource in the age of information. Just like access to cars, education and books became more accessible resources during the industrial age.
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Bodystorming is a fun, collaborative method to identify possible gaps and opportunities in a process, giving you fast feedback without spending time, effort and money to build the wrong thing. Go on, give it a try.
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Having a difficult conversation is hard. Not talking about things though make it bigger, yet unresolvable. By talking about the elephant you give an opportunity to build trust and more functional habits within an organization.
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Through discipline comes freedom. Continuously practicing something - whether it is a task or a mindset - turns it into a subconscious habit. Read more about Improvement Kata as a scientific method to cultive a habit of continuous improvement.
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Trust is a barometer. It’s not a milestone that you can reach and keep forever, just like an oven’s thermostat constantly clicks on and off to maintain its heat. You need to actively work at maintaining trust, adding more trust-worthy actions than compromising trust.
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Photo by SHVETS production: https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-with-letters-on-his-palms-8410857/
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Children are by far more creative than most adults I’ve met. They have not yet adapted the limiting beliefs and cognitive biases most adults view the world with and that inhibit our creative thoughts. Adding play can help you come up with more novel insights.
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There are many more failures than successes. Startup success and emotional mastery are directly related to each other. This post looks at the reason for failure and how to master your judgement emotional intelligence.
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Agility is the ability to quickly adapt and change direction at speed. It requires the ability to learn and apply learned knowledge. Here's a few guidelines on how to grow an agile mind.
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The impact of fear on productivity is a silent killer. It kills motivation, creativity, and productivity. To create a productive environment, drive out fear by making information accessible, being explicit about expectations and listen without judgment.
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“Can Quality be built into software?” Ultimately, the level of quality in the software is a reflection of the level of responsibility within the organization. Own it. Don’t wait for someone else. Quality is everyone's responsibility.
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Today, more than ever before, we need to make leadership more accessible. No longer can companies afford to spend their most expensive resources managing other resources, ultimately slowing down the productivity of the entire organization. To stay ahead of the competition, you need to create more leaders.
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Coffee is coffee. Right? Not quite. You only master a concept when you can apply it in different ways. This post demonstrate 5 ways to play Lean Coffee.
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An ending is that akward space before a new beginning. But how do you end a project without leaving with regrets of what should have been? The best projects have a strong beginning and a strong ending. Here's a few ways to end a project.
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The easiest way to improve productivity at work is by breaking down big goals into more achievable parts and then delivering more value more frequently. This is the foundation of all agile methods and remains the fundamental pre-requisite before anything else will work.
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Most people measure the efficiency of parts of a system in the hope of improvement a system's overall productivity. But what if you're measuring the wrong thing? Here are the three main reasons why productivity improvements don't work.
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Choosing the right tool at the right time can be the difference between success and failure. But which one should I choose? This post explains the difference between the lean startup, lean, and agile methodologies.
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High performance teams are teams who trust each other. Teams who feel safe. Safe to admit when they don’t know the answers. Safe to ask for what they need. But how do you create psychological safety in the workplace?
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How do you create conversations on social media? If you meet someone you really like and he asks for your number, you give it to him. If he doesn’t ask, conversation ends. If you don’t give it, conversation ends. Digital is no different, it's just a different channel.
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Most people view unhappiness as an unwelcome guest. They don’t realise that the only difference between unhappiness and happiness is the wrapping hiding the gift inside. In order to stumble on happiness, you need to be willing to feel the unhappiness.
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Authenticity is about being true to who you are. Most people, however, don’t feel safe to express when they’re unhappy. They try to avoid conflict as much as possible. But when you avoid speaking your truth, you end up alone and miserable.
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Money is not the only currency and paths are made by walking. Rather than following in the path of everyone that came before you, try different pricing models that will allow you to get more value for money. Disrupt by offering reverse auctions to get what you want.
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There is a difference between dysfunctional and broken. Broken means something doesn’t work at all. Dysfunctional means it works, but not for the good of all the parties involved and definitely not in a sustainable manner.
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The source of most issues at work and in your personal life comes down to a breakdown in communication. This post aims to highlight how this happens and give some guidelines as to how to get your message acrosss.
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In the age of the human, money follows passion. If you want a successful and sustainable business, do what you love, nurture it like a baby and make your customers feel special, as if they matter.
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Money is a tool to enable us to get what we want. But everything we want is because we think it will make us feel a certain way. So next time when you think you need money, ask yourself what you would do with that money and how would it make you feel.
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Society is designed to remove fun from your life. Fun is something only allowed by children. If you're an adult, you should be serious and responsible. But what if that's not true? Here's a few easy ways to add fun to your boring day.
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The quality of the answer is directly related to the quality of the question. Market research often asks biased questions that filter out insights and feedback rather than invite it.
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What happens when you put together a bunch of strangers all with the desire to start a new business? Can you define an MVP in under 3 hours? It turns out you can. Here's how.
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Cape Town is arguably one of the most livible cities in the world. It is also the most expensive city in South Africa. But there are loads of free things to explore. Here's a list of my favorite things in Cape Town.
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The Titanic sunk not because there wasn't early warning signs. It sunk because no-one bothered to look at the issue and respond to it. Organizations sink when they are too busy to take the time to take a step back and be honest about the reality of where they are.
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We're often caught up in our daily habits. Running around in circles not getting anywhere with no time to stop and smell the roses. But life's too short to rush. If you want joy and meaning, consider slowing down, even if for just a little while.
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If you want your business to grow exponentially, increasing price and decreasing costs are very old and restrictive ways to solve the problem. Rather than focusing on profit, it is much more effective approach to focus on value and view payment as feedback, as a waiter would looking at his tip.
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Without a founder breathing a clear vision of changing the world in some way and with a determination to see it through, most startups fail within the first year or two. But how do you choose a successor when you're successful?
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Skin color, facial features, age and nationality says something about you, that is undeniable. But it is what goes on in your mind that really sheds light on the capacity for embracing diversity.
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Cape Town has a lot to offer, and hidden behind the big names of places to go are Observatory - mostly a student hangout - and Woodstock - the design and startup mecha of Cape Town.
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Want to be more creative and fun at work? Use story cubes to prompt a new idea or solve a problem in a novel way. Here's 5 different ways to use it.
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For Kaizen to be successful, it has to become a culture. It’s a continuous focus on getting a little better at what you are doing already, everyday. Kaizen is a step-by-step approach to optimizing the total system where small changes are made continuously, rather than big changes done once a year.
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Scrum changed how most organizations do software development. But what's next? Teal introduces a softer, slower, more whole ecosystem as an evolutionary next step in organizations as we know it.
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Hell yes! The answer, or rather my answer, to Nuno Rafael Gomes question in his post “Shall we dance?”, an essay using dancing the tango as metaphor to explain how he views organizational agility compared to being agile.
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Losing something valuable is hard. Collecting these lost pieces is a miracle that never seizes to surprise me in the miraculous ways things happen. If only you have the courage to get out of the way...
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The most creative solutions were first seen as glitches. Mistakes. Unexpected and unintended outcomes. But what if it's not a glitch? What if creativity requires these mistakes?
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Remote work isn't going to indemnify you from facing the issues in your team. Rather, going remote will amplify it. If you want to go remote to avoid something, you're doing it for the wrong reasons. Here's why.
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In order to be happy, you have to be willing to feel and validate the pain that blocks you from your joy. Emotional intelligence is a process of self-discovery and ultimately self-mastery.
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Automation is an insurance policy. First, you have to make sure that you have a product worth insuring before you start investing in the premiums. Here's a leanapproach to automation testing.
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Tools make for a more productive day. With the right tool, you spend more time on what you really care about and have less to worry about or maintain. Here are a few of my favorite tools.
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Testing is an art. It's the art of uncovering weaknesses in software. Here's a bullet proof strategy to make sure you're finding meaningful errors while testing software.
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What goes on in the mind of a hacker? What motivates someone to attempt to push the boundaries? A recap of a recent hacker lean coffee to get into the minds of hackers.
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In his book Reinventing Organizations, Frederic Laloux defines the different paradigms in organizational development to a specific color starting with red, moving on to amber, orange, green and finally teal. Teal organizations are the most developed and can be considered the adult compared to the red infant organization. This post aims to start that process, by defining the four most important values.
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Technology to me is like having a superpower and the ability to save the world. Or, if used badly, destroy it. Looking at the state of the world as it is today, it feels as if technology is more used to destroy than create and sustain life. But we can change all that…
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Are you building the right product? When requirements are bad, the impact is lasting. So how is bad requirements born? And how can you create better, more lasting requirements?
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We live in a world where it's easy to see what's not working well and what's wrong. But there's always beauty and love around you. If only you focused your attention to notice the little things.
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Most teams don't succeed the way they invisioned when they embark on an agile transformation journey. But what if you can make the movement towards agility an inside job?
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A critical analysis of organizational development and a book on what the next paradigm of leadership within an organizational context might look like. The book draws on developmental psychology as framework to explain the development of organizations. It is an inspiring read painting a hopeful future for organizations focused on wholeness and self-managing teams.
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Agile has been around for a few decades now and most companies have adopted it to at least some level. Naturally, it’s time to think of what comes after agile. Here's a curious look at the possibilities.
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Have you ever refrained from saying what you truly think of a solution or a behavior, just to keep the peace? Have you ever talked around a subject to avoid any criticism from your peers? Have you ever tried to hide information, intentionally leaving it out in a fear of hurting someone else’s feelings, or possibly scared of being punished? That’s our Achilles heel. Feedback.
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A practical and essential toolkit for any entrepreneur, this book contains practical advise to guide a small business owner’s funding decisions. It is a comprehensive guide to help entrepreneurs understand what funding options are available, and what investors are looking for.
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Culture is the driving force of the behaviors of an organization. Healthy culture, happy people, quality products. Dysfunctional culture, unhappy people, error-filled products. How do you evaluate a culture?
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Learning is in the pause between the in-breath and the out-breath. The retrospective is when things fall into the right compartments inside your brain that allows you to act differently going forward. Taking the time to contemplate learning and writing this post shed another powerful and obvious insight we all missed during the call.
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An or point of view is a limited viewpoint. Whereas an and point of view allows for more possibilities. That is the essence of an agile mindset — it’s an open mind looking for similarities and how two parts can complement each other, rather than the differences.
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The first workbook in a series of four books to practically guide teams, based on personal experience, through the four stages of Bruce Tuckman’s group development theory towards high performance. According to the model, a team undergoes four distinct stages before they reach optimal performance, first forming, then storming, followed by norming and finally performing, with a final fifth stage of adjourning. This workbook focuses on the forming stage.
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More than anything else, for a team to be agile, they need to work together as a coherent team. Each person has to speak as if from the same voice. Jira doesn’t mean that you’re agile. Using Trello doesn’t mean you have a smooth workflow process. Using Slack doesn’t mean that your team is collaborating.
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Like the human body consists of different limbs, organs and parts, each with a separate, unique function, so too an agile team needs to know each other in the team and understand the function in order to support each other, lead by a combination of heart and mind. The heart guiding the where, with the mind guiding the how.
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The biggest waste in agile is the loss of valuable information as a result of bad communication within teams. Communication is not the same as talking. You don’t communicate with anyone by speaking. You communicate when there is equal speaking and listening.
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*Set in the Firths around the Black Isle in Scotland, [Listen to the Dolphins](https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0955249414/sr=1-1/qid=1486993577/ref=olp_product_details?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1486993577&sr=1-1) is an easy, insightful and entertaining read about organizational change. The easy to understand metaphors make this book valuable to anyone interested in leading change in big organizations, regardless of the industry, as there are no industry-specific buzzwords or references.*
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The Definition of Done (or DoD for short) is one of the most important aspects that differentiates a successful agile implementation from a less successful one. It can also one of the biggest pitfalls keeping teams from delivering.
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An agile team is one that is in balance, with a steady rhythm. They are an optimized team working at a sustainable pace, investing time in action as well as reflection.
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The authors of the agile manifesto realized that face-to-face communication is the most effective, and efficient, way of communication. But collaboration takes more than just communication.Action without collaboration is potentially as harmful as collaboration without action.
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Self-organizing teams need great technical skills, but even more than that, they need strong shared values. They need trust, respect, and great communication. They also need to be humble, leaving their ego at the door, always focusing on what is best for the team and the customers, rather than what’s best for me.
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The purpose of having a cross-functional team is to increase efficiency, which in turn reduces your cycle time. It is not the only way to increase your efficiency, but it has the potential to radically reduce waiting time, while increasing trust and communication within the team itself.
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The law of small teams is useful because it is the most efficient way of creating a function or a product, without any waste.An agile team combine different and unique perspectives to form a complete picture, with the least amount of waste.
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When you weigh up options as alternatives, you limit your possible solutions. An and mindset, on the other hand, includes rather than excludes. This post looks at the relationship between mindset and tools and then go into a few techniques to practice an inclusive mindset.
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Many people think that when they use Scrum, they are an agile organization. Not wanting to be the bearer of doom, but it couldn’t be further away from the truth. Scrum is only the beginning of becoming more agile. Here's why.
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Training your mind to become agile, is training it to be more flexible. Similarly, an agile organization is a flexible organization. An organization that has rules, but allows for these rules to change dynamically. An organization that values learning and growth more than playing it safe. An organization that courageously acts and responds even when faced with fear.
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To cultivate a flexible mind,you need to get out of your comfort zone. Do something new, learn something new. Push yourself. If it wasn’t for being pushed out of his comfort zone, Richard Branson could still be the shy little boy he used to be. Thanks to embracing the discomfort of new experiences, he is now one of the world’s most successful and most loved business men.
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Scrum works. If it’s not working for you, evaluate whether your implementation is meeting the rules of the game, as outlined in this post. The framework itself is a perfect model for agility. Understanding why Scrum works, makes it possible to fill in the blanks tailor made and suitable to your unique organization.
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Like any profession, you get bad people, average people, and a hand full of really good people. The problem often comes that when you embark on an agile transformation that you don’t know what really good looks like.
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To successfully transition towards an agile model, the most important element is having purpose driven by passion and strong leadership to demonstrate the values and mindset of an agile culture.
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Knowing what you want and knowing what you need are not always that obvious or easy to spot. The best question to ask next time you consider adding more, is “Will more speed me up or slow me down?” and “Will this cost me less than the value it will bring me?”.
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Obtaining a degree or certification marks the start of learning. In order to speed up, you first however need to slow down. Effective learning is not about how fast or how much training you complete, but how flexible you are in applying your knowledge to different problems.
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Can one person make a difference? Is it posible to enable change if you're outnumbered? This post looks at five strategies to cope if you're the only agile mind in the team.
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Being agile is about responding to customer needs promptly, and the best way to do this, is to know what those customer needs are. Even though the Product Owner’s primary role is knowing their customer, it’s not possible to view the same thing from two different sides. If you want to be really agile, invest in more manual testing.
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It’s relatively easy to do agile. It is about following the guides and learning the technical skills involved in delivering agile. It’s much harder, however, to be agile. Being agile, requires mastering the values and soft skills such as responsibility, trust, focus and discipline which will guide your actions and your decisions. An agile mind has mastered both the technical skills and the soft skills required to enable you to respond to changing needs from your environment and customer.
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Effective learning is not about how fast or how much training you complete, but how flexible you are in applying your knowledge to different problems.
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Successful gamification design requires thought, a lot of planning, and many iterations to get it right. And once you finally get it right, it’s time to change it to keep it interesting.
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A meaningful leader, whether it is the head of a big organization or the head of a household, is someone who lives in integrity, leading by example and inspiring, not demanding. A meaningful leader listens to the needs of his people and reacts thoughtfully, after careful consideration.
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Being agile is about the ability of an organization to respond to the constant changes around them, not about being the fastest individual runner. Being agile is a collaborative team sport, not a solo competition. It is about viewing a user requirement from different perspectives, but delivering a whole.
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To gamify a workplace, marketing solution, or system, the key is to find the fun. Once you have a blueprint, all you need to do is apply some of the elements to transform boring into engaging. So what does fun look like? And how can you make something that is not fun more engaging?
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A meaningful leader’s main role is to fulfil the needs of the people that follow him, and to keep them on the road towards the higher vision of the organization. And you won’t know if you don’t ask.
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We spend the majority of our day at work, yet I can literally count the number of people that love what they do and feel it is meaningful on my one hand.
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Engagement is about making something interesting and looking at games can teach us a lot about how to engage our audience. So next time you’re out of ideas or feel stuck, pull out a game and play.
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A select few people are lucky enough to be born knowing what they want to be when they grow up. However a large percentage of the population doesn’t have a clue what their passion is, mostly ending up in a frustrating and unfulfilling career that their parents or society probably wanted them to be in rather than it being their choice. In order to find your passion and enable you to make career choices more aligned with your personal vision, start noticing what people thank you for, what you can’t stop doing and what frustrates you most.
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