New(s)

Calling all testers and QA focused team members! Have you wondered about how your work and perspectives fit in James Shore and Diana Larsen’s Agile Fluency Model?

At the Agile Open Northwest Open Space event, Diana Larsen led some discussions about the utilization and evolution of the Agile Fluency model. Afterwards, Diana spoke to InfoQ about her involvement with and contributions to the Agile community over the last 13 years and the fluency model.

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader. -John Quincy Adams

Last month we talked about resilience - what it is and where it comes from. Because that newsletter prompted more comments and feedback than we have ever had to any newsletter, we decided to explore the topic a bit more. So now let’s proceed with resilience redux…

We are all familiar with the scenario. One author coins or uses a term, it gets picked up by someone else, both are quoted in a third source and so on. Pretty soon, it is on the pages of Harvard Business Review and now it is the latest bona fide management craze. Lately, there has been quite a crop of articles on resilient individuals, resilient organizations, resilience as the new skill no manager can do without, revenue resilience, etc. So I decided to do some research (OK…more like poking around) and see who is actually talking about what, based on what evidence.

How do you set conditions for organizations to become “learning organizations” and how do you support the self-organizing teams that emerge from this transformation?

Trying to save others from the discomfort we’ve experienced is a worthy impulse. When the pain we are trying to help them avoid is embarrassment, physical harm, disappointment or a lot of wasted effort, we mean well. However, too often we communicate the message in a way that is difficult to hear.

Kevin, the COO of a medium-sized Oregon food company and a long time client of ours, called recently sounding frazzled.

Given that Kevin is usually so affable, his tone of voice immediately signaled that something was up. A few days later we met him at our favorite coffee shop where he explained that he simply had “no bandwidth,” as he put it, to respond to his board’s request for a new 3-5 year strategic plan reflecting current market conditions.

“I know my board members feel anxious about the market, we all do. But how can I confidently predict how things might change...

Why do we use assessment tools?

"The bottom line is that personality matters to individuals because self-understanding allows a person to be strategic about his/her career choices and career development. Personality matters to employers because knowledge about a job applicant's personality allows them to be strategic about the hiring process."
Dr. Robert Hogan

Assessments help your organization increase productivity and maximize performance by hiring the right people, evaluating leadership potential, and developing the talents of key individuals in the specific areas that really matter for success.

Assessments help individual leaders like you understand limitations and strengths and how understanding can bring strategic awareness to...

In today’s faster paced and technologically advanced world, organizations have become emergent, complex systems. If they ever seemed simple, none of us can think of them as static or simple these days. Things change. Fast. Organizations, and individuals within them, must respond. But how? Our old ideas about change no longer apply. In a fantasy future, a leader like Jean-Luc Picard (Captain, Starship Enterprise) could say, “Make it so!” and walk away. In our real future, things aren’t so easily accomplished in a single step.

We used to view organizational change management as a linear, predictable process to be managed...

In December 2011, cbsnews.com published an article by Dave Logan, Ph.D., author of Tribal Leadership, suggesting that “work-life balance “ is a crock, an idea whose time has come and gone. Although I too have felt that this is an unrealistic ideal, I’m not so sure that I could clearly articulate what I do believe about this idea. I decided to take a look at some other current commentators writing about work and life balance. Here’s a sample of what I found:

David Greuse at Convergence Design, noted that “…we reject the notion of work-life balance, although...

Our experience thus far has been that while self-organizing teams may enable the organization to operate from day to day without active management, a more integrated organization and more productive teams make the value-add of managers highly transparent and place a premium on specific leadership skills.

From Adam Light, Chris Vike and Diana Larsen. "Teamwork Required: Managing Agile Application Delivery in a Matrix Organization", Cutter Agile Product & Project Management Executive Update, Vol. 12, No. 19. October 2011.

For a free download of the article pdf, register at the Cutter site. You can also order reprints from Cutter to use...

When the rains came down and the flood waters rose in Nashville TN one month ago, it became clear the Agile Alliance would have to “respond to change” rather than “following the plan” for our annual Agile 2010 conference—with the conference scheduled to open in only 14 weeks.

While in Washington D.C. last month, for the first time I visited the U.S. Library of Congress. Guided by writer and experienced LoC researcher David Schmaltz, I received a temporary library card to research early management thought.

In the glorious reading room under its amazing dome, I held two precious books. One, an (out of print) copy of Mary Parker Follett’s Creative Experience is so old it didn’t have publication date or place data printed in it. However, a little diligent searching told me the edition I held was published in 1924. The book contains ideas offered...

For some time, I’ve been ruminating on how to answer folks who query, “How do I convince people that Agile is better?”