Smiley Face Coin Game to Learn Team work, Limiting Work in Process and Learning via Scrum

The text outlines a Scrum teaching game that involves physical contributions, choices, constraints, and roles to simulate real-world team dynamics. The game employs coin flips to dictate when tasks can move forward, demonstrating the foundations and limitations of Scrum. The experience proves more impactful in understanding roles and team operations than mere theory explanation. Set-up requires certain materials, space, and team roles. The game offers variants for different scenarios such as matrix organizations or multiple teams, and ends with feedback and discussions on learned lessons.

Complexity Simplified: Stop Dressing Your Hippo up as an Elephant

Want to simplify your complexity, come see how embracing complexity allows you to see the world from a new perspective.
Complexity means that 2+3 ≠ 5
Hippos sometimes get dressed up like an elephants
And seeing complexity as a noun or an adjective will change how you see it.

Gardening Your Transformational Flowers

In Agile transformation, admiration for success often overshadows the complexities involved, akin to appreciating a flower’s beauty without understanding its growth. Agile transformation, like gardening, comprises four interlinked components: analyzing the environment, cultivating the right soil, nurturing the collective mindset, and allowing teams to bloom. While many focus on visible Agile practices, the soil (leadership mindset and organizational design) and environment (market conditions and culture) are often overlooked. Successful transformation requires nurturing these socio-technical aspects, not just the visible “flowers.” Leadership plays a pivotal role in creating the right conditions for Agile to flourish, fostering adaptability, and empowering teams.

Scaling Delivery Agility versus Business Agility

Scaling Agile is an appealing call to get economies of scale and delivering value faster. But scaling can be done in a multitude of ways for your organizational context. Come look at four ways of scaling and see what makes the most sense for you.

Prioritization is not your priority

The assumption that prioritization leads to getting more work done is a fallacy. Prioritizing work actually creates the opposite effect, as too many things MUST be done at once. This makes moving and responding with agility impossible. Management teams could focus on reducing the number of things in parallel and setting up a flow of value before prioritizing. This can be achieved by having teams pull work into their pipeline, and visualizing their capability pipeline as a system. Once the system has been studied and understood, managers can work backwards to prioritize tasks.

Agile Fish and Wise Turtles in the Ecosystem of Work

Imagine a wise turtle coming across a school of fish going through an Agile Transformation. The wise turtle has one important question to ask the fish that will help them realize that the agile transformation is not helping them. How is the water today? The answer from the fish will surprise you unless you are using system thinking.

The Scrum Team, the Manager and the Wardrobe

Scrum is like the wardrobe in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” as a vehicle to discover and deliver products/solutions to customers. The potential of Scrum is limited by how it is goverened for complexity through Cynefin and leadership action logic. This post outlines how the wardrobe can relate to complexity in the liminal zone, but only with a context appropriate leadership style.

Leadership Style is a Glass Ceiling on Your Business Agility

An overview of how Action Logic leadership styles can affect a Lean-Agile approach. Each leadership type has an appropriate setting, but they will become the glass ceiling of a team’s potential if they are not ready to adapt to the new business context. y the end of this post, you will see the potential when a Catalyst Leadership approach is taken to teams working in Lean and Agile.