As 2020 continues to evolve and bubble – like red-hot lava destroying existing platforms and building new ones. Humanity’s place in “navigating NEXT” is becoming clearer: people and business need to move from suboptimization in one area – whether that is work at the team organization, societal and even governmental levels – to focusing instead on addressing structural issues. The global pandemic has revealed the broken infrastructure that pits business goals against human goals. But a shift is happening. Accenture recently released new research on how migrating to the cloud isn’t just good fo ..read more

The 2020 Business Agility Report was just released publicly yesterday (September 17, 2020) and for the third straight year, the annual report reveals where organizations are in their journey to becoming more Agile businesses. The 2020 Business Agility Report examines data from 359 organizations, spanning 28 industries and 53 countries. What is of particular interest for us is that this year’s survey responses were collected in the time period preceding and through the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, giving us a unique view into the impact of a global disruption while it was happenin ..read more

This article was co-authored by Jim Tremlett, Delisa Brownley, and Ryan Keawekane. Agility, once the domain of product development organizations and IT, has moved out of this realm and into business overall as companies face an ever more uncertain world. The same rules of customer focus, small teams, and flexible organizations are being adopted by whole enterprises and driving toward a future with greater resilience, flexible systems, and more human-centricity including a focus on the customer. This trend is reflected in the proliferation of business agility services, well established entities ..read more

All designs by Kit Friend, except for Henrik Kniberg’s skateboard image and others where stated (sources provided below). Henrik Kniberg’s much loved skateboard-into-car visual analogy is hugely popular, and in the various forums he’s presented it in comes with all the fantastic explanation and narrative you’d expect from the prolific agile coach (“Making sense of MVP”), all of which deserve a thorough reading. The ‘glanceability’ of the drawing is such that it’s spawned hundreds, if not thousands, of derivations. A Google image search immediately serves up quite a few (the Ustwo gif is parti ..read more

A working agreement is a common set of expectations that a team creates to capture how they will work together and engage with each other. For many collocated teams, this is a valuable asset. However, the team working agreement becomes even more critical when team members are working remotely. Depending on the team or phase of work, working agreements can vary and should be modified to account for changes in the type of work or work environment. It should also be reviewed regularly and updated based on learning. What is a Working Agreement? A working agreement is a living document that capture ..read more

Virtual work has recently received a lot of attention for obvious reasons, but the truth is remote work has been hot the last few years. Check out this quote from HBR: “Despite a few high-profile retreats from remote work policies in recent years, data on the U.S. workforce suggests that remote work is increasing. A 2017 Gallup poll reported that 43% of employed Americans had spent at least some time working remotely, and U.S. Census data released in 2018 reported 5.2% of U.S. workers being based entirely at home.” – Harvard Business Review, Aug 2019 Remote work is trending higher and benefits ..read more

This article was co-authored by Skip Angel and Janel Lanza. As constant change and markets push companies to adapt and deliver at an ever-increasing pace, agile remains at the heart of strategic conversations. It’s a testament to the customer-centric, engaging and ever-innovating agile environment so many companies have created in their tech areas. What’s changing (for the better!) is the need for agile environments throughout an entire company, not just in tech. As representatives from all parts of the organization join the agile strategy table, it’s time to define what we mean by an “agile ..read more

When you mention metrics-driven coaching to an agile coach, you will often get an initial reaction that “Metrics are evil.” Often, a valid reason underlies this reaction. Many of these coaches have had experiences where metrics were used to evaluate, manipulate and control individuals and teams, rather than for self-managed growth and improvement programs. Between “metrics are evil” and a reliance on anecdotal coaching lies a pragmatic and effective value proposition for metrics-driven coaching – an organization undertaking continuous performance improvement in a deliberate and demonstrable, y ..read more

In 2014 Frederick Kniburg posted an article describing how a small music player company in Sweden organized some of their development teams. It’s a nice article describing how Spotify was organizing at the time. The names Spotify came up with for the various dimensions of the organizational structure are cute – “Tribes,” “Guilds,” “Chapters.” Somehow, however, this interesting anecdote became a rigid prescription that many large corporate IT organizations thoughtlessly copy, often (mis)guided by one of several large consultancies who flog the Spotify model as a key component of their clients ..read more

A recent white paper “What Moves You” by the Business Agility Institute revealed that as business agility continues to flourish, so will the focus on employee engagement. Organizations are now looking past team lunches and formal recognition programs to meaningful, forward-looking incentives. While many companies are revamping their formal programs, leaders have an opportunity to make a big, local impact on engagement. One of the most intriguing and effective activities you can do with your teams to support their growth is to explore adjacent disciplines. From the nostalgic Karate Kid movie to ..read more