How do you respond when someone makes a mistake? Hopefully, you don’t do what the English Premier League has been doing this season to its referees who make “human errors”: Publicly humiliate them and suspend them from work. One longtime referee actually left the English refereeing organization “by mutual consent.” The message is clear: Mess up, and you’re fired. That should instill confidence among the remaining employees.  In other news, the beatings will continue until morale improves. How we respond to mistakes hugely impacts psychological safety and motivation. The disturbing part in ..read more

The quintessential American sports tradition that is March Madness concludes this weekend, and with it a chance to observe team dynamics that, although enjoyed in the context of college basketball, are often applicable to work environments. Yes, I’m talking about kanban on the court. In particular, some basketball teams have a unique use of a kanban, one that you may not expect or even notice if you’re not paying attention during substitutions. Can you spot the kanban? To substitute, a player will check in at the scorer’s table, then await the next whistle, at which time he is allowed to enter ..read more

Understanding first-hand what motivates people Do you know what motivates people? Why would they choose to stay or leave? If you care about the people you support and want them to stay (and moreover, thrive), it’s pretty easy to find out how to help: Conduct a Stay Interview. If you know what an exit interview is, you know how to do a stay interview. Simply move the timing up. It’s like the pattern of moving from a project post-mortem to a regular retrospective; by bringing the learning forward, you have a chance to do something about it. My own lessons from stay interviews I’m learning a few ..read more

It’s that time of year again when many of us in the northern hemisphere look at the weather forecast in anticipation of that lovely winter precipitation to see whether we’ll have a white Christmas. And that leads me to my annual reminder about forecasting events in the future: Always forecast with a range! Anyone with a weather app is familiar with the concept: Since the future is probabilistic and not deterministic, we should think of our work forecasts in the same way — always give a range of possibilities, each with its own probability of occurring: Like the weather, we need to account fo ..read more

I read Mik Kersten’s helpful book Project to Product shortly after he published it, and I didn’t comment on it at the time. However, a colleague recently asked about The Flow Framework contained therein, so I am now sharing some thoughts on it. In general, anytime someone promotes the principles of flow management and thinking — especially when he or she is well received for it — I am grateful. That’s largely the case with Kersten’s book. Insofar as it has increased awareness and even the practice of flow management, I commend it. In the interest of giving credit where it’s due, I offer just a ..read more

[Editor’s note: I was surprised to realize that I had never written my own list of kanban myths, probably because so many other good ones exist. But here’s my take.] Like the one about George Washington, myths about kanban persist long after evidence to the contrary. Before I list some of them, I’ll start with a few connotations of kanban, since I think that most of the myths stem from a misunderstanding of kanban. Of course, I’ll happily work to understand your own connotation of kanban. As for me, when I talk about kanban, while I respect all of the following connotations, I really consider ..read more

The traditional “iron triangle” of project management often crowds out our thinking about what we should really be focusing on in product delivery. Although things like scope (count of functionalities, features), cost and time seem easiest to measure — and therefore become the things we measure and elevate — they really have little to do with product success. Rather, customer concerns like return on investment, fitness for purpose and sentiment are more important things to measure if we are interested in building great products — and they’re actually not as difficult to measure as we might hav ..read more

The 8 Stances of 
a Transformational Leader from Matthew Philip Inspired by Barry Overeem’s 8 Stances of a Scrum Master, I have been talking about (and will again at the upcoming Agile Kanban Istanbul and UnlimitedAgility conferences) the eight stances of a transformational leader. I’ll be publishing my own white paper with a fuller explanation, but for now here’s a snapshot. First, I use the term stance in the sense of “a mental or emotional position adopted with respect to something.” So it’s not a title or a role, but a way of being in a particular context. By transformational leader, I m ..read more

Following is the infographic that Yoan Thirion and I presented at the recent XP2021 Conference in the poster track. Also, you can read the accompanying white paper, which will be published in the conference proceedings ..read more