agile-7

Writing

I write about teams, change and complexity. The newest pieces come from leading engineering teams today, and the 2020 posts come from my years as a coach, where many of these ideas started.

  1. Trust has neighbors

    Teams copy what works nearby, even habits nobody remembers choosing. A grid of players shows how trust spreads, one neighbor at a time.

  2. Chance of done

    A weather forecast for your backlog, with no estimates and no story points. The 50% date is a coin toss. Plan on the 85% date.

  3. The AI productivity trap

    AI agents can produce more code than ever, but are customers getting value any faster? And how are the people doing the work holding up?

  4. Stop starting, start finishing

    Two teams, same people, same work. Watch what happens when a team is working on everything and finishing very little.

  5. What shape is your team in?

    Human Systems Dynamics' CDE model explains why a team's problems keep coming back, and three questions in a free tool show which of seven shapes your team is in.

  6. Too certain to grow

    In 2018 my work was close to certainty and close to agreement, and I was stagnating. The Landscape Diagram helped me see why, and it guided a leap to China with my family that turned out to be one of the best decisions I've made.

  7. Every bug teaches the system

    When AI writes most of the code, my senior engineers do their best work by turning each problem they catch into a skill, a hook or a check, so the system catches it every time after.

  8. The bottleneck moved

    When AI made writing code cheap, the bottleneck moved to review. The Theory of Constraints has something to say about what happens next.

  9. Beginning and Ending with Gratitude, Part 2

    I expected Glenda Eoyang’s “Poems” exercise to fall flat over Zoom without sticky notes in a room, and the energy in the session proved me wrong.

  10. The Power of Inquiry

    This exercise from Human Systems Dynamics helps you get unstuck: describe a sticky issue in three sentences, then listen to the questions without answering them.

  11. Pattern Spotting Super Powers

    When a team of managers couldn’t get along, one question in a workshop showed what was really dividing them.

  12. Beginning and Ending with Gratitude

    Thanking five people a day felt awkward at first, but it became an energy store for me and led to a meeting warm-up you can try with your own team.

Writing elsewhere