Partnership & Possibilities

As part of my commitment to my own professional development, a few months ago I attended a certification training program on effective practices in organizational change and leadership development. Although it required more time commitment than usual on my part, I found the experience well worth it. I would make the same decision again if […]

“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 […]

Team member: How will we know when we’ve found an impediment? What do they look like?
Sponsor: How can I know what impediments block our teams’ productivity?
Scrum Master: How can I get the team to mention impediments in our daily meeting and retrospectives?
Product Owner: Why is everyone whining about impediments? Why don’t we just get […]

In a article at the Six Sigma IQPC site, Christian Loyer offers a new twist on the old fishbone diagram root cause analysis approach.
He describes the usual application of a fishbone diagram for digging in to solve a problem. In addition to Ishikawa’s Ms for manufacturing fishbones that Christian mentions, I’ve also used Ps […]

Martin Jul writes about a retrospective activity in the post “Retrospectives - Adapting to Reality.” He describes an interesting process for highlighting issues in the Generating Insights part of a retrospective session.
In this activity we mark out three sections on a whiteboard:
“DO” is where we put the things we should do or keep doing. […]

Today I invented a phrase (at least I think I invented it because I haven’t heard anyone else say it): “Avoidable Heroism.”
I invented it in response to a question, “Should my team work on the weekend to meet a commitment made under their control?”
Now, I don’t know the background behind this question. Maybe it’s […]

In Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great! Esther Derby and I include a collection of activities we called, “Short Subjects.” (page 122)
After Gathering Data, these useful activities provide relatively quick ways to review event, effort, and response data; reflect on the implications of the data; and Generate Insights about team experiences.

We listed these […]

I’ve been fortunate to have experienced many great team building moments, activities and events on several great teams. One of the best, involved feeding each other.
In Fearless Change, Mary Lynn Manns and Linda Rising counsel that a pattern called “Do Food” “makes an ordinary gathering a special event” and reference Christopher Alexander’s pattern “Communal […]

High Performance
supports and reinforces
Creativity/Innovation
supports and reinforces
Constructive Conflict
supports and reinforces
Commitment
supports and reinforces
Trust
Derek Neighbor’s post about Patrick Leoncioni’s team dysfunctions model prompted me to share a model I developed many years ago for work with self-directing teams. Esther Derby and I use the model as part of our “Secrets of Agile Teamwork: Beyond Technical Skills” […]