Watch the video on our LinkedIn page. Hello Stephen Bungay. How nice to have you in the Leading Complexity program. For those who don’t know you, who are you? When I started my business career in the early 1990s at the Boston Consulting Group, I spent close to 20 years there. End then I left
Continue readingCrisp's Blog
from the Crisp Consultants
Interview with Henrik Kniberg about Leading Complexity
View the video at our LinkedIn post. Hello Henrik Kniberg. It’s very nice to have you in the Leading complexity program. For those that don’t know you, how would you introduce yourself? I’m a Swedish dude who is a coach and a software developer. I have worked at Spotify, Lego, and Mojang. I had a
Continue reading
This might just be the highest leverage Product Discovery activity that your team can do
“Where do we start?” is a recurring question that Martin Christensen and I receive when we run Product Discovery training. A fundamental challenge with Product Discovery is that there is no right way, no silver bullet, and no perfect process, which means that teams need to pick the right tool for the right situation. But
Continue reading
Interview with Dave Snowden about Leading Complexity
Watch the video (5 min) in our LinkedIn post.
– Hi Dave. Good to see you again. For those who don´t know you. Just briefly, who are you?
– Dave Snowden. I run the Cynefin center. And that focus on the application of Natural Science to social systems.
– So why should leaders care about complexity?
– Complexity just is. So complex adaptive systems are an integral part of the world, and they deal with systems where you can’t plan specific goals. It is what we sometimes call the unknowable, unknowables. So basically, a complex system is deeply entangled, it’s highly uncertain, it’s the reality of the world we live in, and then we have to learn to manage in it. But most of our management tools were not designed for it.
Interview with Mary Poppendieck about Leading Complexity
Watch the video in our LinkedIn post. For those who don’t know you, can you quickly introduce yourselves? Tom and I are authors of four books on software development and managing software development, bringing lean concepts into the whole process of managing software development. Before that, we had many many decades of experience actually writing
Continue reading
Interview with Bjarte Bogsnes about leading complexity
Watch the video in our LinkedIn post. Hello Bjarte. We are so happy to have you in our Leading Complexity program. For those who have not met you, can you tell us about who you are and your background? I’m a finance guy by education but have also worked in human resources. I work with
Continue reading
Interview with Johanna Rothman about leading complexity
See the video in our LinkedIn post. Welcome to the Leading Complexity program, Johanna. Please let the audience better know who you are. People know me as the pragmatic manager because that’s the name of my monthly newsletter and it’s also what I do. I really believe that management has a role to play –
Continue reading
Agile Contracting in Banking using Lean/Agile procurement
In this case story, Rivo shares how Lean/Agile procurement was used to procure a complex solution in banking, in the matter of weeks not years. psst: Interesting to learn how to put it to use? Join our class in May.
Continue reading
Slides: A story of getting better on Alignment
I recently was asked to do a presentation of how companies approach alignment in Agile settings. Where most companies normally put considerable effort putting some alignment framework in place, the really good ones improve this iteratively, matching the process, removing bureaucracy – so it matches the competence level over time. In this presentation I share
Continue reading
Agile Islands 2021 – Slides
Agile Islands had several interesting sessions this year again. For you who haven’t seen this conference, please do! This poses a (positive) challenge to me as speaker, “how the heck do I make my session interesting enough so people stay!” This year I was asked to do an introduction to Agile for people outside IT
Continue reading
Why Professional Coaching matters to an Agile Coach
Professional coaching is one of the four stances of an Agile Coach, and the reason for the word “Coach” in Agile Coach. But yet we see so many misconceptions of what professional coaching is and when to use it. I was recently involved in a couple of discussions about this on LinkedIn, and was surprised that apparently many Agile Coaches still don’t really know what professional coaching is. Here’s why it matters to an Agile Coach.
Continue reading
Advantages of Trunk-only Development
What’s the alternative to complex branching and pull requests? Trunk-only development drives practices such as testing, incremental development, and branching by abstraction. It also improves communication within the team.
Continue reading
The Navigator just updated – adding Pocathon Big Room event
If you are working with partners to develop innovative solutions, you should take a serious look at Agile contracts. Agile contracts enable you to work Effect driven (over ticking off requirements) using collaboration, and incremental release to reduce risk. There are now good solid case studies that demonstrate how this shortens time to value in
Continue reading
Minimize the gap between Maker and User – slides from my London 2019 keynote
In 2019 I did a keynote at Mind the Product conference in London. I shared some key insights afters years of working with Spotify, LEGO, and Minecraft development. Spoiler alert: the most important insight is in the title of this post. Video recording Slides
Continue reading
The Three Stages of a Maturing Developer
Developers follow a relatively predictable development curve in their early careers. While there will be individual differences, pretty much every developer must pass through the following three stages: The Meta programming stage, the Design pattern stage, and the Functional composition stage. If left unchecked, the code produced during each of these stages may sometimes be quite harmful to a codebase. However, it represents an increase in the developer’s understanding of programming and should be harnessed and explained by more senior peers who know where that particular avenue leads.
Continue reading
Individuals and interactions or processes and tools?
Individuals and interactions or processes and tools?
As the developer cheerfully runs over to work with Sue in the deployment team, with an extra cup of coffee, he is stopped by Charlie, the manager of the deployment team.
-Hey, where are you going?
-To see Sue about the deployment, the developer answered.
-Have you written a ticket?
-What? No, I’m gonna talk to Sue and we’ll do the deployment together as usual.
-Sorry, Charlie said, we have implemented a ticketing system last week, and you need a ticket. We can’t have developers running all over the place disturbing our team all the time!
True story.
Continue reading
The Silver Bullet of Agile Software Development
What should a struggling software development team do in a world of seemingly infinite improvement options?
Continue reading
Introducing: The Agile Leadership Practice Library
Have you ever wrestled with these questions in a leadership scenario?
“How can I get the company to be more proactive and self organized without me being around all the time?”
“I’m a practical guy, I get most theories, but what do I do with them?”
“What is a good start when we are talking about building an Agile organization?”
If so, then this is for you.
Today the Agile Leadership Practice Library is launched
Continue reading
How to Achieve Zero or Negative Productivity
Do you feel like your organization’s development process delivers too little at too slow a pace? Your gut feeling is probably correct. In this post, I’ll describe three paradigms that result in near zero or even negative productivity.
Continue reading
How to Assess a System’s Quality in Two Hours
You can get a fair feeling for any software system’s quality by putting in just two hours. Here’s how.
Continue reading Video: Improve your decision making under uncertainty, using four simple techniques
4 simple techniques to improve decision making, in time of uncertainty
Continue reading
Team Success Metrics
Are we successful as a Team? Can we measure that? We look at 10+ areas of team success and how to measure them. Get inspired to choose the metric you need, right now, on your path to high-performing!
Continue reading
Shape the future – share an act of leadership!
What does it take to lead in an Agile environment? You have probably seen inspiring acts of leadership that made a difference. We’d like to hear about it! Today we launch activeagileleadership.com. A platform for leadership insights and practices in Agile environments. Want to know more? Let’s start with Mindset. Leading in an Agile environment
Continue reading
How to create useful documentation – only write the table of content
This article is a follow-up to my post on lean documentation that I published some time ago. In summary, lean documentation is characterized by being easy to consume and simple to keep updated. The purpose of lean documentation is to help you, as the reader, find answers to your questions, not to hold the detailed answers
Continue reading The paradox of masterly management leadership style
To understand this article, first read Managing in Mayberry by Don Gray & Dan Starr: https://www.donaldegray.com/managing-in-mayberry-an-examination-of-three-distinct-leadership-styles/ In short, it is about three different styles of leadership, depending on their view of the problem. The situation is that, in heavy traffic, left-turners may cause a queue of cars that leads to a dangerous situation. Officer Barney’s micromanaging leadership
Continue reading
The Lead-Squad Protocol
How to successfully drive initiatives, objectives or opportunities that require several squads (or teams) to succeed? How to do this in a way that respects the agile mindset without falling into the command-and-control trap? Today, this problem is more complex than it seems. We’ve designed and built our squads for self-organization and autonomy in the
Continue reading
Slides from Agile Islands 2020 – “Agile outside IT”
Agile outside IT – presentation at Agile Islands 2020
Continue reading
Integrating Discovery & Delivery – Patterns that work
This is the second article in my series on integrating discovery and delivery. In the first article I outlined some common challenges I have seen holding organizations back from benefiting fully from both.
In this article I will introduce some patterns that will help you integrate product discovery and product delivery in a way that works. These patterns have all been field tested in practice.
Continue reading
Integrating Discovery & Delivery – Common Challenges
Most organizations that I meet in my work are struggling to integrate product discovery and agile delivery in a simple practical way that works.
I will illustrate what I mean by giving you examples of a couple of very common issues.
Continue reading
Driving Change in a VUCA world
If the acronym VUCA hasn’t made sense so far, then in these pandemic Covid-19 times it surely must. The acronym stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. So when people refer to a VUCA world, they refer to a world where you cannot possibly foresee everything ahead of time (if anything, really). This is true to the whole world – the planet Earth, but also to the world, or context if you like, in which you and your organization operate.
Continue reading