OK here’s an offer to any conference organizer in the lean/agile/tech/climate space. I get a lot of requests to do conference keynotes, which I’m grateful for, but unfortunately I have to turn down the vast majority. I limit long-distance travel for family reasons, and also for climate reasons (although I confess I’m in Thailand right now as I write this…. hard to be 100% consistent…).

Now I’m thinking: Why should something as mundane as physical transport get in the way of participating in a great conference? And, in this world of catastrophic climate change, shouldn’t most business trips be replaced with remote participation?

My hypothesis is that it’s possible to remote-participate effectively in a conference –  to do a keynote or talk, participate in workshops, even hang out with people in the hallway. I’ve tried this a few times using video conference and telepresence robots. In fact, 4 years ago I was sitting on this same beach in Thailand, remote-participating in a Spotify event in Stockholm using a Double (see “What it feels like being an ipad on a stick on wheels“). That was fun and a bit clunky, but it was 4 years ago so I bet the telepresence robots have come a long way since then!

So here’s my offer:Continue reading

As the devastating consequences of climate change become increasingly obvious (flooding, fires, storms, drought, melting icecaps, rising sea levels, etc), the question on most people’s mind is “what can I actually, really do about it?”. Well, listen up. The most obvious minimum first step is to eliminate your own personal carbon footprint, and become climate

Here are the slides from my keynote “Agile – where are we at?” at Agile Tour Bangkok i November. Here’s the abstract:

Everyone is talking about Agile. I stumbled into this 15 years ago and have been living and breathing Agile since then, seeing it grow from a small movement within software, into an industry-wide revolution and then gradually become mainstream. More and more companies around the world, even big traditional companies, are turning themselves inside out trying to be Agile. Now it’s time to take a step back and reflect. What is going on? What is this all about? And where is it headed?

The CO2 emissions from this trip were offset using Trine and GoClimateNeutral.

Sample slides:

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Not every company starts from a green field. Many carry legacy. So how do you kickstart Agile and get traction in an organisation with scale?  We can learn lessons from SimCorp,  a successful provider for asset management solutions, who runs 500 developers across 4 sites and went from 0 to 8 release trains in 14 months.  Here’s

In modern software development there are three development practices that everyone should strive to apply:

• Automated testing
• Pair or mob programming
• TDD, test driven development

After many years of using and researching these practices in the development community there is no longer any question whether these engineering practices bring value or not – they do. It’s not a matter of opinion, it’s a matter of fact. We know that now.

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Last time I wrote a book (Visualization Examples) I decided to do it publicly online. That was a fantastic experience, which I also wrote a blog post about. It was great fun and I got tons of valuable feedback.

Now I’ve started to write a new book and I’ve decided to have the same approach. It’s currently titled “Toolbox for the workshop facilitator – Facilitaion Tricks and Techniques (How to reach strong workshop outcome)“.

The book is far from finished and it might take me another year to finish it. But I still want to invite you to read it now and to help me make the book even better.

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November in Sweden: Blä! The sky is impossibly low and grey, it’s pitch dark at 4 pm, freezing, and then everyone gets cold. Especially men: they get man-cold. There are also situations when your Kanban gets a man-cold (though it doesn’t need to be November for that): it’s not really dying, but it feels like

– Having rules for communication is stupid!
– What was your intention with calling the rules stupid?
– Well, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything negative towards you, of course. I just don’t find such rules necessary at all. We have been communicating with each other since we were small.
– Okay, I understand what you are saying. But, hear me out…

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Just got back from Athens and Devops Greece where I talked about “Using Kanban in the field, and how we got management buy in to do so” Two key takaways are: Shift leadership behaviours, in order to shift your culture. The good news is: You can all exericise them, they are not personality traits. The invisible

In Sweden, we love to ‘fika’. Fika requires you to take time to sit down and sip coffee (usually strong and black) with your colleagues to chitchat about this and that. Visiting different organizations, I tend to fika a lot and hear all these stories about how things are going. Today, I’ll like to share

I have the pleasure to be invited back to I’ve hosted a workshop about “how to train to Kanban” at the Lean Kanban France 2017.  The session was specially designed for you who is about to start training one or several teams, or who want to become better at training Kanban. It builds on the “Kanban

In this series of blogs, I am writing of my experience of practical applications of Sociocracy 3.0 (S3) patterns in teams and organizations. In the first blog, I wrote about My journey of finding and applying Sociocracy 3.0 (S3). There are many cool patterns in S3 that I have been using with great success as an Agile organizational coach so far. In this article I will cover the pattern of Consent Decision Making:

In contrast to consensus which focuses on reaching an agreement, consent focuses on intentionally checking for reasons not to do something a certain way. An objection is an argument that reveals why doing (or continuing to do) something, impedes or misses an opportunity to improve flowing value somewhere in the organization. Reaching consensus is often very time consuming and has the risk that one single person can block the whole process when unanimity is sought. Continue reading

So your organisation is going ”agile” and talking about ”collaborations” between teams? You, as the big boss, are starting to feel powerless and not in control of the efficiency of YOUR teams? Let me give some tips on how to turn that around so all progress can be traced back to you. I mean, as their mighty leader, you do deserve all the credit for their work.

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Here are my slides from today’s talk “Scaling Agile @ LEGO and Spotify” at EA träff in Stockholm (EA = enterprise architecture). Fun to hang out with enterprise architects and learn what that’s all about 🙂

Some sample slides from my talk:

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How do you leapfrog a successful waterfall company into Scaled Agile? How do you transition into Agile when you have legacy? When your company is already successful in what it does and when it carries legacy, transitioning into Agile is a more complex challenge than starting off Agile in a green field environment. After all,

The Future of Work is already here, it is just only unevenly distributed.

There is a crisis in the world of work. The pace of change in our environment is faster than the internal change in most organizations. Many organizations are struggling to keep up and are risking becoming obsolete. Gallup’s report on engagement crisis with only 32% of US workforce and 13% of the worldwide workforce engaged. Companies in the S&P 500 Index in 1958 stayed in the index an average of 61 years but has fallen to 18 years in 2012. Why is this?

When it comes to our work-life most of our organizations are still designed based on principles from the industrial age. Separation of thinking, planning, and management from the work. Organizations are designed to be top-down hierarchical and inside out rather than outside-in, customer-centric, and decentralized. There is mechanistic view rather than an organic, natural and Agile view of organizations.

This new complex world will put completely new demands on leadership, organizing and just everyday living. We are living in truly exciting times. How can we create organizations that are fit for the future and more human? How can we re-invent organizations so that we will free up people’s potential for doing good? Many of these organizations are also based on triple bottom line principle: “Profit, People, and Planet”. This is my passion and I am super excited about it right now. Continue reading

In the talk I gave at Agila Sverige in June, I brought up misconceptions about UX I’ve encountered during my years in the IT business. One of these is that it’s only the UX people (and possibly the PO) who need to meet the users. In this post I’ll discuss why this not true, but also how meeting the users can make a real difference in focus and motivation for the team.

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As I write this I’m sitting on a train headed back to Sweden, pondering the result of a year’s experimentation with travelling by train instead of flying. Is this an effective way to reduce my carbon footprint? The jury is in! Read on. One common rallying cry among climate advocates is to fly less (or

Here are the slides for my talk “Agile, where are we at?” from USI conference in Paris (USI = “unexpected sources of inspiration”) in June. One of the coolest conferences I’ve ever attended!

My talk was an attempt to take a step back and look at the big picture, and also speculate about the future of agile. I was also interviewed a couple of times, and the talk was also recorded. Here are links:

• Interview “Agile is about taming complexity”
• Interview “Etre agile, c’est savoir dompter la complexité“
• Interview “L’évolution de la culture agile en entreprise“
• Video recording of the talk

2 of my kids tagged along on the trip, we took the train to make it extra adventurous (and also to mind the climate). It’s a long way (24 hours each way), but we made good use of the time!

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Here are some common misconceptions about TDD. I call them “myths” here, for short.

If this feels like talking to the dentists about your teeth, you are not alone. When I talk about tests sometimes people gets embarrassed about their habits, “I know you’re right but …”.

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In June I gave a talk at a conference about things that I, as a UX professional, find obvious that I have noticed that others don’t. After giving the talk, I decided to also put it down in writing as a series of blog posts. This is part 2 of that series and talks about that even if you hire usability experts, they still need to meet the users.

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I did a talk at the local conference Agila Sverige in June about things that I, as a UX professional, find obvious about UX, but that I have discovered that other professions might not. I actually felt really nervous giving the talk, because I feared that I had been mistaken and the things actually were obvious to everyone. I needn’t have worried…

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The Ship

For years I was hearing an increasing murmur and rumours about some kind of problem with the ship. Finally I decided to take a closer look, went up to deck, leaned out and looked down, and…. oh sh*t…. this ship is sinking! It’s tilting, some cabins are already flooded, with people frantically crowding the hallways and staircases trying to get to higher deck. It’s happening slowly, very slowly. In fact, the ship won’t be completely sunk during my lifetime probably. But my kids, and grandkids…. Darn!

So what’s going on here? I start roaming around, talking to people.Continue reading

Adapting to accelerating change

In a world where the speed of change seems to accelerate almost exponentially, it is only natural that an organization’s way of working must be constantly challenged and improved – especially in the highly competitive media business.

This text, which was inspired by winning an award (we will return to that), is the outcome of a joint effort between Michael Göthe, Agile Coach at Crisp, and Jens Abrahamsson, Agile Coach at Telia Company’s TV & Media Backend department. In it, we describe parts of the always-ongoing journey towards a more lean and agile way of working at the Telia TV team.

As always when looking back at a complex change process it is not possible to copy what we did but our intention is to share useful learnings, practices, and tools that can inspire you on your change journey, in your context.

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Codekvast is a tool for detecting Truly Dead Code in your Java application. Truly Dead Code is code that is in production, but has not been used for a significant time. Codekvast has been lurking in the spare-time realm for too long. Now the project has eventually been granted some full-time development effort, with the initial

I’ve spent ALOT of time the past few months trying to understand climate change and global warming, and how to effectively contribute. I’ve dug through 1000-page scientific reports, talked to experts, and basically tried to digest as much information as possible. I was surprised by how little I knew before. I’m convinced that, the more people who really understand the problem, the more effectively we’ll be able to solve it (or at least mitigate it).

So here’s a short animated video summarizing the whole issue. The problem, the consequence, the root cause, the solutions, and what you can do to help. All packaged in a fun and easy-to-digest way, same style as my other videos about Spotify Engineering Culture and Agile Product Ownership. The video is all based on solid scientific references, not speculation or rumours.

Please help spread it as widely as possible! Link to this blog post, or the youtube link: https://youtu.be/3CM_KkDuzGQ

I hope this video will inspire many people to make small changes, and a few people to make big changes. Who knows, maybe the next young Elon Musk is out there somewhere, just waiting for the spark of inspiration 🙂

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Large group retrospectives are long, large, unwieldy facilitations. So much so that they’re typically done only at the end of a project. Holding a 1-2 day retro every few weeks for a large project is neither practical nor responsible, but continually improving the project is also important.  So, how do you hold light-weight retrospectives for large groups, while making sure that you:

• Have a common understanding
• Identify issues and strengths
• Reach a group agreement on action points
• Ensure that the group feels that they received a high return on time invested

This retrospective combines different techniques and technologies to achieve these results.Continue reading

This is a strong retrospective for bringing issues up to the surface. Instead of just one person expressing an issue as a positive or a negative, the whole team feedbacks about the importance of the issue. The team then decides which issues to tackle. The retrospective also exposes issues where there is not common view, and highlights areas of alignment. It also allows the team to ask tough questions in a safe environment.Continue reading

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