James King

I was talking to a friend of mine who is also coaching people at the moment. His team are currently distributed and working from home, due to the current pandemic. We talked about how both the pandemic and the need to work with people you are not in physical contact with creates has an ongoing…

I wrote an article a while ago, suggesting that it is a good idea to invest in the growth of our crew. I promised at the time that I would also explain the concept of a “skills backlog”. Now, several months later, I thought I would write the promised article. The approach is quite simple:…

Editor’s warning – a long article with personal comments and opinions. Probably 10 minutes to read. My daughter Kiran recently published an article on the growth mindset. After she published her article, I spent some time thinking about the topic in a little more depth. I decided that would be much easier to teach a…

I was speaking to my daughter about a growth mindset recently and she agreed to post a summary of what it is. As my daughter Kiran explained, it is pretty obvious that a growth mindset is good, because it involves perseverance, confidence and other important traits. It is equally obvious that a fixed mindset is…

This is an article about what a growth mindset is and what a fixed mindset is. This article is actually by Kiran who is James’s daughter. She is 8 years old and has actually taught a class for agile coaches when she was in year 1. (That was me Kiran writing that too if you…

My 8 year old and I now share an “office” My daughter and I are both “working from home” now, so I thought that I would compare our approaches and the experience we are having at the moment. My daughter is at school (grade 3) and I am an experienced worker who had worked at…

I am known for my simple, “dodgy, ” approaches to workshops and problem solving. So it may not surprise you that I have prepared some dodgy analysis in the following graph. Analysis of the value of solving the problem This graph shows how you can prioritise the time and energy of your team. Some activities…

I have been considering double loop learning and I said that we should continually work on our skills in order to even keep moving at the same pace or, hopefully, grow better each year. People agree that it is important to invest in themselves and their crew, yet they seem to struggle to find the…

By introducing effective feedback loops rather than long slow pieces of work, teams learn faster and thus have the opportunity to substantially improve the value of the product that they create or the service that they provide. But this is only half of the advantage of implementing effective feedback loops. If you believe that team…

I sometimes talk about people as resources, even though I am told not to. Apparently people should be called “talent” or even “people,” but I have an old mindset and I still think of them as people who should also be useful if they are in this team. I also still think about questions like:…