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Be wary of starting a tariff war with Penguins
I heard that the US is imposing tariffs on penguins. Those birds may seem like easy prey, but based on Australian history, you should be careful about starting a war with birds. This is the news of the impending and dangerous start to the Penguin Trade War While humans might feel confident before the war…
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Breaking our critical resource by design
When I spoke to some engineers once, they talked about stress testing things beyond their breaking point. The mantra was “keep increasing things until it breaks, so you know when that will be – then work out how to predict and mitigate trouble before it occurs”. But doing so assumes you can replace, repair and…
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Invisible value
Sometimes the most important work is the work not done Sometimes the most important thing to listen for is the words that were not spoken Sometimes the most important help is space and not action Of course, sometimes the opposite is true :)
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Do backlogs still work?
It’s actually been a long time since I have used a physical story wall or a physical story map that the team keeps referring back to. These days I work with people across multiple locations and we all spend some of our days working from home. So I guess a physical wall with cards on…
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That doesn’t seem quite right
This is a picture of a giant spider with a sign saying “Emergency Assembly Point”. I find it funny because of the innovation shown on the part of the (imaginary) spider. Creating an emergency and then having people rush into your web shows extraordinary entrepreneurial thinking. It is also funny because it just looks odd.…
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Not all change is significant
Yesterday was an unusual day where I live. In the morning there was an official heatwave warning. This turned out to be valid with temperatures reaching 40 Celsius. I am not sure what that is in Fahrenheit because I didn’t google it, but the human body’s temperature is 37 degrees Celsius (98 degrees in the…
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“Done” with my private life
When I ran agile training courses I would often talk about the definition of done. Essentially you want to team to be clear on the expectations of the work they are doing and to define a clear end-state, where the work is complete and value is added. If I carry this concept into my life…
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Agile is … but did we ask the customer?
I am an agile coach, which was once a mysterious title that nobody understood. Now days most people in IT or consulting, as well as many people in different business or government roles, have a view on what agile and coaching are. Since people now have a view on agile, quite inconveniently, I guess I…
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Please question my assumptions
Last week I published my view that outcomes and intentions are different things and that this realisation makes life a lot easier. But even with this in mind there is a trap that I still fall into sometimes: The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred George Bernard Shaw Sometimes it…
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Outcome does not equal intent
I have long believed that we confuse the outcome with the plan or the intent. An example is when we make a decision and then see the outcome. We assume that: But recently I have been thinking about the old saying that “we judge ourselves on our intentions and we judge others on their actions.”…
James King 