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Disappointingly, monkeys are good problem solvers
I remember, many years ago, a friend and I went to the pub to talk about how bad our project was and how we were undervalued. We knew that we were both smart, effective people, yet we had way too much work on and we were constantly frustrated by all the obstacles that others were…
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Entropy and improvement
I was thinking recently about good retrospectives. Pausing to reflect on how we work and how our ecosystem supports our work is a great way to get better at whatever we do. On the other hand, frequent retrospectives are not always good retrospectives. Sometimes a team can fall into a rut and just skim through…
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I am sure you agree, but should I be?
I write this blog in WordPress and it gets published in both LinkedIn and Twitter. Sometimes I get a comment on either WordPress or LinkedIn and I feel good and sometimes reply with a short comment in response. Anyway, last week I got a comment from Glenda, about my blog on disagreeing with people. She…
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Recent talk – Disagreeing with nice people
I did a short presentation at work last week and I thought it would be good to reproduce it here. The talk was titled “Disagreeing with nice people”. Why nice people? Disagreeing is, well, disagreeable. But disagreeing with “meanies and fools” sounds more satisfying than disagreeing with nice people who might be right. You don’t…
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Collaboration or collective monologue?
I heard a great term recently – “Collective Monologues. The context I hear it in was where young children first attend day care, preschool or kindergarten. Apparently they all happily play together and have a great time. But if you listen carefully to what is going on then you realise that they are not all…
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Remember that agile thing?
Many years ago, I stumbled into “agile” and instantly found myself at home. I felt like I was part of “a small group who could change the world”, to paraphrase Margaret Read. Originally, I thought it was an approach to running projects based on reality rather than theory. A few years later, I realised that…
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Do I know your team better than you do?
I was pondering the value of team coaching recently. My conclusion was that coaches are awesome and you should definitely hire them. If you are a hiring manager then there is no need to read on – just be assured that you will get a positive ROI on agile coaches – the more you have…
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Should I have a not-to-do list
I have a reasonable todo list going now. I use paper and pen and force myself to write a fresh list every day. That works well for me because I have writing things into my list when I already listed them. The pain of doing so actually forces me to do small things rather than…
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It turns out I plan backwards
I was raised to be resilient, grateful, persistent and willing to make the best of things as they are rather than complain about how they should be. Having this constantly reinforced has been a real strength during my life – giving me a optimism and a pragmatic acceptance of the challenges I face from time…
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Failure modes revisited
I ran a retrospective lately, to look at when something went wrong, rather than just looking at a sprint and asking what was good or bad. In doing so, I went though how something had failed, but I realised that I was drilling into what had happened, not what could have happened. This is OK,…
James King 