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 class full of kids, if they all have a growth mindset. Here is my reasoning: Kids with growth mindsets will seek opportunities learn from and will regularly ask for feedback that they can use improve their learning. They are also more fun to be around … Continue reading Growth mindsets and lucky coaches

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 bad, because it involves self-doubt, giving up and other unhelpful things. Therefore you should adopt a growth mindset and be confident that you will get where you want to go. Kiran pretty much takes this for granted and her view is frequently reinforced by her … Continue reading Is a fixed mindset OK?

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 did not know). I learnt about this in Kindergarten!!! You kind of need to know what the other one is to understand the other. Growth mindsets and fixed mindsets are complete opposites as you will see in this article. So what is the difference? It … Continue reading What a growth mindset and a fixed mindset is (explained by an 8 year old)

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 home, in cafes and even on planes. My daughter has received a face to face education for 3 years (plus kindergarten) but she is suddenly doing her schooling at home for the first time. I am also working from home, though the term “work” is … Continue reading I should be an expert at remote work. My daughter has never tried it before.

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 (building trust) are valuable while others (random meetings) are not. Some things are easy (going for a coffee) and others are a lot of effort (Building mastery in core skills or truly satisfying customers). Using this dodgy analysis approach I have listed succession planning as … Continue reading Succession planning is easy so just do it

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 time to actually make the investment. I don’t believe that this is because “management don’t care about people here,” or that “our crew just don’t want to learn new things.” Instead, I believe that there are two main reasons for no investing in skill growth, … Continue reading Please start growing your people

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 members, with all their diverse skills and abilities, are valuable assets, then the same feedback loops should also allow the team to more effectively invest in their own development, becoming an ever stronger team over time. To me, this is actually the greatest advantages of … Continue reading Moving at the same pace involves ongoing growth

A story wall helps us to focus our attention on the present, by allowing us to take a snapshot of the state of our work in any given moment. Doing so allows us to see bottlenecks and priorities and generally take better control of our work in progress. But in my last article I mentioned that we can extend the use of our story wall to help the team apply “second loop learning” as well as managing their daily work. I do not intend to explore second loop learning here again in detail, but I do intend to show how … Continue reading Using a story wall to add learning