What Is in Your Organizational Closet?

Do you need to clean out your organizational closets? Closets are where we store useful things. But they also tend to accumulate items that no longer provide value.I’m having new flooring put in on the second floor of my house, which requires that I empty all seven...

Shaping Patterns

How do you create an environment for great work? Where healthy self-organization happens? You notice and shape patterns. Patterns are meaningful events that repeat over time—actions and interactions, outcomes and results. That might be teams that flail and fail to...

The Fingerprint Principle

When leaders make a change, they want buy-in. But they way they present a change may prevent that. I had a conversation with a manager who wanted to improve communication between teams in his organization. While in theory all the teams were working towards the same...

The Forest Succession Principle

In ecology, the process through which rocky ground becomes a forest is referred to as forest succession. I’m married to an ecologist, so I hear a lot about such things, and it occurred to me that we can learn about how to create sustainable change in our organizations...

Filling a Team Position

Many job descriptions focus on skills—usually technical skills. Interpersonal skills may get a passing mention—“strong communication skills,” “collaboration,” or “teamwork.”  But when you are filling a team position, you have to think both more...

Experiencing Change

In early 2020, we experienced one hell of a change when Covid-19 swept the planet.  On March 13, I flew home from a workshop on the west coast. For the next three months, I only left my house to buy groceries. My status quo shattered, along with everyone else’s. The...

For Happy Employees, Explore Needs Fit

At one point in my life, I dreamed of owning a book store. I loved the idea of working in a book store, but the actual job was a poor fit. I had the skills to do the work. But it didn’t fulfill what I wanted out of the job. Here’s what I wanted: I loved...

Re-Teaming, Not Churn

In response to a tweet on the benefits of stable teams, someone asked whether I’m against changing teams (aka re-teaming) in response to business needs. I am not.  I’m against churn.  There are plenty of good reasons to re-form teams to meet organizational...

4 Questions for Evaluating Experiments

When you try something new, when to you expect to see results? How do you evaluate an experiment decided on in a retro to know whether your hypothesis was correct? This week I read a post that described a situation I see too often.The poster described a retrospective...

Steering Signals: Signs Along the Way

When making a change or fixing a problem, we consider the outcome we want to achieve—what will be different. People usually consider how to measure  those outcomes. Will cycle time go down? Retention go up? Customer satisfaction improve? Clicks go through the...

Where to Fix a Problem

When there’s an issue in an organization, people have a tendency to focus on fixing the person(s). But there may be other—more effective—ways to fix the problem.  People are easy to see, and easy to criticize. That’s where we’ve been taught to focus. Performance...

Adapting to Change

The idea that we must set personal goals and work relentlessly to achieve them, bothers me. There’s an implicit valuing of perseverance over flexibility, adaptability, ingenuity. Sort of like following the plan–no matter what!–rather than adapting to...

Supporting People Through Change

We are all experiencing change right now. Minor blips and stunning upheavals. Routines at home and work. Expectations, assumptions, institutions—all are up for grabs. People ask, “As a leader in my organization, what can I do? How can I support people through change?...

Explicit and Implicit Knowledge

Baking may not seem related to the work we do. However, my experience teaching a friend how to bake bread highlighted explicit and implicit knowledge. And that has everything thing to do with learning new ways of working and organizational change.  We...

They Need to Change (But Might Not Know It)

Sometimes I meet teams who’ve adjusted or even embraced a change initiated by company leadership. They tell me how much benefit they’ve experienced. But, then say, “We’ve made all these changes, but our managers need to change, too....

Systems and Patterns of Thought

Systems drive behavior. They also influence patterns of thought. When we enter a system—a company for example—we unconsciously slip into the assumptions of the system. The values and beliefs behind structures seep into practices and policies. Truths that we hold as...

When I Feel Empowered, I Can…

I asked a group to complete this sentence: “When I feel empowered, I can__________.” Here’s how they filled in the blank. When I feel empowered, I can… do better thingshave trust get to flowfocusfeel in controleffect changebe excited about...

Work on the System

When I say “work on system,” I mean influencing factors that contribute to patterns of events and interactions in your organization. Making work work better.  So, how do you work on the system? Attend to creating an environment where great work is a...

Introducing Collaboration Tools

Like many people, I’m staying home during a pandemic, trying to work, using collaboration tools. I’m having many Zoom meetings. In one such meeting, I was on a panel regarding remote retrospectives. One of the panelists posited that people from earlier...

When Management by Walking Around Isn’t Possible

Management by walking around isn’t possible right now. You can’t walk by the team room, sense the buzz, see what’s on the task wall, engage in conversation, ask questions. Casual conversations don’t happen naturally.  So how do you, as a dev manager (or line...

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