Questions matter. The questions we ask open one avenue of inquiry, but close others. If we want to change the way we manage, we need to change our questions. And so, here are my slides from my talk at Agile 2010: 14 Essential Questions aimed at refocusing management attention on creating work systems that work–creating
We’ve long lived with the assumption that the people at the top of the organizations are the ones who understand the business. They understand the market, the product, the customers. They hold the financial information about how the company makes money and the current financial status. Since they hold this info, they also know what
Retrospectives become a waste of time if the changes and improvements agreed upon in the meeting are never accomplished. Esther Derby believes in the power of retrospectives. And she knows firsthand that it’s easy to talk about a change, but not always easy to actually do something differently. In this week’s column, Esther shares experiences that illustrate this point and offers advice on how to make changes stick.
Too often, manager in organizations act as if changing behavior in an organization is a simple matter of “make it so.” Some changes are like that–but most significant changes are not. Systems drive behavior. Therefore, if you want to change behavior in an organization–increase accountability or teamwork for example– you need to understand the factors
A while back, I sat in on a birds-of-a-feather session on organizational change. The main theme was bemoaning the difficulty changing even mid-sized organizations. When people talk about how hard it is to bring change there’s a tendency to blame: people who don’t turn on a dime are labeled resisters, NoNos, dinosaurs, laggards. There certainly
© 2007-2010 Esther Derby This article originally appeared in my newsletter, insights. You can sign up to receive my newsletter using the form on the right. You’d think that since I’m president of a one-person company, I could change anything in my office in a snap. But a recent incident reminded me that change is
Most of my clients want to change something: they want to deliver software faster, reduce the number of defects the software they do deliver, and improve financial results. Affecting these changes neither simple nor easy. Improving organizational results involves changing the work system on multiple levels. That means seeing the system, understanding that there’s seldom
Esther Schindler recently put forward a scenario about a struggling employee named Frank, and solicited advice from her network. Briefly, the scenario is this: Frank was a great maintenance programmer, but the company is retiring the system he worked on. Frank has moved to a new project in a new language and he’s not catching
I attended an Organizational Change BoF last evening at the AYE conference. Among other things, we talked about why it is that some managers fail to act when there are many signs of big problems. I see three conditions that are prequisites for change (at any level): People have to recognize the situation. One person
I got a call from an acquaintance, Gloria, who is trying to convince her organization to adopt agile methods. “I’ve given them every logical argument I can think of,” she said. “They just don’t get it. All I get is blank looks. How stupid can they be?” “They” probably aren’t stupid at all. But they