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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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?...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
At the start of the great wave of WFH, a comment about using PTO for child care during the day scrolled by. No one can seriously be expecting people to switch to PTO each time their kid needed some attention, can they? How could that possibly work? 7 minutes here, 22...
I visited an organization making an Agile transformation. It looked like the teams were making great progress. But the managers asked, “How can we tell they are working hard?” Team members seemed happy with their cross-functional teams. They solved...
I’ve been hearing various people speculate about how work will look after things get back to normal. (First, they aren’t going to go “back” to normal. There will be a normal, but I doubt it will be what existed pre-pandemic.) It does seem likely that remote work will...
