Questions, lessons and advice for change-makers. Available directly to your inbox, once a week (ish). Think of these posts as seeds of change, that we plant together.
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Leading people (part 1) – responsibility
I went looking for a guide for people who want to do better at that responsibility, whether by managing, mentoring or coaching others. I didn’t find that guide, so this is it… part 1, at least.
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Leading change with style(s)
Different kinds of change benefit from different approaches. One of the most useful ways I know to frame these varied needs is as a function of certainty and complexity… and then always prepare for less certainty than you expect!
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Opening space for group thinking
Agilists weren’t the first people to study what worked and didn’t work when people tried to take action in a group. Each of those methods was itself woven of many threads of self-organization, facilitation, collective leadership and design. And one of my favorite threads is Open Space Technology.
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Looking for a job? Do it as a team.
The day I was laid off in 2023, I posted about it on LinkedIn. A coaching conversation spiraled into forming a team that has, no joke, changed my life. We’ve all stayed focused and motivated by the support we give each other for months. This is how we did it!
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Ancient agile history
I’ve been cleaning up my own ancient professional writing and deciding where to keep things (if anywhere; I wrote a lot of junk). This blog post from 2009 is a handy bit of history predating the wider agile movement.
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February is my favorite month
I’ve joked, perhaps a bit meanly (sorry, calendar-year resolution setters) about how much I like the gym on February 1 – it’s much emptier. What that really means is that, for a lot of people, the idea of the gym was exciting, but the reality didn’t work out for them. Lots of people start, not…
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Any fool can be optimistic
This post’s title is a direct quote from a member of an old work team, talking about his role as risk-identifier, gadfly, pessimist and occasional nay-sayer. I wrote most of it in 2009, but it turns out to be entirely applicable 15 years later.
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What’s under the table?
When we work in teams, we most likely only talk about what’s on the table – that is, the issues, feelings and ideas that people have expressed and can talk about. It works great, as long as our team feels comfortable enough to get their thoughts out.
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You get to decide to change. Even if you were forced.
Lots of people in tech are slogging through the forced change of layoffs this year, and I’ve been thinking about how we design these changes that most of us didn’t ask for or agree to. How do we make it ours? Because, sure – as a person laid off, no amount of buying in is…
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Serving as a leader
And that is what experience is for, to be made into power. The great leader creates as well as directs power.