The significance of relatively small, stable teams with a business rhythm that includes time to breathe.

An exploration of the changing nature of expertise in a complex world and what leaders need to know about expertise.

Here I’ll describe my thoughts on the differences between ‘iterative’ and ‘incremental’ product development and the need to focus on value and learning.

What I’ve seen over the last 25 years are leaders who want to do more with less but aren’t prepared to change their organizational structure or culture to accommodate that desire. Consequently, it’s PEOPLE (and their families) who suffer the physical and psychological burden of constant context switching and noisy communication.

Not having agreed-upon communication conventions increases the noise in the system and incurs daily costs of delay and more context switching, which in turn lengthens time-to-value.

The way to ACCOMPLISH more with less, is to DO less to accomplish more. For most people the best way to deliver more is to change two things: 1) focus on fewer goals at any given time and 2) simplify the communication surrounding those goals.

While value may obey some simple Newtonian laws in a vacuum, value in the real world is rooted in complexity theory.

Decisions, value, and Newtonian mechanics in simple systems.

“ … but the skills most valuable are those that result in the ability to experiment quickly.”

Look out for standardization and treating ‘agile’ as the goal.

Finding key behaviours we look for on agile teams .. at the dentist’s office.

The decay of our personal time and attention follows a similar path to climate decay due to value extraction.

“… but the value of learning whether we are solving the right problems the right way.”

“We need to be comfortable WITHOUT fully populated schedules and plans. We need to have more empty spaces in our maps.”

“… to induce change in behaviour, one can choose to either reduce the restraining forces or increase the driving forces.”

“All too often people and organizations are either unwilling or not enabled to learn new techniques in their core skills.”

“Interestingly (and possibly related), these same organizations also had vastly different meeting cultures.”

“… but it remains a list of problems that represent a body of work (with an overall goal) and those problems are prioritized by value.”

“We need the customers of the organizations that use Scrum to see the value of Scrum and WANT their products developed using Scrum … ”

“Knowing when you, as a catalyst, have been inhibited is one of the many coaching skills necessary to ensure that your clients’ transformations continue to evolve.”