What prevents you from getting work done? One of the top answers is too many meetings! Too many interruptions, meetings, and tools overburdens workers and can lead to burn out. In this post, we visit Dominica DeGrandis's advice for creating a balanced calendar to optimize your time. Too Many Meetings A calendar full of meetings leads to little time to complete actual work. We double book, triple book, and even quadruple book our time. Dominica DeGrandis describes three common types of … [Read more...]
Bonus Interview with Jonathan Smart on Sooner Safer Happier
Gene: You use the Cynefin model to frame a picture of everything from known knowns to unknown unknowns. What about this model is essential to the necessary mindset shift and business success in the digital age? Jon: I find Cynefin, a sense-making model, to be a great frame of reference for optimizing the approach to the work, to the domain of the work. Cynefin articulates five domains. Within the Clear domain, there are known-knowns. There is best practice.The relationship between cause and … [Read more...]
Leading through Better Value Sooner Safer Happier
Gene Kim Interviews Jonathan Smart, author of Sooner Safer Happier (Part 1) Gene Kim: Why Better Value Sooner Safer Happier? What about those five words is so revolutionary. Jonathan Smart: The world of work has fundamentally changed. We are living through a tipping point in the latest of a succession of technology-led revolutions, which have a socio-economic impact. We’ve gone from the Age of Oil and Mass Production to the Age of Digital. Like going from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, we … [Read more...]
Happier Employees Equal Better Business Outcomes
Two Simple Questions for Better Business Outcomes Two questions I ask during 1-on-1s might strike people as a bit unusual, but they directly lead to better business outcomes: Are you happy? Are you able to do work that you’re proud of? Why? A core reason is that I care about the people I work with, and I want good things for them. I want them to be happy! When I learn there are obstacles to their happiness, we generally have a productive conversation about what can be changed. My conceit is … [Read more...]
Choosing a Narrator for Sooner Safer Happier
“Would you narrate the book, Jon?” said Anna, Editorial Director at IT Revolution. “The intonation, the emphasis, is more natural when the author reads their own words,” Anna explained. I was in a dilemma. I wanted to read it for that reason, the subconscious passion that comes across when reading out loud the words you’ve written and have viscerally lived. Likewise narrating the words of the co-authors, where we have shared journeys and learnings together. We discussed how long it would take, … [Read more...]
Conway’s Law: Critical for Efficient Team Design in Tech
This post on Conway's Law is adapted from Chapter 2 of Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow. Conway's Law Conway’s law is critical to understanding the forces at play when organizing teams amidst the long-lasting, unattended impact they can have on our software systems, as the latter have become larger and more interconnected than ever before. But you might wonder if a law from 1968 about software architecture has stood the test of time. We’ve come a long … [Read more...]
Pattern 1.2: Start with Why; Empower the How
This post is adapted from Chapter 1 of Sooner Safer Happier by Jonathan Smart, with Zsolt Berend, Myles Ogilvie, and Simon Rohrer. In Antipattern 1.2: Using Old Ways of Thinking to Apply New Ways of Working, we saw how a capital “A,” capital “T” Agile Transformation feels to an employee like involuntary, mandatory change being inflicted upon them, whether they like it or not. The capital “A” denotes how they are going to change and the capital “T” denotes that they have to change. … [Read more...]
BVSSH Principles
In Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility by Jonathan Smart, Zsolt Berend, Myles Ogilvie, and Simon Rohrer, each chapter's essence is distilled into guiding principles, to guide behavior and the millions of decisions that we make every day. For example, “Invite over Inflict” and “One Size Does Not Fit All.” They apply across contexts. Specific practices emerge by applying the principles to a unique context and by using coaching and experimentation, … [Read more...]
Antipattern 1.2: Using Old Ways of Thinking to Apply New Ways of Working
This post is adapted from Chapter 1 of Sooner Safer Happier by Jonathan Smart, with Zsolt Berend, Myles Ogilvie, and Simon Rohrer. Focusing on “Agile,” “Lean,” or “DevOps” as the end rather than the means to an end is using old ways of thinking to apply new ways of working. A capital “A,” capital “T” Agile Transformation, from the perspective of employees, infers involuntary, mandatory change being done to them, whether they like it or not. The capital “A” denotes how they are … [Read more...]
Pattern 1.1: Focus on Outcomes
In our last post, we looked at Antipattern 1.1: Doing an Agile Transformation. Now we'll look at the corresponding pattern: Focus on Outcomes. Focus on the outcomes, on Better Value Sooner Safer Happier, as the goal, not on Agile, Lean, or DevOps as the goal in order to achieve true business agility. In his 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations, sociologist Everett Rogers described how innovation tended to spread first to a small number of Innovators, then reached Early Adopters, was taken up by … [Read more...]
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