A one day offsite for leadership teams

March 24, 2016

This week I held an offsite for my engineering leadership team. My two aims were to do some formation activities as we have a few new faces in the team and to...

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The team that learns together stays together

March 3, 2016

I prefer to build long-lived teams where the same people stay together over an extended period of time. I believe in the immutable team: > Teams are immutable....

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Culture gardening

February 15, 2016

"Get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats." That's the advice from Jim Collins in his 2002 book...

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Using the Westrum typology to measure culture

February 4, 2016

Having a culture of collaboration where people feel safe to share their views and work across a diverse group is a must for a successful organisation. Every...

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Measuring happiness

February 4, 2016

As sometimes happens, I wanted to answer a question on Twitter but couldn't do it justice in 140 characters. The question was this: > @andykelk @auxesis...

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Why all the Jira hate? I'll tell you why

December 21, 2015

I've recently retweeted a few tweets which weren't exactly complimentary about Jira. For example: > Plenty of good things happened at work today. And then I...

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The power of coffee

December 15, 2015

Reading this article recently, an interesting theory about coffee was raised: > The time of day people drink their coffee varies with Sydney waking up with...

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Building a learning culture on a budget

December 9, 2015

Think about the last day you spent at work. What did you learn? We usually reflect on what we achieved, what we completed, what we delivered....

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Blameless Postmortems

October 22, 2015

Let’s talk about failure. It’s not something we talk about a lot because it’s not a comfortable topic. We always hope for success but we also need to be able to deal with failure...

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Get rid of all the managers

October 20, 2015

Are you happy at work? Statistically speaking, the chances are that you're not. In countless surveys, the number of people reporting that they're engaged at work comes out at just 30%....

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