Category: Organisational Learning

  • The importance of understanding variation or how to avoid treating all contractors as thieves

    Here’s a story of how managers detected a problem, but by not understanding the cause of the problem of the type of variation the problem represented, applied the wrong type of solution which meant things were worse for everyone: Once upon a time in a large financial institution that had many thousands of people in…

  • Naming names: helping Agile teams effectively deal with discussing individuals’ behaviour

    I’ve seen a common issue where people in Agile teams are afraid to mention the behaviour of specific individuals. There’s often a fear that speaking about individuals’ behaviour will result in conflict, but indirect strategies are often self-protective and avoid dealing with the issue in a way that allows everyone to learn. By reframing the…

  • Handling a team member who “talks too much”

    How do you handle a situation as a team manager or coach where one member of the team seems to dominate the conversation? The scenario below is based on several experiences where team members think “that person’s talking rubbish!” but don’t know how to address it. This blog shows how the Ladder of Inference can…

  • Skilled incompetence in action at Agile workshops

    As part of my workshops on effective communication, especially around introducing innovative new process approaches such as Lean and Agile, I’ve found examples that demonstrate how people can act with “skilled incompetence” and “skilled unawareness”. One exercise I run is to help people look at how effectively they communicate feedback on difficult topics. The scenario…

  • Using a simple kanban to run effective meetings and workshops

    I’ve found using a kanban a productive approach to structuring and running meetings, workshop and presentations.  Many meetings or workshops are often run from a fixed schedule that isn’t easy to update or change and also isn’t visible to the participants. I wanted to find a better way of structuring the day which balanced some…

  • How three forks on a hand-drawn chart helped a team improve

    After visualising the workflow of a recent client’s software development process, and showing where the work was, the team realised there was a queue of tasks that had been developed and were waiting to be validated (‘tested’).  The team decided to move from a “I just do my task” approach to a “whole team” approach…

  • Can Agile overcome Organisational Defences to achieve Double Loop Learning?

    Agile approaches are sometimes focussed on helping organisations experience transformational change. Many Agile adoptions have failed to achieve long-term change, especially outside core teams, where the problems are non-routine and potentially embarrassing or threatening. Chris Argyris has developed a theory that provides a possible explanation of why Agile adoption has failed to bring about these…