A thought-provoking view on how 3, in themselves excellent concepts, combined can produce an opposite result than you were looking for. — If you have been walking around in the world of Agile and Scrum for a while like me, you might have run into this Gartner (2016)diagram a few times before. At least I see it being used in presentations more and more often. The diagram combines ideas from Design Thinking…

How Mindfulness, Selflessness, and Compassion can save your organization. — Mindfulness, Selflessness, and Compassion in the corporate world sound like a contradiction. Yet, it is a serious topic of conversation within companies such as Google, Facebook, McKinsey, and Deloitte. Rasmus Hougaard is responsible for putting these topics on the C-level agenda. In his best-selling book, The Mind of the Leader…

And practices to achieve this. — Psychological safety, the belief that one can speak up and share ideas without fear of reprisal or negative consequences, is essential for the success of any Scrum team. If your workplace is psychologically safe; There is a culture of openness and honesty. Everyone feels supported and can express themselves freely. …

The 3 biggest misconceptions — Story points are a common tool used in agile environments to estimate the size and complexity of a User Story. However, there are several misconceptions about how to effectively use Story points that can lead to misunderstandings and miscommunications among team members. Here are the 3 biggest misconceptions about using…

Road to Professional Agile Leadership — Are Scrum teams Self-organizing or Self-managing? As a change Agent, I often run into the misconception that self-organization and self-management are one and the same thing. However, self-organization and self-management are two concepts that, according to the literature, are essentially different from each other, but are regularly used interchangeably. …

And ways to hunt them down — Attention! Dangerous Product Management Animals Can Easily Derail Teams Being a Product Owner in any organization is an adventure in itself; a role that is often misunderstood. Sometimes you are expected to organize Agile product development towards management’s expectations. …

A Scrum Master’s road to Mastering Scrum — A while ago I spoke to a Scrum Master who said: “Marty, I don’t really need a full-time organizational coach but I am curious about what team coaching is and how you look at it from different perspectives. I work a lot within groups and of course, interact daily with…

And level up your stakeholder collaboration — Tuesday, 9 AM, in a pre-Covid era The team stumbles into meeting room 3.12 where Rose, the Agile coach, stands at the entrance to welcome everybody in. Everyone is chatting while enjoying a cup of coffee, when Rose abruptly stops the background music that sounds softly throughout the room, everybody looks up. Okay, ‘Team Raptors’, today we’re…

Facilitating meetings is often harder than you think. Old habits and paradigms can block effectivity As a facilitator ( like one of the roles of Scrum Master ) you facilitate events but that sounds easier than it usually turns out to be. Old habits and paradigms are hard to kill in many organisations and probably in yours too. In this article, I share my personal…