Category: Insights
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A Lesson from Kung the Philosopher
Said Kung the Philosopher: You think that I have learnt a great deal, and kept the whole of it in my memory? Sse replied with respect: Of course, isn’t that so? It is not so. I have reduced it all to one principle. — Recently, I was tasked with giving a fifteen minute ‘lightning talk’…
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Scrum master recruitment, lift offs and post-it machines
This is a post about our experience of hiring and interviewing a new scrum master and the lessons learned. It’s also about how we attempted to integrate elements of agile into our recruitment and how I was influenced by a wonderful book that I was reading at the time: ‘Lift off’ by Diana Larsen and…
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A lesson from Richard Wagner and a carpet
This is a story about a carpet I bought and how it led me, by pure chance, to a beautiful insight from one of Richard Wagner’s operas which gave me a paradigm shift in terms of my approach to work and life. But first, the story about the carpet: Recently, we were in Oman over…
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A Lesson from a Clown
Probably the most personal thing I’m writing here. Probably one of the toughest lessons. One day a clown taught me an important life lesson. I had just started university and, at that time, I was insecure and prone to be embarrassed by just about anything. Somehow, I figured that to help me with self-confidence, I…
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Tools and Etiquette for our (Online!) Big Room Planning Event
Last week, 120 of us met up online to scope out the work and the objectives for the next three months. In scaled agile (SAFe) this is called Programme Increment Planning (or PI Planning). We didn’t do it ‘by the book’ but we took parts of the concept and adapted it to our needs and…
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Apollo 13 and the importance of ‘Lift Offs’
Recently I was watching the film Apollo 13 which tells the story about a shuttle’s re-entry into Earth. It’s a dreadful film but it’s compulsive watching since it combines a lot of people’s natural phobias such as claustrophobia, fear of flying, fear of darkness, and one of my own, Tom Hankophobia. Apollo 13 is also…
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Playing, Creating & Reconnecting with Lego and Carl Jung
The last thing I – or anyone – wanted to do after a three-day planning session was a team building activity. An Escape Room? Working together to solve problems so that we can escape from an asphyxiating room – hang on, that’s what we’ve just been doing for three days! Anyway, we came up with…
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2019 books
“Liftoff – start and sustain successful agile teams” by Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies Favourite book of the year. Changed my entire outlook about starting a project. I’m confident about starting any new project now. “Product roadmaps relaunched” by Lombardo, McCrathy, Ryan, Connors Excellent resource for visualising and communicating the outcomes of a project. Compatible…
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Soup Retrospective
This was a new type of retrospective for me and I tried it out with our team in India. It’s something I learned from Aino Vonge Curry at a recent agile conference in Cambridge. It’s a great retrospective that can be used in any situation and I’m sure you’ll make some breakthroughs as a result.…