Tag: Teams
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To Dare and To Conquer Summary
Special Operation and the destiny of nations – by Derek Leebaert Special operations have repeatedly bent the arc of history. At decisive moments, small groups of “picked men” seized impossibly high-leverage opportunities, transforming desperate struggle into breakthrough, and breakthrough into conquest. Although not explicitly outlined in the book, I noticed a familiar pattern: Struggle >…
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Team identities ⚓︎ Ship o’ Theseus ⚓︎ Siddhartha
If every member of a team was replaced, one by one, is it still the same team? The Ship of Theseus is a classic thought experiment which asks if you changed every piece of the ship, plank by plank, and if every part is replaced. Is it the same ship? Does this apply to teams? …
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Bureaucracies
A nice and short article here about Weberian bureaucracy. https://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/encyclop/bureaucracy.html It gives some historical perspective about how (and why!) bureaucracies formed – evidently with positive intentions in response to the prior feudalistic modes. Many bureaucratic tendencies remain in companies still today, but without the human memory of what we had prior to that, nor the…
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Ask Iwata – Gaming Work
“Ask Iwata” is a short booklet with a collection of enjoyable insights from the legendary Nintendo CEO. What’s interesting is some of the philosophies to work (and play) within a gaming company. Incidentally, a company that works to create play. It was really evident how much this team loved making games and solving difficult problems…
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Outcome Orientated Space(s) and future of WFH
Last year, when WFH became the norm, I was originally initested in how artisans work. They are of the few people in society who CREATE their own environment optimised to what they do / the outcome they wish to seek. But why should we look at artisans? Because they have to create the optmial environment,…
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The Advice Trap Review and Summary
I’ve just read through The Advice Trap – a new book which was very kindly given to me as a leaving present, and very much a thoughtful gift to help me continue my learning in the coaching domain. So, as part of that learning process, my key takeaways are: When we assume one of the…
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How are you?
We’ve been doing some annual reviews and making a renewed effort to check in with people’s well-being. One thing that was pointed out was that it might be necessary to ask someone ‘how are you’ more than once because the first time people are inclined to just say ‘fine’. It reminded me of learning Arabic…
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How reliant is your team on you to achieve ‘HA’ status?
This was topic of discussion for last week’s Agile Coaching Academy. I stumbled across the quote somewhere, and now I cannot find it! Ha – from Shu Ha Ri, a distillation of the path towards martial arts mastery. 守 – shu: learning the rules 破 – ha: make them your own 離 – ri: transcend…
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WFH and the Misery or Mastery of One’s Work
Whilst re-reading the book, “How to make yourself miserable”, I realised that my current home office set up is much closer to the “perfect room for being miserable” than it is as a place to do high quality work. But, upon reflection, my open plan office wasn’t much better either. In fact, the open plan…
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Remote onboarding / Onboarding Retrospective
This article is a combination of a retrospective that I created (the ‘feelrospective’!) based on Non-violent communication, and the subsequent insights about onboarding a new team member remotely (which I feel will become increasingly common). If you don’t know anything about Non-violent communication (NVC), this post will hopefully serve as a nice introduction and, ideally, inspire you…