Clik here to view.
Cynefin for Devs
Every now and then, someone comes up with a new way of looking at the world that becomes the next fashionable thing to do. Every time I’ve seen this, there’s usually a space of time in which a lot of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Deliberate Discovery Workshop
This is a pretty simple workshop which I ran at Agile 2011 and have run as part of my BDD tutorial since. It usually gets people thinking differently, so I thought I’d share it with you too. Some teams...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Respect for People: it’s a Test, not a Pillar
On Monday at LKNA13, I ran an ignite talk on the title above. It was prompted by a video clip of John Seddon talking to Jeffrey Liker, suggesting that running interventions to make people more...
View ArticleClik here to view.
BDD and Complexity Thinking tutorials at NDC Oslo
This year I’ll be running two 1-day workshops at NDC Oslo: Behaviour-Driven Development Have you ever wanted to know exactly what your customers want? Or helped them to clarify their requirements? Have...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Estimating Complexity
Over the last few years, teaching people the Cynefin framework early on in engagements has really helped me have useful conversations with my clients about when different processes are appropriate....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Capability-based Planning and Lightweight Analysis
As a follow-up to my post on estimating complexity, I wanted to share one of the interesting things I’ve been doing with the ideas and the numbers. This is quite long, but it’s turned out to be faintly...
View ArticleClik here to view.
BDD Before The Tools
Another client approached me today about BDD and using tools like Cucumber to automate scenarios. There are a few things I’d love to teams see develop as a focus before heading down the tools path. You...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Disorder, or, How I Got a Black Eye
In the Cynefin framework, the Disorder domain is the one in the middle. It’s the state of not knowing what kind of causality exists. Over on the right we have the predictable domains of Simple and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Goals vs. Capabilities
Every project worth doing has a vision, and someone who’s championed that vision and fought for the budget. That person is the primary stakeholder. (This person is the real product owner; anyone else...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Using BDD as a Sensemaking Technique
A while back, I wrote about Cynefin, a framework for making sense of the world, and for approaching different situations and problems depending on how much certainty or uncertainty they have. As a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Shallow Dive into Chaos
For more on the Chaotic domain and subdomains, read Dave Snowden’s blog post, “…to give birth to a dancing star.” The relationship between separating people that I talk about here, and the Chaotic...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Estimates in #NoEstimates
A couple of weeks ago, I tweeted a paraphrase of something that David J. Anderson said at the London Lean Kanban Day: “Probabalistic forecasting will outperform estimation every time”. I added the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Correlated in Retrospect
A few years back, I went to visit a company that had managed to achieve a high level of agility without high levels of coaching or training, shipping several times a day. I was curious as to how they...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Breaking Boxes
I love words. I really, really love words. I like poetry, and reading, and writing, and conversations, and songs with words in, and puns and wordplay and anagrams. I like learning words in different...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Yes, and…
Imagine two actors standing on stage. “I like your penguin,” the first says. The other turns round, looking at the empty space where one might imagine a penguin could be following. There are two things...
View ArticleHow Agile Manages Out Innovation
The Oatmeal has a fantastic comic on the Backfire Effect that was so popular, they rewrote it with, um, cleaner language. It starts simply. “You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you.”...
View ArticleA Really Common Problem
I haven’t written in a while for various reasons, and will probably post more about the climate later (being an even bigger and more important problem), but today I wanted to write about a Really...
View Article
