Troubleshooting Agile

Are you wearing a Viking helmet, sun hat or graduate cap? On the podcast this week, Squirrel and Jeffrey are joined again by fellow podcast host duo Russell and Ken of the “I Need to F-ing Talk To You” podcast. In this episode, Russell and Ken detail the "hats" they use to identify the different patterns of human behavior that affect conversations, and how they use BEEF and COACH models to improve...

Can you speed up your learning with improv? On the podcast this week, Squirrel and Jeffrey are joined by fellow podcast host duo Russell and Ken of the “I Need to F-ing Talk To You” podcast. In this episode, Russell and Ken discuss their Forum Theatre for Business methods and Squirrel considers if they’ve been missing a trick by not incorporating real actors in their conversations. Links: - Websit...

Can it really be more effective to throw out the plan? This week on the podcast, Squirrel talks about his late-night escapades at improv classes and why he’d prefer to travel to Mars in a starship, not a rocket. Join Squirrel and Jeffrey to find out how you can use improvisation to benefit your business. Links: - Squirrel's Making It Up event: https://squirrelsquadron.com/events/2023/03-23-makingi...

Scrum. XP. Kanban. Squads. Pods. Feature teams. Trying to figure out the ideal tech team structure and process? Listen to this first! On this week’s episode, Squirrel and Jeffrey discuss why the "right" choice isn’t going to solve your problems, and what you should be focusing on instead. Links: - Squirrel’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/douglassquirrel/status/1636738222955872256 - Krakow keynote 1...

Jeffrey is fresh in from IT Revolution’s DevOps Forum in Portland, where one of his takeaways was the power of streamlining and doing the absolute minimum. Join us on this week’s episode where Jeffrey discusses what tech teams can learn from the calamitous collapse and subsequent rebuilding of a highway outside San Francisco in 2007, and Squirrel shares his “Independence Day method" to discover th...

Study Groups are a great way of developing new skills in the team and strengthening the learning culture in your organisation, but if not executed currently, their impact can be limited. Listen to this week’s episode to discover how to get company-wide benefits from your study group, and why you shouldn’t look at learning activities as “perks” for your team - even if they come with pizza! Links: -...

Is there a place for Stack Ranking? Squirrel and Jeffrey concur that Stack Racking can be problematic, but Jeffrey has some ideas about where this sub-par practice comes from, which underline the importance of difficult conversations about performance no matter how you create them (even with a stack rank) Links: - Vitality Curve (Stack Ranking):https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve - Poppen...

Could Chat GPT improve our conversations? While pondering a difficult conversation with an unhappy client, Squirrel took to Chat GPT to see if he could recreate the dialogue. Listen to this week’s episode to discover his findings, and learn about how you could use prompt engineering and role playing with chatbot to get better results from your conversations. Links: - ChatGPT @ OpenAI: https://chat...

This week, Jeffrey is joined by guest Elisabeth Hendrickson, who shares her powerful dream that inspired a new theory of office politics. Elisabeth and Jeffrey discuss the behaviors that lead to toxicity, and how to utilise the core value of consent to evoke positive change. Recorded live at CITCON. Links: - Elisabeth’s company, Curious Duck: https://curiousduck.io - Elisabeth’s LinkedIn: https://...

In this week’s episode, Squirrel and Jeffrey discuss how you can use emotional outcomes in your conversations to build trust and evoke more positive responses from your customers, rather than relying solely on intellectual ones. Listen to see how you can incorporate lessons from “Emotional Rugby” in your sales and customer relations, as well as across your workplace practices. Links: - “Many of us...

After last week's episode on starting before you're ready, Squirrel and Jeffrey discuss some ways you can encourage this behaviour—while still providing a safety net for participants and the wider organisation. SHOW LINKS: - Toyota Kata: https://agileconversations.com/blog/we're-the-aliens-three-ways-to-seek-safety/ - How to be helpfully demanding: https://agileconversations.com/blog/how-to-be-hel...

Squirrel and Jeffrey note examples of teams who never get started because they're aiming to do a project "right", and contrast with those who get started without being ready. SHOW LINKS: - https://twitter.com/douglassquirrel/status/1593243886180216832 --- Our book, Agile Conversations, is out now! See https://agileconversations.com where you can order your copy and get a free video when you join o...

Squirrel and Jeffrey discuss two examples where engineers are trying to get accurate answers, when getting a (slightly) wrong result would actually be better for speed or learning. --- Our book, Agile Conversations, is out now! See https://agileconversations.com where you can order your copy and get a free video when you join our mailing list! We'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you...

Squirrel and Jeffrey continue discussing why you and your team might need a coach—for techniques and skills that they are already good at. This week they concentrate on practical steps for finding internal and external sources of instruction and inspiration. SHOW LINKS: - Pair Programming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming - Mob Programming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mob_programmi...

An article by Atul Gawande on coaching for surgeons inspires Squirrel and Jeffrey to reflect on why you and your team might need a coach—for techniques and skills that they are already good at. SHOW LINKS: - Personal Best: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/03/personal-best - Mundanity of Excellence: https://fermatslibrary.com/s/the-mundanity-of-excellence-an-ethnographic-report-on-stratif...

This week on Troubleshooting Agile, we revisit another one of our “Greatest Hits” In this episode, we look at how the Ladder can help you discover your own reasoning as well, to discover ways to promote mutual learning with your own behaviour. SHOW LINKS: - Top Business Podcasts for CEOs, from Fiona Anderson: https://www.rocktime.co.uk/insights/listen-and-learn-the-art-of-podcasting-for-ceos/ - Th...

This week on Troubleshooting Agile, we revisit one of our “Greatest Hits” In this episode, we start describing our favourite trust-building technique: the Ladder of Inference. Our take this week is on using the Ladder to understand someone else's reasoning and align your stories, creating trust as a foundation for further improvement in your agile team. Surprisingly, the experience of using the La...

A listener asks, "how will we know it's working?" when considering changes of process or technology. Jeffrey and Squirrel discuss how to set "imperfect indicators" to measure your progress—or lack thereof!—along the J-shaped curve that takes you through learning to improvement. SHOW LINKS: - Tic-Tac Change: https://blog.jeffreyfredrick.com/2008/07/07/tic-tac-change-slides/ - J-Curve episode: https...

Jeffrey remarks that he's working with a software team whose code is "done", that is, the organisation wants to keep using it but doesn't want to invest more in changing it. He and Squirrel reflect on when this make sense and how "software doneness" affects processes and measurements. SHOW LINKS: - Control Chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_chart - Principles of Product Development Flow:...

It is easy to see our dominant organizational structure of teams divided by roles as natural. But Jon Smart, author of the book Sooner, Safer, Happier, points out that this goes against 1.9 million years of evolution. In this podcast Jon and Jeffrey discuss the link between the outcomes we’re getting and how we organize, and thus how changing our organization can change incentives, which in turn s...

Do you find the yourself constantly fighting for making even small improvements? Randy Shoup has a way to avoid such “nickel and dime” conversations: agree with your peers on an innovation budget. In this episode Randy Shoup and Jeffrey discuss why these strategic conversations require learning how to speak executive, and why new engineering leaders often struggle to live up to their role in these...

Dominica Degrandis is an expert on flow and helping companies get the benefits of using flow metrics to make systemic improvements. What does she find as the biggest obstacle to success? A proper investment in change. In this conversation Jeffrey and Dominica talk about the importance of a daily change budget, time you’d expect people to be working in the new way, with some advice for both leaders...

Audit, compliance, security, and governance: these words all carry the heavy weight of bureaucracy, the feeling of a burden to be overcome. In the recently published learning novel Investments Unlimited Bill Bensing and coauthors introduce the idea of automated governance, and in this conversation Bill and Jeffrey explore the difference between “governance theater”, automating away bullshit, and a...

If you want to create a “value flywheel” where success breeds success, you need to start with clarity of purpose. Join Jeffrey and his guest David Anderson to learn how David uses the technique of Wardley Mapping to generate shared understanding. But don’t make the mistake of thinking the map is the point! David says throwing away the map is just as important as creating it in the first place. SHO...

Want to know the agenda? We aren’t going to tell you! Join Jeffrey with guests Pascal Dufour & Ronald Doelen to talk about how the “tilted slider” applies to meetings just as much as other software development process. Recorded live at CITCON. SHOW LINKS: - Pascal Dufour: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pascaldufournl/ - Ronald Doelen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rdoelen/ - Episode: Tilted Slider: htt...