The Humanizing Work Show

In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question, “How do you overcome resistance to change?” Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/overcoming-resistance-to-change/ Connect with Humanizing Work: https://twitter.com/HumanizingWork https://twitter.com/rslawrence/ https://twitter.com/tptman/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/humanizingwork https://www.facebook.com/HumanizingWork

In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question: what’s your take on “enforced team fun”? Many teams have an expectation that everyone will participate in things like birthday celebrations and morale building events, despite the strong possibility that some on the team would experience stress and anxiety, and no evidence that holding those events increases engagement on the team. There are...

Peter and Richard mentioned in an earlier episode that they’re not fans of epics for agile teams and product owners. In this episode, they explain why and what to do instead. Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/why-we-dont-like-epics/ Connect with Humanizing Work: https://twitter.com/HumanizingWork https://twitter.com/rslawrence/ https://twitter.com/tptman/ https://www.linkedin.com/compan...

The Peter Principle is the idea that people get promoted until they hit the level where they’re no longer competent enough to get promoted again. In this episode, Richard and Peter discuss what this means, whether it’s always true, and how management can escape the Peter Principle. Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/the-peter-principle-management/ Connect with Humanizing Work: https://tw...

In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question, what’s the best size for an agile team? The Scrum Guide says 5-9, but how does the Humanizing Work team think about it? Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/whats-the-right-size-for-an-agile-team/ Connect with Humanizing Work: https://twitter.com/HumanizingWork https://twitter.com/rslawrence/ https://twitter.com/tptman/ https://www.li...

In this episode Peter and Richard talk with Nicole Forsythe. Nicole is a librarian turned leader of Agile coaches. We discuss a variety of topics including: how work is broken and what to do about it; navigating career transitions; practical advice for agile coaches; and what we can learn from the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton. The conversation was interesting and practical, and we’re thril...

In this episode, Richard and Peter take on the question: “My team members only want to work on their specialties. What can I do to get them to pull from the top of the backlog?” Richard answers with a vivid story about food prep, common sense, and “grilling next week’s chicken.” Episode page: https://humanizingwork.com/grilling-next-weeks-chicken-or-how-to-get-people-to-work-outside-their-specialt...

Peter checks in from the beach in Ghana, Africa, sharing his thoughts on his time in Africa and his takeaways from the World Trade Promotion Organizations conference, where he gave a keynote. Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/hw-africa-wtpo-conference/ Connect with Humanizing Work: https://twitter.com/HumanizingWork https://twitter.com/rslawrence/ https://twitter.com/tptman/ https://www...

It's been 8 years since Peter created an animated illustration of Laloux's book Reinventing Organizations (the source of the term "teal organization" that's become popular in the Agile community). Since then, that video has hundreds of thousands of views and the overview illustration from the video is used all over the internet as an illustration for the model. Since releasing that video, we've le...

A course participant recently asked, “Is user story fatigue a real thing?” Richard and Peter tackle that question and try to get at the question behind the question. If it feels like user stories are more trouble than they’re worth for your team, this episode is for you. Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/user-story-fatigue/ Connect with Humanizing Work: https://twitter.com/HumanizingWor...

In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question: “What should I do if people won’t participate in retros?” It can feel like you’re failing as a facilitator, but sometimes there’s more going on. Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/when-people-dont-participate-in-retros/ Connect with Humanizing Work: https://twitter.com/HumanizingWork https://twitter.com/rslawrence/ https://twitter.c...

Most people know how useful feedback can be. But the actual experience of getting feedback is so often ineffective or even painful. In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question, "How do you get useful feedback?" by sharing a six-step approach that avoids some of the most common feedback challenges. Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/how-to-get-useful-feedback/ Connect with Huma...

Our standard advice is that we should structure teams to contain complexity. Complex work is inherently emergent, and you need close collaboration with team members to address that emergence effectively. This is much harder to do when a team spans time zones. The feedback loop to get all team members aware of and adapting to the new information can be up to a full day, a glacial pace compared to t...

Humanizing Work Snapshots are brief episodes where we share examples of the ways we’re working to humanizing our own complex work. In this episode, the Humanizing Work team reflects on an example of how we prioritized our own work for a team collaboration day when it wasn’t obvious what to focus on.   Check out the episode page for an image we refer to in this episode.

We host four Humanizing Work Communities of Practice. On the first Friday of each month, alumni of our annual conference meet to stay connected and dig into advanced topics about humanizing their work. On the second through fourth Fridays, our ScrumMaster, Product Owner, and leadership communities meet.

In this episode, Peter and Richard talk with Luke Hohmann, best known as the creator of Innovation Games. We discuss how Luke moved from high-level figure skating into software development, how Innovation Games started, and what he’s doing now with his new company, FirstRoot, to bring participatory budgeting to schools. Episode page:  https://www.humanizingwork.com/luke-hohmann-on-figure-skating-i...

Sometimes a management team decides they want to use something like Scrum to organize their own work. But they’re not building a product, so what should their backlog look like? In this mailbag episode, Peter and Richard answer the question, “How do we create a good backlog for our management team?”

In this episode, Richard and Peter answer a question that comes up frequently when we’re working with leaders in an organization considering agile adoption. Sometimes, picking which team goes first is straightforward, but not always, and there are a few important trade-offs to keep in mind. Episode page: humanizingwork.com/picking-a-pilot-team-for-agile-adoption/ Connect with Humanizing Work: http...

In this mailbag episode, Richard and Peter answer the question: "Our boss is pushing us to deliver a big project on a timeline that feels impossible. Saying we can't do it feels like a bad career move. How do we deal with unrealistic timelines?" Spoiler alert... The right answer is neither “Just agree” nor “Just say ‘no’.” Episode Page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/dealing-with-unrealistic-deadl...

Our background is in Agile development, and one of the reasons we find Agile approaches so useful far beyond software development is that they provide a great toolset to create real, effective teams. In this episode, we'll share the part of Agile that anyone, software-focused or not, can take away and apply in their approach to building and improving teams.

Peter reunites with a few team members from the Adobe Audition team, the first Scrum Team at Adobe in 2005. We laugh, we cry, we dig into what made that team so memorable for all of us and how we've applied what we learned to future teams.

There are a few factors that can kill a team that are external things, and hence out of its control. But almost all of the things that we've seen kill a team are related to individuals' capability to collaborate and lead effectively. In this episode, we share the things we've seen that are most toxic on teams, and the antidotes we've seen most effective in addressing those toxins.

Peter's first career was as a musician playing trumpet in jazz and other groups. As his second career in Humanizing Work unfolded, he realized that jazz groups provided some amazing lessons for work teams on collaboration, listening, group creativity, and individual and collective growth. In this episode, Peter reunites with some of his old buddies and a few new friends from the jazz community to...

Great work, innovative work, impactful work is almost NEVER a solo effort. In fact, most important work is done by teams small and large. Unfortunately most of the work groups that people call a team aren't really a team. In this episode, we'll share our definition of a team and the key components that set a team up to be successful.

In this episode, we examine the historical trends that are creating the need for the Humanizing Work movement to emerge today. We seem to have hit the limits of a mechanistic view of work, and are transitioning into something new, or more correctly, a restoration of a human-centric approach to work, but one that includes emergence and the benefits of technology and scale.