Building trust with others can seem like running the bases in baseball. You, with your good intentions, might feel like the lone baserunner. The people you want to build trust with…they might seem like the other team, intent on getting you off the field entirely. Like a runner, you need to [...]
In their book The Trusted Advisor, consultants David H. Maister, Charles H. Green and Robert M. Galford present a formula, called the “trust quotient” for measuring trust between clients and co-workers. More above the formula on their website. The key part of the formula is a factor they call [...]
Our ancestors did not spend all their time developing cognitive optimizations that would inadvertently lead to failed technology projects in the 21st century. In fact, one of the skills they developed gives us a great image for the kinds of remedy that can help our teams function better today. In[...]
When things don’t go as planned on a sprint or an initiative, you’ll often hear some version of these comments at the retrospective: “We weren’t focused.” “We spent all our time fighting fires.” “We made assumptions that turned out to be wrong.” “The team had [...]
If I had to choose one word as the key indicator of technology initiative success, I’d choose alignment. It’s a word that comes up a lot in planning and implementation of initiatives. Nina Schoen, who lead the PMO at Getty Images when I was there, would often say when a new initiative was [...]
This week at a client site I witnessed a great example of the way mindfulness practice can expose a problematic organizational power dynamic. A Finance group was using the Taming the Elephant method to explore a business process that was not functioning properly. The process progressively uncovers [...]
At a client site yesterday I was introduced (by my wonderful co-facilitator Dawn Kinsey) to a group mindfulness exercise in collective sense-making, where the group spend a minute mindfully inspecting an object (in this case a green water bottle), and then each in turn offered a non-judgmental [...]
One of my very favorite new places to hang out is Seattle CoffeeOps, a biweekly meetup at Chef Software to talk about DevOps. It's big (50+ attendees), friendly and wonderfully designed. The quality of conversation in the breakout sessions of 10-12 people is very high. At a recent session one of the[...]
I taught Gregorian chant classes and retreats for over a decade. Very regularly, enthusiastic new students would show up, exclaiming, "I just love Gregorian chant! It makes me so peaceful and happy, and I'm thrilled to have the chance to learn to sing it." After a few hours of workshopping, I [...]
Talk about effective collaboration! I had the great privilege yesterday of hearing the guitar duo Antoine Boyer and Samuelito at the marvelous DjangoFest Northwest on Whidbey Island. In front of a packed house these two young and wiry Frenchmen sat side by side on the stage in utter relaxation and [...]