Phyllis Turner-Brim, Peyina Lin-Roberts, Jeanne Yu, Joe Anderson, Molly Huber I wrote a chapter in my book on Cultivating Attention about Connectedness (more on that here). At a couple of recent meetups I was reminded of how complicated and multi-layered the experience of connectedness within[...]
This post is excerpted from the Connectedness chapter of Cultivating Attention: the Paradoxical Secret of Team Success. Agile software development includes a wide range of practices. The common characteristic of these practices is an incremental and iterative approach: do the work rapidly and [...]
This past Monday was the first day in many weeks that I didn't posted a snippet of content from the book I'm working on (working title: Cultivating Team Alignment). That's mostly because I'm moving into high gear to get the book out the door by the end of the year. I'll post some updates on my [...]
“I’m sorry, but I just don’t trust you,” said Pat to Chris skeptically. Within this black cloud of a sentence—sure to drop plenty of rain on any relationship—there is a very faint silver lining: the fact that Pat is willing to say it out loud to Chris. More typically, a lack of trust [...]
Seattle has grown nearly 20% since 2010. This change has all sorts of consequences, but the one that may affect me the most is a collective breakdown in the civility of driving behavior. When I moved here from San Francisco in 1989, the driving customs seemed almost quaint. Getting through a 4-way [...]
In his book Your Brain at Work, David Rock introduces the SCARF model, a useful paradigm for understanding what motivates all of us, at work and beyond: Status: how important are you to others? Certainty: how well can you predict what’s going to happen to you? Autonomy: how much control do [...]
“If you want to understand someone, walk a mile in their shoes.” I was in a certification course recently where one of the primary characteristics of the group was the varied and interesting shoes the participants wore. Phyllis wore a different (and fabulous) pair of shoes for every one of our [...]
In her book Technology and the Virtues, Shannon Vallor draws on classical Greek, ancient Chinese, and Buddhist principles to lay out a framework for ethical action in the rapidly changing 21st century technological environment. A key principle is “expanding your circle of concern”. As humans we [...]
It’s wonderful when people initiate spontaneous connections with others. There’s nothing quite like the moment when you realize, in the middle of a stressful situation, that the people you are working with are actually human beings, with all sorts of dimensions and contours you never expected. [...]
Suppose you’re just starting a new job and you’re sitting in a conference room with your boss and your new team on the first day. You’re excited about the new work and want to make a good impression. Then you notice it: someone across the table is giving you the “Critical Evaluation [...]
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 [...]
I sang and taught Gregorian chant for 20 years - nearly as long as I have been working in technology. I learned a few principles that may have some relevance for technology delivery. When teaching a group class, my initial piece of advice was always the following: Sing loud enough so the [...]
In his Slideshare presentation on The Agile Method Ecosystem Agustin Villena makes the useful comment that Agile development functions much like fractal systems in nature: like the branching patterns of trees or the contours of a coastline, Agile delivery relies on a nested set of progressively [...]