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 [...]
You are equipped by default with two valuable mechanisms you can use to practice mindful focusing. The first is a set of highly sophisticated sensors attached to your ankles: your feet. The second is a system of air passages and musculature conveniently configured with connections to most of your [...]
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 [...]
It's hard to imagine designing a contemporary technology system without a healthy investment in performance and reliability monitoring tools. What would the human equivalent of a set of system monitoring tools look like? The Thoughtstream Monitor The Thoughtstream Monitor would present a display of [...]
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[...]
Last week I went to the DevOpsDays Seattle conference. It was a great community event and very well-run, and I got to reconnect with a bunch of old friends and make some new ones. The best part of the conference for me was John Allspaw's talk on "Taking Human Performance Seriously in Software." As[...]