Archives February 2023

Behind the scenes

Behind the scenes of a webinar in our Hanoi apartment.
Cherry is talking to an audience of parents at Alpha School about our parenting books.
(The amazing flowers were a gift from a business client. They all love her.)

Optimise for agility

When we look at Cynefin, it’s tempting to suggest that in Clear or Complicated work, we can optimise for efficiency, with a simple linear model.

We must remember that Cynefin is situational, and the situation can change at any moment.
Optimising for efficiency not agility is a mistake in a VUCA world.

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Back in Vietnam

There is nothing we enjoy more than being back in Vietnam: the people, the food, the sights, and most of all our Teal tribe community.

We are here for six weeks, working with two wonderful new clients and some existing ones too.

And, as always, having a good time doing it.

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Blog posts for January 2023

Information has no value until it is acted upon.

Visualisation is great, if you do something with it. Information has no value until it is acted upon. That is beyond the scope of this book, except to say that this concept is expressed in many different ways that all essentially mean the same thing:

In praise of boring

Boring is good, for living, working, and running a company.

Project management was the worst thing that ever happened to IT

when I wrote this back in 2017 it was for the IT context, but it is still fresh and it applies for any fungible product,  not just software

Get controls out of the way

Controls are essential to protect the organisation’s assets. But achieving velocity through quality requires that all “necessary non-value work” get out of the way of value work. Minimise controls: just enough to control risk, ensure compliance, and monitor performance, with the least possible impact on value work. Experiment with less or lighter control.

A reflection from our client, Amber

In November 2022, one of the Amber team, Maria Nhật Tân, shared on the Facebook Agile Managers Club group: