All posts by Rob England

We shouldn’t regard this disruption as an interlude before we see a return to normal. This is normal.

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One way for managers to get out of the way and to respect knowledge workers is the concept of maker schedules.

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Perfection is important in technology. Not so much in humanity, work systems, performance, or art.  We must embrace the joy of the imperfect.

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If you build your organisation out of projects you are building out of blocks that evaporate. A project is a transitory phenomenon, not a structural component. You probably know of one or more organisations whose BAU is whatever was left when the projects vanished. Building a business out of projects’ droppings is a bad idea. We should build our organisation out of products, with standing product teams which are a permanent function for the lifetime of the product. Our New Ways operating model is based on product not project.

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At TU, we are careful to distinguish between leader and managers.

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There are classic mistakes being made over and over as large organisations try to “do Agile”, “implement Agile”, or *shudder* “transform”. I’m getting passionate about preventing the harm.

We hate that word “transform”, although old habits die hard and I still catch myself using it. I had to do a deliberate purge through our new book. Transformation is done by fairy godmothers. Or caterpillars. Large entities don’t change like that, they don’t change that fast, and it isn’t a finite step. Stop it. We say “advance”.

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Don’t use structural reorgs to chase ”transformation”.
They don’t work.
They break existing teams.
They damage morale.
They sow confusion.
And they turn one set of siloes into a different set of siloes.

Amongst the dysfunctions of transformation, restructuring is one of the worst.

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We are in tight lockdown in New Zealand but Teal Unicorn are as busy as ever.

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When I read work-related social media, Bob Dylan’s “Times they are a changin’” often echoes in my head.

I’m amazed at the inability of so many people – most of them my cohort: middle-aged white men – to grasp the social changes under way.

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The conventional view of planning looks at it from an assumption of a simple /obvious/ clear[1] world that is understandable and predictable. We now understand that the world is generally complex, that we are not able to understand or predicted much of it.

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