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Blog posts for May 2023

Planning Europe as we go along

Teal Unicorn – Dr. Cherry Vu and I – have been in Europe for three weeks, working and touring. We finalised very little planning until the last minute.

Hooray for the hatters.

This guy is clearly as mad as a hatter. This is Chaos Engineering at its finest.

Quality

Quality has become a charmless concept of measurable performance.

Decision matrix

The “Eisenhower decision matrix” is so dated, so last century.

On hybrid work, again.

Remote vs office is not a binary choice. It is a spectrum.

Reality rocks

Definitely one of the top 100 moments in my life, noon on a sunny Sunday in Place de Paris, Luxembourg, with love of my life Dr. Cherry Vu.
You know what all those top moments have in common? None of them happened in cyberspace.

Are you being screwed?

The whole of society – the education, religion, philosophy, and community – will gaslight you into believing your place is to work and suffer for the profit of others.

Teal Space

At Teal Unicorn, we have a favourite approach to workshopping improvement with clients, developed and refined by Dr Vu.  We call it Teal Space because of the influences from Open Space Technology.

We are off to Vegas next year

We are off to another conference in March 2024. Las Vegas here we come!

Blog posts for April 2023

Together we are better

We are a collective. It’s in the name: “organisation”. Some sectors like IT are riddled with prima donna thinking, solo operators convinced of their own genius, and equally judgemental of others. This is one endemic cultural deficiency that we must address.

The social impact of AI

People worry that there will be social disruption from AI putting people out of work, like coalminers in Wales or auto workers in Detroit. There potentially is, and I’m not trying to trivialize it.  But I don’t think it will be anything like as painful.

Be prepared

The world is VUCA. How do we be prepared for disruption?

Why we aren’t fans of Situational Leadership®

The Situational Leadership® model is great for an asymmetric power relationship, either master/apprentice or boss/worker. As the world progresses to more advanced workplace cultures, we think Situational Leadership looks dated for management – it is really only suited for training.

Lighten up on speed of making the product

This post is a long one.  It is about software creation but it is also much more general. It is for everyone: we should lighten up on obsessing about the speed of making our products.

If you can’t measure it…

It doesn’t have to be measured to be managed.
It doesn’t have to be measured to be improved.

Solving systems debt

The normalisation of a defect list is one of the biggest dysfunctions of conventional project management and waterfall.
“Thank you for your money, here are your defects. I shall now deliberately release this technical debt into your systems and then we will all leave.
Doughnuts for everyone!”


And three case studies, as I finally catch up with some of our clients in Vietnam

CareHome patience doing the right things for the right results

We are glad that, with Teal Unicorn’s help, CareHome home maintenance company has gone from a bulky management firm to a compact, agile one; from a place of constant loss, and insufficient compensation, to a profitable one; from unhappy people to happier employees and customers. The two owners Đào Hồng Hà and Quách Văn Giang have changed their management ways, from micro-management to open management.
We want to share with you their story:

A spectacular shift at PCS Group

Teal Unicorn’s client PCS is comprised of six divisions: Courier, Post, Logistics, e-Commerce, Online Import, and Trading.  We wrote a case study of the Courier subsidiary.   Here is an update from Cherry on the parent group and the spectacular changes there.

An agile enterprise success – updated

An agile enterprise success in the Vietnam online training industry.
This must be one of the fastest organisational improvements in Vietnam. Mostly over a period of just three months, with the guidance of Teal Unicorn’s Dr. Cherry Vu*, Amber Academy have advanced in a series of incremental steps.