Blog posts for March 2023

Team or tribe?

It depends on the work. Sometimes people have to really be tight like a rock band, sometimes more freelance like the horns in an orchestra.

Leaders talk last

When the expectation and authority to speak is proportional to someone’s position in the power hierarchy, everybody loses.

Get management out of the way

Chair and CEO of client: “My staff messaged me to say it’s lucky I’m away on business because they got so much solved in your workshops. Yes, I have removed myself from the process because I see I am the bottleneck.”

Self-regulating IT

It’s not all up to government to regulate the tech sector.
It’s up to us in tech as well.

Trapped in the 20th Century

This article is interesting “Beware the Pitfalls of Agility”. Not because I agree with it – I don’t – but for what it reveals.

The BigC model

I’ve seen the full range of individuals in the Big Consultancies. E.g. Deloitte do some lovely work in Wellington. That doesn’t change the problem with the fundamental model of every BigC…

Fixing Agile

I don’t think Agile software development will ever be “fixed”. It is what it is, it’s in wild, distributed across millions of people in a  hundred countries.

Just as Agile swept the IT world, and then the business world, something else will come along to displace it. There will be a seminal event, a core group, and a new concept that doesn’t just capture but also ignites the zeitgeist.

Simplification

It is tempting to want to simplify systems of work. It is also risky and costly.

Dealing with bullying

This is a useful resource for one of the primary issues when creating a psychologically safe workplace: bullying.

Meaningless commitments

We must stop holding people to commitments and measuring them on meeting them.

Two sides to ChatGPT

There are two interesting aspects of #chatgpt that seem to be conflated in many discussions. (Guilty).  One is a clever party trick,  one may be something more.

Estuarine mapping

Dave Snowden wrote  this post about Estuarine Mapping back in October last year, but I was too busy to read it properly until now.  It’s important. Reading Dave’s stuff is heavy going but rewarding. There are insights here on how we all will think about change now that we accept and understand the complex nature of the world.

Finding complexity

Moving from a computable causal paradigm to a complex emergent one is such a profound reshaping of ones own brain, I’m not surprised most people fumble. I’ve been wrestling with it for a decade and I still have a long long ways to go.

Four levels of organisation

For me, there are four levels of organisation

Reflection on a Teal Space workshop

Our friend and one of the Team Teal, Thi Thanh Hoa Dao, posted this on Facebook today, talking about an all-day workshop we are just finishing up now (we ran another one for a different client yesterday).
The FB translation is passable: