What makes your teammates lose sleep at night? The best way to find out is simple, but not always easy: ask them! In this post, I’ll be presenting a technique — suitable for a retrospective or a lift-off — that opens up channels of communication about the topics of fear…

Ever since the dawn of our species, we’ve told stories. We’ve sung them, told them around campfires, painted them on cave walls, drew them on clay pots and canvases, woven them in tapestries, and carved them into stone. Eventually, we wrote them down. Today, we share stories via sticky notes…

Bring up the topic of “technical debt” to a software engineer, a product owner, a stakeholder, or heavens above, the gold owner. What happens? Do you get frowns? Smiles? Nervous fidgeting? Technical Debt is such a loaded, misused, and misunderstood term. I imagine in most conversations when the topic comes…

Make Deeper Connections by Getting a Little Bit Awkward at Your 1:1 Meetings Catalyzing high-performance teams means more than just working with the right people. It’s more than skill and attitude. These days, more than ever, we need to build and nurture resilience. That means getting to know each individual more deeply than we did yesterday. One on ones are all about your…

All systems have waste. (See the 3M’s of Waste). It’s because of those dang laws of the universe, sometimes known collectively as “There Ain’t No Free Lunch.” I coach teams to practice the art of Kaizen — to become aware of the drag in their systems and address things incrementally…