Category: Culture and Training

To manage one must lead. To lead, one must understand the work that he and his people are responsible for. —Edwards Deming   We have a problem. Proclamations about the cloud, agility, and digital transformation hide the growing gap between the speed of the outside world and the speed inside organisations. My colleague Gregor Hohpe […]

I was talking to the executive team at one of our enterprise customers recently when this connection suddenly hit me. Someone on the team had asked a question along the lines of “How can you organize the activities of autonomous teams so that you can trust them to work on the right things?” An easy […]

We’ve learned from COVID-19 that in a crisis, enterprises quickly have to focus on getting their employees working again. It’s the chief prerequisite for reestablishing business operations. After all, how can your employees respond to the crisis if they can’t work? In an earlier post I pointed out that agility, or nimbleness, is the essential […]

Sometimes, other leaders in your company reject your ideas. Perhaps you’re a CIO, who knows perfectly well that the cloud will have tremendous benefit for your company. But the CFO says no, it’s too risky, or the economic projections aren’t convincing. Or perhaps the CEO doesn’t think it’s a priority right now, or the board […]

The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum [of money] involved. —C. Northcote Parkinson: Parkinson’s Law of Triviality   In my last blog post I covered issues inherent in freeing up time to become more agile. In this post I’ll get into some ways of eliminating […]

A person who chases two rabbits catches neither. —Confucius “I need to transform my organisation to become more agile, but I don’t have enough people or time.” Does this ring a bell? As organisations look to evolve their culture and adopt supporting cloud-based technologies, one significant challenge is how to do this while also keeping […]

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them. ― Ernest Hemingway At a discussion on the characteristics of modern agile organisations, a chief people officer asked how psychological safety could be created in the workplace. In the moment an answer eluded me. The topic came up again as […]

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosopher

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. — Goodhart’s law As a developer fresh out of school, the first two service level agreements (SLAs) that I was accountable for were on-time delivery (OTD) and first time right (FTR). While the intention of the first time right measure was to reduce rework […]

Managers don’t solve simple, isolated problems; they manage messes. -Russell L. Ackoff By education and hobbies, I am an electronics engineer. Most problems I face in this domain can be solved through the application of mathematical principles and known solutions. Complex problems can be decomposed into multiple simpler problems and solved in the same way, […]