I delivered a talk on January 22, 2018 to the DC Scrum User Group entitled “Decoding Culture: Beyond the Fluff and Back to Business”. There are a lot of references and resources included in the presentation. I listed them all here.
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I’ve been thinking a lot over the last several months about how my team and I work. This is somewhat about the actual work we do, but more about how we do it. My thinking was prompted by several factors. First, we felt like we were always maxed out on capacity. The metaphorical CPU was always pegged at 100%. As a consequence, we had long cycle times and lots of context switching. Second, much of the time we felt like we were struggling against the system to get work done. It felt harder than it should have been, was draining our energy, and hurting morale. Finally, we didn’t feel like we were collaborating as a team as much as we would like. We were operating in our own silos.
We needed a change.
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If you hadn’t already figured it out, we live in an increasingly complex world. More people. More moving parts. More interactions. More uncertainty. Some organizations, like Toyota, Alcoa, and the U.S. Navy’s Nuclear Power Propulsion Program, have learned how to manage that complexity in ways that have helped them separate themselves from the pack. In The High-Velocity Edge, Dr. Steven Spear decodes the magic and gives us insights into how these “high-velocity” organizations have become who they are. Continue reading
It's a Nice Life. 