Each week we share key ideas from our client work, our interactions with the Humanizing Work community, and our travels on the internet. We’re constantly thinking about how individuals, teams, and organizations can be more effective in a human-centric, complexity-aware, and sustainable way.
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This Week
When 33°F is colder than 11°F - In a recent early-morning workshop on Zoom, we got into a discussion about cold weather. Someone from Austin mentioned it was a chilly 33°F. A few participants from Colorado and Nebraska chuckled—they were dealing with single digits that morning. “It’s what you’re used to,” someone pointed out. And they were right. What feels bone-chilling in […]
The Archives
- When 33°F is colder than 11°F
- The Secret to Keeping Your New Year’s Goals (It’s Not What You Think)
- Why Are We Still Talking About Story Splitting?
- The 1-2 Punch for Effective Goal Setting
- Bring the Work to the Team
- The Hidden Power of One-Way Giving
- How I Learned Scrum Wasn’t Enough
- Breaking Free from the Delegation Trap
- “This Worked For My Last Team” (And Why That’s Not Enough)
- The Hidden Leverage of Great Product Management
- The Return of Pragmatic Agile: Coming Full Circle
- The Secret to Making Facilitation Skills Feel Natural
- Spreadsheet Problems
- The 4-Step Roadblock Buster
- The 3 Essential Levels of Planning
- Perception ISN’T Reality, But…
- Why Is Prioritization So Hard?
- 3 Essential Skills for Engineering Managers
- 5 Common Mistakes When Answering Questions Under Pressure (And How to Avoid Them)
- The One Thing You Control In Every Meeting
- Asking Why Without “Why”
- Decision Making in Consensus Driven Cultures
- Does Agile Make You Faster?
- Three Approaches to Goals
- Our Favorite Prioritization Question
- Why Most Teams Underperform
- Don’t Put That In Your Backlog
- Facilitation Case-Study: Remembering the Future Together
- Maximizing the Flow of Value
- Customers Don’t Want Your Product, They Want This…
- Why 40-hour work weeks aren’t a good target
- 5 Business Insights from the World of Music
- Using Vision as a Filter
- Teams Need a Shared Purpose
- Lightweight Async Feedback
- What to Focus On in 1-on-1s
- Unsplittable Stories—Myth or Reality?
- Are POs Responsible for Strategy?
- From Intuitive to Instructive in 3 Steps
- 3 Course Formats for Different Kinds of Learning
- A Sprint Review Is More Than a Demo, But It’s Not Less
- How Long Should Backlog Refinement Take?
- 5 Principles for Org & Team Structure
- No More Bad Meetings!
- Get to Done Every Day
- Team Habits for Reliable Results
- How to Keep Meetings On Track
- Sustaining Team Momentum Beyond January
- Insights from 2023’s Most Popular Content
- Our Favorite End-of-Year Retro Format
- You Only Need to Change One Thing
- Finish Strong, Start Stronger: Practical Tips for Year-End Success
- When Busy Becomes a Buzzword: The Art of Value-Driven Work
- The High Cost of Ineffective Backlog Refinement
- Groups of Customers Lie to You
- But We Must!
- Confirmation Bias: The Silent Product Killer
- Keep Showing Up
- Purpose, Mission, Vision, Strategy: What Jobs Do They Do?
- Business as Usual Product Ownership (and why it doesn’t work any more)
- New Manager Mistakes
- Can’t Fix It? Make It More Visible
- Framing a Meeting Right
- Do It Once Before You Scale It
- Does it need to be a meeting?
- The Most Misunderstood Motivation Factor
- Drifting into Consensus
- The Problem with Quick Wins
- Designing Org Change Experiments
- How to Learn Faster
- When a Team Isn’t Performing
- Dealing with Interruptions on a Scrum Team
- How to Get the Quiet Ones to Engage
- How do you define value?
- Collaborate vs. Coordinate
- Archetypes of Product Ownership Gone Wrong
- Why Doing Scrum Well Is Not Really About Doing Scrum Well
- When You Can’t Do It By The Book
- Habits and Strategies
- Culture Signals
- Cultivating Good Luck
- 10 Ways to Influence Beyond Your Team
- Borrow to Unlock a Breakthrough
- The Power of Layering Models
- Create Clarity by Defining Success
- Feature Mining — Where do you start?
- Using Questions Well
- Own-Influence-Respond
- Prioritization Heuristics
- What parts of Scrum are essential?