Badass Agile

By Fuse Chamber, IncTechnology

Badass Agile episodes

July 23, 2018 Episode 59 – Tension Kills Everything
In North America, our lives are increasingly defined by the amount of stress we can shoulder. The ability to ‘push a little harder’ each year is considered a mark of dedication and achievement – but should it really be that way? Is success really about maximum effort?
Tension and anxiety are not only pervasive in our society, they are also lethal. You can see the impacts of stress everywhere on people’s health and happiness
In nature, too much or too little of anything throws the system out of balance, and restoring that balance is costly to the health of the system
We must learn how much physical, mental and emotional effort is enough, and we must be constantly aware that too much effort is not only wasteful, but dangerous.
The most important skill you can teach your teams as a coach is balance – in every aspect of what we do
12 min
July 15, 2018 Episode 58 – Slow Is Smooth, Smooth Is Fast
Agility is surrounded with the expectation that things will happen quickly - teams will ramp up fast, agility will spread quickly and easily, and projects will immediately start delivering value faster. What’s the right mindset to have about speed in Agile practice?
* As the saying goes, you have so slow down before you can speed up.
* If you slow down and execute with precision and quality, you will be - and appear - faster than if you hurry through things and create more mistakes
* Teams need to learn to practice fundamentals to perfection and THEN speed up
* This mindset also helps ease the panic and overwhelm of getting started, which trips up a lot of new teams, because the prevailing attitude is one of Doing What We Can and Improving As We Learn.
12 min
July 08, 2018 Episode 57 – Setting, Achieving, and Re-setting Targets
How do legendary performers become legendary? What separates them from the rest of the vastly talented, inspired and hard working people in the world? I believe it’s the habit of constantly moving the goal post forward.
* You can never rest on what you’ve just done, and you definitely cannot take shortcuts or look for ‘easy'
* You have to make a habit of asking the question - how could we get 1-2 percent better next time?
* You do this at the team and the individual level
10 min
July 01, 2018 Episode 56 – Is Agile Coaching Dead?
Is this the end for the Agile Coach? Have we reached the summit of our useful lives?
* If Coaching is dead, it is incumbent on all Agile leaders then to find the next thing, the next level of improvement and performance
* The notion that ‘everyone gets it now, we’re just fine, thanks’ is the same thing as telling a major league baseball team that we’ve seen enough batting practice, and that we don’t need advice on how to improve anymore
* The coaches job is to continually excel, experiment, and stay on top of new developments and help implement and test them among teams to arrive at a standard that works for a given organization
* It is also a coaches job to know their customer, their teams, and the unique profiles, learning and communication styles of its members. An ‘Agile’ Agile Coach knows how to navigate conversations across levels of seniority and personality.
12 min
June 25, 2018 Episode 55 – The Most Common Questions
What are the most common questions that I get from listeners and clients?
In this episode, I address the 10 questions I get most commonly from listeners and clients, including what to do about estimation across multiple teams, how to break through resistant mindsets within the team and the leadership, and how to get more badass in general.
20 min
June 17, 2018 Episode 54 – Visioning The Sprint
The nature of Scrum is a cycle. Every two weeks feels like a brand new mission. Sometimes, its easy to lose sight of the overall vision and lose our sense of passion and shared purpose. A Sprint Theme, or Vision, can help with that.
* Use the sprint theme not as a list of work or stories to complete in the next two weeks, but as a commitment to changing the world - what is the most important thing we can achieve in this upcoming increment?
* It can be stories or features but it also can be improvements, clearing impediments or winning support
* Make sure the team builds it together - unlike organizational and product visions, a sprint vision is owned by the team, for the team.
8 min
June 11, 2018Episode 53 – Asking for Forgiveness Instead of Permission
One of the badass leadership principles is Ask for Forgiveness, not for Permission. That scares a lot of people. So how do you really integrate that into your badass life and practice?
You never want to be reckless or insubordinate, but you definitely want to encourage your teams to own solutions and decisions
I believe it is as reckless to hold up product with desire for certainty – sign offs, consensus, approvals
Just make sure you have general vision and direction from leadership/product ownership
You’ll need to be courageous at first, but it becomes second nature
You will have to be prepared to protect your team and back up their decisions.
11 min
June 04, 2018 Episode 52 – The Simple Art of Discipline
To fully live Agile values of frequent value delivery, self-organizing teams, continuous improvement, face-to-face communication - WHILE maintaining high standards for design and quality requires something most people don’t have enough of, and it’s one of my favourite topics. Discipline.
* Everything you learn about Agile, Scrum, and any other framework is designed to do one thing - create and harness disciplined action. To do effective things repeatedly until they become habits, and then to build on those by incorporating more.
* The fastest way to ensure that you deliver value all day every day is to learn the art of discipline, what it means, how to get more of it, and how to ensure you are always getting stronger and better - with or without your Agile practice and frameworks.
12 min
May 28, 2018 Episode 51 – Badass Leadership – Recruiting A Passionate Tribe
Building a Tribe Requires that You Set a High Bar for Quality. Excellence. Vision. Dedication. Ethos. To do any less is to guarantee the dilution of the tribe’s effectiveness. But how do you find people like that?
* Start with the Willing. Bring in the people who show the most passion.
* Passion will allow them to work harder and stay the course during tough times
* Passion will make it easier for you to trust them
* Passion decouples performance from external motivators
* Passion makes for better creativity
* It’s easy to find passionate people, but the hard part is getting yourself and others to abandon attachment to education, experience, certification, references and other traditional measures of ‘quality'
12 min
May 21, 2018 Episode 50 – Badass Leadership – The New Wave Of Leader
Leadership has to change in lockstep with changes in society, culture, and values
* We can’t lead the same way as we did 100 years ago…or even 20 years ago.
* The core traits of a leader in this age is not to manage and inspect work, but to inspire, set vision, care for and protect people, and to build trust with and within teams
13 min