22: A New Normal - The Escalation of Climate Change
Only a radical systemic shift can delay climate catastrophe and save humanity from the collapse of ecosystems within just 9 years.
11: A Retrospective of Spotify's Squad Health Check - Todd Galloway
en-usAugust 02, 2016
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About this Episode
Some weeks ago I met with Todd Galloway, Scrum Master with Square Two Financial. Todd has a passion for helping teams to improve, assessing their health, and helping them get where they need to be. For Todd a lot of fundamentals go into helping teams to deliver value sustainably.
In our discussion we addressed the following:
- The Agile Denver Scrum Master Guild.
- Spotify's Squad Health Check (also known as a Team Health Check).
- Todd's experience with the Team Health Check.
- Coaching questions, lively discussions, and learning.
- His recommended frequency for doing Squad Health Checks.
- The Health Check questions with which his teams struggled most.
- The challenge in motivating teams when a compelling mission is absent.
- How powerful questions can help your teams to improve their creativity and collaboration.
- End of Sprint pressure and problems with Scrum.
- Scrum, Kanban, and Scrumban.
- Bottlenecks and the need for greater flow.
- The power in making commitments and setting clear and unifying goals.
- Trust and information biases.
- The importance in discussing the results of the Team Health Check during the same session.
- Assessing team health in low trust environments.
- And much more.
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15: Making the Very Complex... Awesomely Simple – John Spence
I was very fortunate to have spoken with John Spence.
John is one of the top 100 business thought leaders and one of the top 500 leadership development experts in the world.
He is an international keynote speaker and management consultant, and has written seven books on business and life success.
Along with Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Jeff Bezos, John was listed as one of American Management Association’s Leaders to Watch in 2015.
In a free-form conversation, we covered a myriad of topics, including the following: the biggest problem that companies face, the components of great cultures, the evolution of leadership in business, and potential responses to the massive technological disruption which we are now undergoing.
We had a blast. John's infectious laughter made the interview an absolute joy.
The Agile and Beyond website, agileandbeyond.co, is now live. To see the show notes for this interview, please visit the site.
And without further ado please welcome to my conversation with John Spence.
14: Experimentation, Innovation, Managing Risk - Part 3 - Chuck Durfee
In the final episode of a 3 part conversation with Chuck Durfee, Scrum Master, and Agile Denver Board Member Emeritus, recent MBA graduate, recovering developer, and friend of neon tapirs everywhere, we discuss the following.
- Why he got his MBA.
- How he moved from a fascination with computers and software to process and people.
- Leadership Styles.
- Agile, ethics and the making of morally just decisions.
- Power distribution in Agile organizations.
- Incurring technical debt ethically.
- Political correctness, and the stunting of healthy conversations with the other.
- Lowering thresholds of pain and sensitivity.
- How the Political Correctness movement went to far.
- Avoiding Cargo Cult Agile, and why the process needs the mindset.
- The failure to teach Millennials good skills for handling conflict.
- The creative process, and the need to explore failure.
- The way Agile is transforming the world of work.
- The problems with matrix management.
- Allowing Agile to flourish, by eliminating constraints around teams.
- Chuck's workplace Nirvana, the kind of organization Chuck would like to build, his Dream Team, and his role.
- How diverse ideas and even conflict help a team to make a better product or service.
- NANO WRIMO (National Novel Writing Month), and his often humorous experiences in writing fiction... including a romantic drama.
- How early design choices shape the final product.
And now welcome to the final episode of a 3 part conversation with Chuck Durfee.
If you wish to learn more about Agile Denver. You can connect with the organization on LinkedIn, and follow Agile Denver on Twitter at @agiledenver. To learn about future meetings, search for Agile Denver on meetup.com at Meetup.com/AgileDenver.
13: Starting From Where the Learner Sits - Part 4 - Erika Lenz
In the final episode of a 4 part conversation with Erika Lenz, Scrum Master, former poet, evolutionary biologist, and tutor, we discuss what makes Erika unique, comfort with the creative process, the prevalence of mental illness in the arts, grounding others in difficult situations, the power of divergent thinking, building bridges, social dancing, choreography, and floorcraft, helping others to pivot in order to change the behavior of a team, the benefits of adding emotional content in tech environments, the benefits in valuing everyone, and kinesthetic intelligence.
Agile and Beyond
en-usAugust 30, 2016