Code coverage is a perverse incentive
While code coverage can be a useful measurement for teams to improve their own results, the moment it’s tracked by people external to the team, particularly management, it becomes a perverse incentive.
What’s wrong with the common Scrum questions?
Each day during standup, most teams will have every answer three questions. The questions most commonly asked are fairly poor and result in a undesirably bad meeting.
Retrospective Magic
Are your retros running a bit flat? Need something to spice them up and make them more effective and also more interesting for your team? Join us as we walk through a collection of techniques from psychology and applied neuroscience to give your retros that edge you need.
Collocated vs Distributed Teams
For years, agile coaches have been touting the benefits of collocated teams and pointing out the inefficiencies of having people remote. When COVID-19 struck and everyone was required to work from home, we found that while teams certainly weren’t as effective as they’d been in the office, it wasn’t nearly as bad as had been anticipated. How do we make sense of this?
Six Thinking Hats
Six Thinking Hats is a technique to improve creativity by focusing our attention on only one perspective at a time. Useful wherever we need creativity - from retrospectives to product planning to strategic visioning.
Putting the Moose on the Table: A LEGO based retrospective
In order for teams to step into high performance. it’s critical that they develop the practice of having effective conversations about what is and isn’t working. Yet in practice, the retrospective meeting is often the least-valued of the agile events: team members feel that their retros are boring, repetitive, and superficial.
Exploring the Anti-Anxiety Toolkit
Stress and anxiety are widespread in our industry and you may have already noticed that it’s really hard to coach someone who is highly stressed or anxious. It’s also really hard for you to personally perform at your best when you’re in that state.
Brain Talk
Words direct attention. Some words will encourage superficial conversations while others will allow you to quickly get into deeper, more meaningful ones. Learn some of the language patterns used by hypnotists and other effective communicators.
Links
A variety of links off to studies and articles that support the concepts covered in this site. Unconscious behaviour, neuroscience, psychology, etc.
Body Language
The triune brain theory suggests that we have three distinct parts to our brains: The reptilian brain, the limbic system and the neocortex (conscious). When we’re talking about body language, we’re almost exclusively talking about those things controlled by the limbic system.