Traditional scaling creates the very problems it's meant to solve!
@jamesshore.bsky.social James Shore shares why the common wisdom of carefully aligning teams and responsibilities eventually breaks down, and how #FASTAgile offers a fundamentally different approach.
youtu.be/2w7of-65Cts
If you’re changing the org chart, don’t design it behind closed doors and introduce it in a top-down manner—that’s a terrible way to foster aligned autonomy as it robs people of their sense of autonomy. Instead, the people affected by the redesign exercise should be involved as much as possible.
It is tempting to do research and management where there are data. It gives the manager a feeling of doing something useful. However, managers need to be careful of falling into a trap of managing the measurable rather than managing the important.
Compassion isn’t just good, it’s good for business, and a 2004 paper argues that compassion at an individual level... can turn into “organisational compassion” when team members collectively notice, feel, and respond to pain experienced by team members.
Unleashing creativity requires that we loosen the controls, accept risk, trust our colleagues, work to clear the path for them, and pay attention to anything that creates fear. ~ Ed Catmul
Dictators come and go, and when they go the dictatorship goes with them. When a true leader departs, the company he leaves behind is healthy, self-governing, vibrant, and intact. ~ Ricardo Semler
Create a culture of hospitality. Which means addressing questions I’ve spent my career asking: How do you make the people who work for you and the people you serve feel seen and valued? How do you give them a sense of belonging? How do you make them feel part of something bigger than themselves?
A fun workplace trumps careful hiring when it comes to performance and personal satisfaction.
"In nonviolent action, you’re trying to win by converting people to your cause" (Srdja Popovic and Matthew Miller, Blueprint for Revolution)
The 4 key metrics you've been measuring?
They are now 5 📊🗝️
Here's what #DORA changed and what it means for your continuous improvement efforts. cd.foundation/blog/2025/10...
Cursing is rarely a symbol of low class. It's often a mark of high authenticity.
Evidence: Swearing predicts higher rates of honesty and integrity. It signals a willingness to prize candor over courtesy.
A little profanity can show that you're being real and you do give a damn.
As customers, we can learn how employees are treated by their bosses by noticing how the employees treat us.
Epstein files giving House Republicans over two months paid vacation and counting.
Who Visited Epstein Island? Find out by watching 'The Onion Investigates: Jeffery Epstein' on The Onion here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjhSoGcQhWU
Pope Leo quotes Hannah Arendt:
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist."
www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news...
Compassion is the self-discipline to imagine and remember that everyone faces hurdles.
Edmondson, Amy C.. The Fearless Organization (p. 206)
People are not resources. Language matters.
Resources, generally speaking, are fungible. They can be bought and sold.
Why does Open Space work anyhow? How could something so simple do so much? The short answer is that Open Space works because self-organization works. At least that is the conclusion I have reached after some fifteen years’ wondering how this little marvel manages to do what it does.
#FASTAgile
If you hold the expectation that your hard work and good efforts are invariably going to be appreciated, acknowledged, and rewarded by your employer in perpetuity, it’s time to get over yourself.
Want to crank up your adaptive / #agile capability? My advice is to ditch #scrum for something else flow-based like kanban or #FASTAgile.
I really dislike being asked "tell me about a time when..." questions in interviews.
I think Will Guidara's approach is much more sensible.
You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic. ~ Robert A. Heinlein
We will attempt to undo the damage of the manager-as-strategist view, and replace it with an approach that encourages you to court success with this formula:
• Get the right people.
• Make them happy so they don’t want to leave.
• Turn them loose.
#BetterWaysOfWorking
History repeats and the same happens again with OKRs (a very similar concept to management by objectives) being done in a way so poorly it defeats its original purpose.
Healthy organizations are a mental concept of relationship to which people are drawn by hope, vision, values, and meaning, along with liberty to cooperatively pursue them. Healthy organizations educe behavior. Educed behavior is inherently constructive.
#BetterWaysOfWorking
Many firms try to use OKRs as a form of top-down control, ensuring that each subordinate’s OKRs fit with the OKRs of their superior. While this feels like alignment, it all but eliminates any chance of divergence or serendipity.
Even in early #Scrum, the founders are recommending one of the same practices #FASTAgile does - team members should be T-shaped i.e. multi skilled.
#Agile #BetterWaysOfWorking
Most new ideas will never pan out. That’s why failure is a fact of life. But it’s a law of #innovation that successes can’t go up unless failures go up, too. And because we can’t have successes without the failures, we need to create organizational cultures that cherish failure.
