Random Thoughts on Leadership and Life

Stories from helping organizations embrace New Ways of Working
5 Surprising Facts about Agile Leadership

I just facilitated my 20th Scrum.org Professional Agile Leadership – Essentials training, making me the 9th most experienced Agile Leadership trainer worldwide – go figure for a guy who is not big on repetitive work. One of the reasons why I am still passionate about Agile Leadership training is the almost 200 leaders I have...

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How to Color Project Gates Teal

I was recently involved in discussion with a group of leaders on project review gates and how to help a product team move forward. Part of the discussion centered on using the word gate and what that means. The more interesting debate, IMHO, is on how to empower a product team and support them in...

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Do You Need Six Geniuses to Make Agile Work?

“You are definitely not a finisher,” responded my wife over lunch after I had explained the Working Geniuses model to her. To make her point clear, she followed up by giving me a couple of examples of projects I have enthusiastically started but haven’t gotten around to finishing (yet). A completely unnecessary elaboration if you...

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How to Improve Business Agility

The newly published 2022 Business Agility Report contains insight from 296 organizations worldwide. According to the report published by Business Agility Institute, understanding your value streams and structuring your workforce and processes around them is one of three key practices to improving Business Agility. This finding is consistent with what I see when advising leaders on...

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A culture of Collaboration is Born at the Top

A lot of the organizations I’m helping adopt Agile are looking to increase collaboration across the organization. Business and IT people need to work closely together to shorten feedback loops and drive down the time-to-market of new productions and solutions. The world is just too complex to solve the problems organizations face in silos. Many...

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Fatal Management

I must admit, I sometimes deliberately, and probably more often unknowingly, provoke my clients to help them think differently about leadership and how they can help their organizations adapt to the challenges of the 21st century. Recently, it was my turn to be provoked when I started reading the book Fatal Management (original Danish title:...

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