Tips & Tricks
A Quick Guide To Asking Better Questions
Today, I think the ability to ask good questions is hugely underrated. Asking good questions is essential to help others, to learn from them, understand a problem to come up with the right solution, or to understand why someone is behaving the way they do.
More Team Creativity? First, Look at Safety
Psychological safety is essential because a lack of it can lead to mediocrity, anxiety, stress, and boredom. The team consequence is a lack of risk-taking and refinement of ideas. Recently, our TH!NK Team led a department through a SWOT analysis. The manager was confident that no one would speak up; we assured her that the right environment allows an abundance of ideas to flow. We used these four tips to create psychological safety in this meeting.
5 Tips for Improving Your Digital Meeting Habits
Under the heading of ‘the new normal’ most people have integrally transitioned all their office meetings to an online setting, without breaks, stretching from early mornings to late evening ‘because you don’t have travel time’. Here are some reminders for more artful way of online meetings (written in collaboration with my work buddy Klazien van Vliet).
How to Make Agile Work in Fast-Growing Startups
For years, I worked in several Berlin-based, fast-growing startups in my capacity as Scrum Master, agile coach, and Product Owner. These are my lessons learned on making ‘agile’ — including Scrum as a framework — work in a fast-growing startup. Also, let me introduce you to the anti-patterns agile startups shall avoid at all costs.
Business Agility
An Assessment of Modern Agile Assessment Tools
Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about agile assessment tools. Whether it is comparative agility or the AgilityHealth assessment, it seems that people want to be able to measure the relative agility of one or more of their teams.
Teams, Coaching & Facilitation
Who is on the Team?
The latest revision of the Scrum guide removed the Development Team role with the intention to remove the "us vs. them" dynamic.
3 Ways to Empower Female Software Engineers on Your Team
The comp sci path was not an obvious one for me. I thought of a few different career paths before I took my first computer science class and it opened my eyes to the possibility of a career in STEM. Math has always been one of my strong suits, but I had never thought of myself in a technical role. One of the reasons for this was that I perceived it as a male-powered environment.
For an Agile Transformation, Choose the Right People
Created by a group of software developers in 2001, the agile methodology, which helps project teams achieve objectives quickly in rapidly changing or unpredictable environments, is now being used broadly throughout organizations. But wanting to be agile and being it are two different things. Our research, which looked at the agile initiatives of scores of companies over several years, reveals that many large-scale ones not only fail to meet their goals but also cause disruption within an organization.
Industry News & Analysis
The C-Suite’s New Agile Imperative
In February 2001, what came to be known as the Agile Alliance developed the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Written over a long weekend at Snowbird, a ski resort in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, the Manifesto advocated a new approach to software—one that emphasized adaptation, action, and speed over careful planning and consideration.