Conversational Transformation

Putting the new employee in charge of onboarding actually improves the result.

Vasco Duarte, master of Scrum, issues a call to arms for all scrum masters: you have nothing to lose but your estimates and feature factories!

Aiming to win robs you of valuable information

Unilateral action risks leaving out vital information

In an episdoe with Alan Weiss we find out why language controls business, how us engineers can drive strategy by emphasizing results and not technology , and what tough love is and why it's so effective.

In the second of a two-part series, Johan Abildskov of Eficode has a conversation with Jeffrey and Squirrel about tools for using conversations to implement agile and DevOps methods, including Test-Driven Development for People.

In the first of a two-part series, Johan Abildskov of Eficode has a conversation with Jeffrey and Squirrel about culture, transparency and curiosity.

We discuss two very different stories about leaders that communicate a cultural message pithily and clearly, and reflect on why these stories were effective and how all of us can communicate culture in this way.

If your boss isn't helping like you think she should, maybe she's not from Mars, but actually trying to give you more autonomy. We reflect on this in light of real-world coaching stories.

A reader asks whether following the "bad idea" advice from last episode can lead to an unrecoverable local maximum, sentencing the team to endless patches and obscure bugs. Squirrel and Jeffrey have different takes on this based on their ancient greybeard stories.

Drawing lessons from Squirrel's driving test experiences, we explore why making a cultural or process change that's intentionally suboptimal can be surprisingly valuable.

We start with a listener question on roles in an agile team, but quickly divert to Squirrel's "driftwood theory" of hiring and role specification, which turns out to be based on effective conversations and flexible problem solving (what a surprise!)