Agile Leadership Articles

The start of the year feels like a natural point to set goals, both personally and at a team or orga…

How do you make goals specific? In this video, John McFadyen shares his recommendation for making go…

It can be easy to be over-optimistic when setting goals, leading to targets that aren’t attain…

Goals can be great to give us direction and keep us accountable. But in such a volatile world, you m…

What do you do when a goal becomes obsolete? The nature of today’s business climate means that…

Why take Scrum training? Scrum may appear simple at first, but it is deceptively difficult to do wel…

For many, the mention of the word agile conjures up images of software engineers, stickie notes…

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries organizations saw great leaps forwards in t…

We live in a world that is more interconnected, more volatile, and more unpredictable than at a…

Organisational culture is one of the most powerful, and misunderstood, concepts around. Leaders and …

I’m lucky enough to find my job professionally satisfying. That’s because I think the line of work I…

We know from Dan Pink’s work that high levels of autonomy are a powerful contributor to motivation. …

An ancient part of our brains that existed to keep us alive in a world of danger has evolved. But ra…

In the previous article ‘There Are Sabre-Toothed Tigers In Your Office‘, we discussed ho…

I’m a bit of a rugby fan and often find myself wanting to run out with the lads, moving through the …

The last time we suffered a global pandemic that brought the world to its knees was in 1918. A littl…

For 20 years, ITV’s “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here” has been a staple of the UK pre-Christmas …

In my previous blog post, “Where are all the managers in Agile?”, I discussed why agile doesn’t need…

The heart of agile is described in the few words of the Agile Manifesto and its accompanying princip…

“Belief is so often the death of reason” – Lord Varys, Master of Whisperers – Game of Thrones …

Part of our Covid Hack series of articles Small, cross-functional teams working closely together to …

For 95 percent of the 200,000 years modern humans have walked the earth, there was no such thing as …

Part of our Covid Hack series of articles Many of the corporations we work with are inherently desig…

Part of the Covid Hack series by John McFadyen In a recent Zoom session with Laura Howie, CEO of Ree…

During the pandemic, our revenue streams dried up – literally overnight. The Covid-19 fairy wa…

When I last posted something, before life changed significantly for all of us, I was coming to terms…

At the turn of the 20th Century, the father of modern Business Management – Frederick Winslow …

‘How do I get the senior leadership team to buy into Agile?’ is a question I’m often asked. It’s a g…

‘We didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost.’– CEO of Nokia There’s a moment when the CEO of …

The Case for Business Agility As an Agile coach, consultant and trainer, I pretty much live in a wor…

If ever one wanted the ultimate portrait of a VUCA world – volatile, uncertain, complex, and a…

In 1913, Henry Ford implemented one of the greatest innovations ever seen in manufacturing: the movi…

User Story Mapping is a great technique to help teams explore their product scope and plan how they …

The bootcamp is planned, the travel arrangements made and suitcases packed. Now, the hard work start…

The recent announcement from HMRC that IR35 and Off-Payroll Tax would come into effect on the 6th of…

Once upon a time, two-ton wombats lumbered across the Australian Outback. Around the same time, sabr…

When I first started my journey as a Scrum Master, I devoured books on how Scrum worked. I learnt al…

To say the words ‘Agile Project Management’ in front of Agile purists falls somewhere in the spectru…

Project Management, as both a profession and specialised discipline, is relatively young. From the d…

Continuous improvement is a core agile principle. The retrospective is an important event in all agi…

Anyone whose profession involves advising others needs to be concerned about ethics. In a more gener…

Communication in all its aspects is of vital importance to effective coaching. Getting the most out …

As important as the spoken word is, body language may convey even more information than speech. As a…

Trust relationships are vital to the way we do business today. In fact, the level of trust present i…

Throughout my years as a Scrum Master, Agile Coach and Scrum trainer, there has been a common and pe…

Active listening is a communication technique that requires the listener to feed back what he or she…

For a coach, there can surely be few skills more important than listening. Hearing what your client …

The GROW model is a solid, time-tested coaching tool that can help coaches ensure efficient results …

In February, it will be 17 years since the writing of the Agile Manifesto. Much was, and still is, p…

Recently I was lucky enough to spend a couple of days with Christopher Avery renewing my practice of…

The purpose of Enterprise Scrum is to give organisations the ability to become more resilient i…

I am often asked if using Scrum can make software developers more productive. My response is always …

It is often said, by those in the personal training industry, that you cannot out-train a bad diet. …

It’s the age old debate. ‘I want self-organising teams, but I need to set some constraints. I …

Let’s face it: People skills is not an area in which the software development community has traditio…

Gandhi didn’t say, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” But the sentiment, whoever first ex…

There’s no end of well-intentioned articles about feelings and conduct on the internet. We have all …

I talk to many people about the concept of responsibility at work, especially as so few people see i…

We learn from an early age that to earn trust; you need to show you’re trustworthy. It is earn…

I’ve been at my current client for roughly a month. The role isn’t clear, but I’m …