Episode 175: Self Selecting Teams & Olympic Lessons with Sandy Mamoli

Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and chat with Sandy Mamoli, Agile Advisor and Coach at Nomad8 and co-author of “Creating Great Teams” and they chat about:

Nomad8 is a managerless agile coaching collective in New Zealand, based on the Crisp model
The lost podcast
Kanbanfor1 (and Jim Benson – Personal Kanban)
“Creating Great Teams” book with David Mole – based on the journey at Trade Me, if people can organise themselves for a Ship It day it should work for everyday work
You do not need to change reporting structures to make self selection work nor does the size of the organisation matter
Original paper on Self Selection
Larger companies should probably split to tribes of no larger than 150-200 people
Heidi Helfand – “Dynamic Reteaming” book and podcast
Should do self selections again every 6-9 months
Team structures can change during a self selection as required
You usually need multiple rounds of self selection, rounds are usually about 10 minutes long
YOW! 2017 talk “How the Olympics Can Make You a Better Person” and Agile Australia talk
“Be the worst player on the best team that will take you” – allows you to amplify learning
AgileWelly
State of Agile in New Zealand – along with Australia are ahead of the USA due to smaller companies, age of companies, less fear and more innovation
Agile Principle and Modern Agile and Liftoff cards
Holocracy – pushing decisions into circles has allowed fast and good decisions, this will continue to evolve
#JAFAC conference

Episode 164: Agile Australia 2017 Vox Pop #2

Craig and Tony are once again roaming the halls at Agile Australia in Sydney and finding random folks to talk to at the conference:

Sarah Romeyn from WorkCover Queensland – enjoyed Pete Steel talk “Developing an Experimentation Culture” and Sherif Monsour talk “The art of building a roadmap“
Rachel Slattery from Slatterys (organiser of Agile Australia) – 1,200 attendees (a sellout) at the conference, such a good level of goodwill in the Agile community, half of the conference are new people and 60% hear about it through word of mouth, all flavours of ice cream (even coconut apparently…), AgileAus hub for all things Agile in Australia
Melissa Perri keynote “The Build Trap“, teal organisations tend to form like that at inception, other organisations have the people but the process to get there is still hard
Adam Boas and Andy Kelk from Marketplacer – enjoying the deep dive sessions as a way to talk to speakers you normally don’t get the opportunity to talk to, outcomes over output is a key theme at the conference

Tony and Craig are at Agile Australia 2017 in Sydney and wander the very busy hallways catching up with attendees and with old friends:

Sieger de Vries – enjoyed Matt Pancino talk “The future of Agile in the enterprise: has the war been lost?”, distributed Agile and use of partnering is here to stay
Mia Horrigan from Zen Ex Machina and Joseph Gard from Australian Taxation Office – lots of Agile interest in Canberra around scaling Agile and leading the change in government, enjoyed Barry O’Reilly keynote “Lessons deploying Lean Enterprise“
Venky Krishnamurthy from The Empirical Coach – LeSS is purely based on evidence from experiments that was created into a framework, enjoyed Jez Humble workshop and keynote “Continuous Delivery Sounds Great But It Won’t Work Here“
Steve Scotson from 4impact – enjoyed the high standard and breadth of subject matter around innovation and organisation change
Karyl Crick – more managers should come to these events to see how Agile can help rather than just listening to the people above them, enjoyed Esther Derby keynote “Leaders at all Levels” and Stuart Mitchell talk “Agile Governance: Evolution or Revolution“
Sally Greenwood – enjoyed Matt Pancino talk, the advocates at CommBank already existed they just needed to make it happen, “it’s not about scaling agile up, it about descaling the organisation”

Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Sydney and catch up with Esther Derby, co-author of numerous agile books including Agile Retrospectives and Behind Closed Doors. We also ask the question whether Tony is cool or not….

Agile Australia keynote “Leaders At All Levels“
Leadership is the ability to adapt the environment so that everyone is empowered to contribute creatively to solving the problem
Need to develop the people we are leading as well as the environment
Need a bigger overlap of the knowledge in organisations so that we can make better decisions
Systemic failure that we assume because you are good at something (like software development) you will be good at management / leadership – they are very different skills
Three C’s – clarity (people know what to work on and how it fits into the big picture), conditions (the means to do the work and access to resources required) and constraints (guidelines to know to act and decide) – things you need to consider if you want to move a complex, adaptive system and build empowered teams
Need to focus on the work that needs to be done not just on the little boxes or our job description
Ask the question to leadership – what are you willing to change?
Coaching Beyond the Team workshop with Don Grey
Whilst smaller organisations can focus on the team, bigger organisations have to focus on the systemic level to make any visible difference
People are interested in the allure of the Agile benefits and what to cherry pick in relation to practices, the same happened with TQM and Lean – need to ask what next shift will help you deliver value to your customers
The millenials will be a big disruptor to management practices