05. Organizationally-Traumatic Management Junk Food
Technology Leadership Podcast Review
Release Date: 03/01/2019
33. Making The World’s Best Pencil
Technology Leadership Podcast Review
Learning to play piano by reading music theory, wasting time investing in your tools, leadership as conducting an orchestra, making the world’s best pencil, and excising the word “prevention” from your vocabulary.
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32. A Bucket Full Of Crabs
Technology Leadership Podcast Review
The downside of being responsive to change, how mobbing addresses the cognitive challenges of legacy code, the similarities between the people you associate with and a bucket of crabs, better marriages through mission statements, and questions to ask your political opponent.
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31. Waiting For The Dinosaurs To Leave
Technology Leadership Podcast Review
The importance of playing well together, the difference between vision, mission, and values, too much well-intentioned work, waiting for the dinosaurs to leave, and the power of being able to say “No.”
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30. 100 Steps To Product Delivery Nirvana
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The true culture of a place, impoverished views of product-building, Agile for Agile’s sake, avoiding empiricism, and the ease of identifying bad code.
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29. An Honest Look In The Mirror
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Where micromanagement comes from, what healthy teams do, adding passion to expertise, the invisibility of good decisions, and the double-edged sword of being listened to.
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28. A Cumulative Pile of Successes
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The most resilient person, appreciating multicloud, the bicycle as favorite product, and getting used to failure.
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27. Sitting In A Room Full Of Mousetraps
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How Airbnb won by doing the unscalable, staying out of the soup of a rewrite, sitting in a room full of mousetraps, adding data to your tool belt, and why we have “on call”.
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26. Patience and Brainpower
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Software development as a marathon, collective intelligence as a window to the future, how to get visibility on a problem, corporate values as threats, and what to make efficient use of.
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25. We Were Expecting Robots
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Why the AI apocalypse is already here, role-modeling the behavior you’re asking others to adopt, unlocking the capability to learn, history as a warning system, and the pathway of gut feeling.
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24. Fighting Burnout with Yoga Rooms
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Fighting burnout with yoga rooms, what happens before and after meetings, picking which customers you’re going to lose, a more subtle form of mentorship, and why you don’t want to turn a startup into a spreadsheet.
info_outlineJesse Fewell on Drunken PM, Dave Dame on Agile For Humans, Stephen Bungay on Boss Level, Julia Wester on SPAMCast, and Matty Stratton on Greater Than Code.
I'd love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email [email protected].
This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting February 18, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the week when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers.
JESSE FEWELL ON DRUNKEN PM
The Drunken PM podcast featured Jesse Fewell with host Dave Prior. Dave and Jesse talked about the role of the Project Management Office (PMO) in organizations that are transitioning to Agile methods. Jesse talked about the invitation-orientation of the Agile PMO as defined in the Project Management Body Of Knowledge (PMBOK) in which the PMO acts to support teams as they learn to become agile. Dave brought up that most people he has spoken to from PMOs want everyone in the organization to “do Agile” the same way, which Jesse described as management junk food. This led to a further discussion about why people want consistency and why most of their reasons are due to misunderstandings and anti-patterns like optimizing resource efficiency over flow efficiency. They also delved into some of my favorite topics: the leadership circle concept from Anderson and Adams, the competing values framework, and Carol Dweck’s ideas around fixed and growth mindsets.
Website link: http://drunkenpm.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-evolving-role-of-pmo-in-agile.html
DAVE DAME ON AGILE FOR HUMANS
The Agile For Humans podcast featured Dave Dame with host Ryan Ripley. Dave talked about growing up with cerebral palsy which led to a discussion about the opportunities brought about by improvements in accessibility in recent years. He talked about how a technology like Apple Pay that might seem like a relatively minor innovation to most people can be a complete game-changer for somebody with cerebral palsy as it lets them pay for something without having to trust a stranger to go into their wallet. He talked about how social media has given him a voice where in previous generations there just wouldn’t be the opportunity. Nowadays, he says, the biggest accessibility obstacles at work for him are not buildings lacking ramps and elevators, but the inaccessible nature of the company’s org charts.
Website link: https://ryanripley.com/afh-105-agile-leadership-and-management-with-dave-dame/
STEPHEN BUNGAY ON BOSS LEVEL
The Boss Level podcast featured Stephen Bungay with host Sami Honkonen. This episode is a few years old, but I recently finished reading Melissa Perri’s new book The Build Trap which referenced Stephen Bungay’s book The Art Of Action and I have been reading his work non-stop ever since, which got me interested in hearing more from him. I liked what he had to say about uncertainty’s central place in strategy and its distinction from risk. He also told a compelling story about a friend of his working in strategy at a UK retailer and how he went against the traditional rollout of store layout changes to all stores at once and instead rolled out changes a few stores at a time so that he could tweak the design as he went. This is something any entrepreneur would recognize as Lean Startup thinking, but it was completely foreign to the management of this retailer.
iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/stephen-bungay-and-strategy-under-uncertainty/id1041885043?i=1000376171555&mt=2
Website link: http://www.bosslevelpodcast.com/stephen-bungay-and-strategy-under-uncertainty/
MATTY STRATTON ON GREATER THAN CODE
The Greater Than Code podcast featured Matty Stratton with hosts Janelle Klein, Coraline Ehmke, and Jessica Kerr. They began the discussion by having Matty summarize his REdeploy conference talk ‘Fight, Flight, or Freeze – Releasing Organizational Trauma.’ Taking the idea of incidents and outages as a form of organizational trauma, Matty talked about the importance of being able to tell stories about your incident responses and how that helps the organization process the trauma. He cited John Allspaw regarding the idea that incident postmortems should ask questions that trigger conversations rather than give answers. Janelle brought up the point that the stories we tell are sometimes lies that cover up the trauma rather than address it when the environment of the organization lacks psychological safety. This brought them to a discussion of blameless postmortems and how a culture of blamelessness is so hard to build and so easy to lose.
Website link: http://www.greaterthancode.com/2019/02/06/116-healing-organizational-trauma-with-matt-stratton/
JULIA WESTER ON SPAMCAST
The Software Process & Measurement podcast featured Julia Wester with host Thomas Cagley. Tom and Julia talked about the need for spectrum thinking, discussed the distinction between spectrum thinking and binary thinking, and then Julia described how she uses the Cynefin framework to identify whether or not a problem requires spectrum thinking. While this is a straightforward concept, I see binary thinking being applied all the time to address problems that require something more akin to spectrum thinking.
Website link: http://spamcast.libsyn.com/spamcast-532-spectrum-thinking-an-interview-with-julia-wester
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Intro/outro music: "waste time" by Vincent Augustus