TL; DR: Scrum Police, Marty Cagan on Transformations — Food for Agile Thought #386
Welcome to the 386th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 45,734 peers. This week, we applaud Mike Cohn and his fantastic squad from the Scrum Police for battling the countless misadventures of wonky Scrum implementations. Also, Jurriaan Kamer explores six options to “revitalize your agile transformation” while we reflect on the “relationship between organization and self-organization,” as systems self-organize within constraints. Moreover, Shane Snow claims, “despite our natural propensity to trust, a lack of trust is the #1 underlying cause of dysfunction in teams,” and Jason Cohen dives into humanity’s repeated pattern of inability to predict the future and what techniques we have to navigate our volatile world.
Then, Marty Cagan shares his thoughts on common transformation pitfalls, from outsourcing the transformation to McBoston to the widespread desire for a process, and Tim Herbig suggests addressing the analysis-paralysis problem product teams face during product discovery. Additionally, Dave Gray shares several free innovation-related illustrations, from the corporate innovation ecosystem to measuring innovation to plugging into the startup ecosystem.
Finally, we appreciate that Corinna Baldauf turned all 144 Retromat exercises into a giant Miro template and enjoy Nick Brown’s excellent primer on the many problems, issues, and flaws of a favorite concept of many organizations: flow efficiency. Russ Roberts interviews Kevin Kelly about his book ‘Excellent Advice for Living,’ and why Kevin Kelly is not worried about AI, and we close with David Rotman’s belief that LLMs would inevitably cause a revolution by transforming many jobs. Whether that will be beneficial to society is up to us to decide.