Food for Agile Thought #133: Agile Taylorism, Competition & Collaboration, Scrum Values, Continuous Discovery

Food for Agile Thought’s issue #133—shared with 15,436 peers—explains why agile Taylorism — or introducing ‘agile’ by a command and control — is a futile approach. We also learn that competing and collaborating do not have to be mutually exclusive while becoming a learning organization.

We get a better understanding how continuous product discovery works in practice, how to avoid triggering your customers’ resistance to (product) changes, and why Geoffrey Moore might have been wrong.

Lastly, we enjoy the opportunity to learn more about becoming agile in distributed teams—with a free ebook courtesy of InfoQ.

Have a great week!

Food for Agile Thought #133: Agile Taylorism, Competition & Collaboration, Scrum Values, Continuous Discovery

🏆 The Tip of the Week

Margaret Heffernan (via Farnam Street): Company Culture, Collaboration and Competition: A Discussion With Margaret Heffernan

Shane Parrish interviews Margaret Heffernan about leadership, conflict, and how to inspire the transition to a collaborative, learning organization.

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Agile Taylorism & Scrum

Jordan Job (via Responsive Advisors): One Shocking Thing Many Agile Coaches Are Getting Wrong

Jordan Job details why coaching agility by the means that worked so well for General Motors in the 1920ies — agile Taylorism, so to speak — is an ill-fated attempt.

Steve Trapps (via Scrum.org): Visualising Scrum Values

Steve Trapps created an exercise around scrum values that has potential to become a valuable team metric over time.

John Okoro and Hugo Messer (via InfoQ): Distributed Agile

Reading tip: A free download of an ebook by John Okoro and Hugo Messer on becoming agile with distributed teams.

📯 Reverse Retrospective — Aligning Scrum Team and Scrum Master

Are you—as a scrum master or agile coach—experiencing more communication kerfuffles with “your” team? Is its speed of improvement stalling? Are you under the impression that the team is slipping back into old habits and patterns? Maybe, it is time to run a reverse retrospective where your share your observations with the team.

Reverse Retrospective — Aligning Scrum Team and Scrum Master

Read more: Reverse Retrospective — Aligning Scrum Team and Scrum Master.

Product & Lean

Teresa Torres: What a Good Continuous Discovery Team Looks Like

Teresa Torres shares an interview with two former coachees who turned practitioners of product discovery detailing how their daily work has changed.

Cindy Chang (via Intercom): Navigating the complexity of change aversion

Cindy Chang reports on a recent redesign project at Intercom and how her team managed to overcome the expected resistance by the users.

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Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought Edition

Read more: Food for Agile Thought #132: Agile Fluency ™ Model, Late Projects, Picking Battles, Brilliant Jerks.

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