Why many Scrum teams struggle with continuous improvement, and how you can do better — Do your Sprint Retrospectives feel like a waste of time? Are members of your team wondering what the point is of talking about improvement when nothing ever happens? Are you struggling to improve with your team, even though the whiteboard, Mural, or desk is littered with stickies with improvements ideas…

An exploration of the color theory of change, and how it illustrates a bias in our community that may explain our failure to enact meaningful change — Do you start a new Scrum team by explaining the roles, artifacts, and events? Do you rarely consider how to build coalitions and persuade people in power to support your work with Scrum? Are you thinking about the psychological needs of people and how to motivate them to work with…

An investigation of three schools of thought on team development and high-performing teams — Recently, the concept of “fluid teams”, “dynamic reteaming” or “ad-hoc teaming” has gained traction in the Agile community. Although the concept has many different definitions, a characteristic they share is that members move in and out of a team during its lifetime. There is obviously a wide range of fluidity…

Reflections from participants on their experience of Liberating Structures — What are Liberating Structures? I could explain that there are 33 of them and that each one is a “microstructure” with a specific purpose. I could give you examples of how they work. For example, the Liberating Structure 1–2–4-ALL asks participants to first reflect in silence on a question…

On the psychological power of Liberating Structures — Liberating Structures are like a language for how people interact. Once you learn to speak and recognize its symbols and its grammar, you see its potential everywhere people interact. I know how weird that sounds — especially when you’ve never experienced them before. This potential affirms my belief that we…

A guide on how to act professionally by seeking out evidence to test what you believe to be true about Scrum, teams, and change — This post is for anyone who wants to inspire, change or influence others through their efforts as professionals, with emphasis on the latter. What is the optimal size of a team? Should teams be stable over at least several years, or is it a good idea they change at will…

If last year centered on anything for us, it was product development for the Scrum Team Survey. Barry Overeem and I consciously made the decision to branch out into new domains and tap into other ambitions. So we spent most of my time writing code, providing support, and uncovering new…

Surprising insights from scientific studies into when and why code smells are introduced, and practical recommendations for how to write better code — This post is part of our “in-depth” series. Each post discusses scientific research that is relevant to our work with Scrum and Agile teams. With this series, we hope to contribute to more evidence-based conversations in our community and a stronger reliance on robust research over (only) personal opinions.

An opinion piece on how the distinction between Agility and Business Agility only distracts leaders from what they should actually be doing — You can also listen to this post in this episode of our podcast. There is a growing trend in our industry to distinguish between “Agility” and “Business Agility”, or even “Enterprise Business Agility”. As one site puts it, “Business Agility is a much bigger conversation and looks at making the…