My general answer when I receive a question like this is “Try it. Apply the ideas to see how you can get impact in your organization. Work with others to create even more impact and learn as a group. Then, use this as the beginning of a learning journey to continue improving and developing your skills further.” After all, training is about the knowledge, not the certification, and the value of that knowledge is essentially zero if you don’t apply it.
aka: Don’t Cripple your Portfolio Agility The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) provides a very powerful portfolio model that allows companies to articulate, steer, and capture the benefits of technology investments. Like the rest of SAFe, however, there is a lot of content and it is very difficult to understand which Read more…
I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of agility, and why companies would even bother with it in the first place. Too often these days, I see agility becoming its own purpose, exposed by language of “We need to be more agile!” or “that’s not agile” or “Do X Read more…
The constant stream of grim news about the Covid-19 global pandemic sweeping the world and about the struggles of world governments to respond has me reeling emotionally and intellectually. I want to do something, but at first didn’t know where I could have an impact. When I was invited to Read more…
Elevate stands ready As I write this, it feels like everything has changed in the world around us. Capabilities that we took for granted even just three weeks ago are no longer possible, and we do not know when we will be able to return to what we knew before. Read more…
One of the more interesting challenges in founding a company focused on bringing agility, advanced facilitation, and radical alignment to leadership teams is that we don’t have existing language to describe much of what we do, even to our most trusted partners and customers. People that have experienced it with Read more…
This is a guest post by Rosemary Astra-Blossom, an amazing woman I’ve worked with on several recent workshops and events. When she asked for guidance on how to process the results of the interviews, and I responded with “It’s hard to describe, I’ll have to show you” and then walked Read more…
A customer recently asked how I defined an “empathy interview.” Because she needed to explain it to the leadership team around her, I needed to provide a better answer than my typical stammering about “understanding” and “being ready” and “connecting.” As all good engineers would do, my next effort was Read more…
Empathy interviews are critical for gathering the context and perspectives ahead of an important facilitation event, as well as just simply connecting with the people you’ll be helping. Getting ready for performing the empathy interviews for a workshop is fairly straight-forward, but there are a few questions to answer before Read more…
The hardest part of preparing for an Empathy Interview is figuring out which questions you need to ask. There’s no canned set of right or wrong questions to use, because each workshop’s outcome and the current state of the group participating directly influences the nature of the questions. When a Read more…