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From Bankruptcy to Abundance
I recently read Rose and Benjamin Zander’s book The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life and I strongly recommend it. To me it was a book full of stories about mindset...
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The Values of a New Methodology: Swarming
Perhaps the time has come for a new methodology. The old methodologies are showing their age as they are gradually incorporated and transformed by the large organizations of the world. There are many...
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How to Slow Down Your Team (and Deliver Faster)
Is your team in need of a little improvement? Are they getting a little stale? Are you looking for a way to bring their performance “to the next level?” Well, maybe you should slow it down. Oh I know,...
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Coping with a Fear of Inaccuracy
“Even imperfect answers can improve decision making.” – Donald Reinertson When I read this from Reinertson’s book on flow, I realized that I had found the reason that people have so much trouble with...
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Swarming Principles
In an earlier post I introduced a set of values that might be used to guide swarming teams. Values are a good start. They provide very broad guidelines to give teams guidance when making big picture...
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Swarming Roles
So far in this series I have covered the values and principles of the swarming methodology. Now let’s talk about roles on swarming teams. In nature, when you look at swarms, flocks and schools there...
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Broadcast Communication
In the agile development community, we are all hip to the notion of two way communication. It can be via any mechanism you choose: email, instant messaging, smoke signals or the hands-down, all-time...
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Team Genetics
Today I was listing to “The Splendid Table”, a great cooking show on NPR. They were talking about variation in growing heirloom tomatoes. Somehow, that got me thinking about agile teams (probably time...
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Swarming Context
The application of Swarming as a method can be broken down into four main contexts. For each context the process of swarming is different. Allowing for different contexts makes sense, because we...
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This is the Way Scrum Ends
This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. - T.S. Eliot Did you ever wonder if this is the future of Scrum? Will it...
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Starting Swarming
“prattle without practice” ― William Shakespeare, Othello Enough prattle! All this theory is great, but how do we actually set the conditions for swarming to occur? How can we make it work? Initiating...
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Disappearing Radiators
A little while ago I wrote an article sharing all the amazing information radiators that you can find in a 1st grade classroom. It’s been a while since that eye opening experience and I found myself...
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Project Anarchy
Recently I’ve been writing a series of posts on a rather radical methodology that I call Swarming. I describe it as a method that enables individuals to become part of whatever team they like and work...
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Swarming Resources
Here are some of the books and web sites that researched as part of my investigations into swarming. There are a few that I should probably re-read too. That said, if you are interested in swarming,...
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Environments for Swarming
What kind of environment would best suit a swarming team? I just stumbled across something called the SOLE toolkit while researching this topic. SOLE stands for Self-Organized Learning Environment....
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Announcing The Swarming Development Method
By now, you’ve probably figured out that I’m laying out all the guidance for using Swarming as a legitimate, full-fledged, Agile method. It looks like this: Swarming Values Principles Roles Team...
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Living in the Space Between the Notes
“The most critical aspect of the work, both artists said, was not the objects themselves, but the space between objects.” -Daniel J. Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music As I was reading Levitin’s...
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A Team Named “Sue”
My daddy left home when I was three And he didn’t leave much to ma and me Just this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze. Now, I don’t blame him cause he run and hid But the meanest thing that he...
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Post Mortem Magazine
Years ago I used to read a magazine called Game Development (at least I think that was it). I’ve never worked in game development myself, but I found it fascinating to take a little peek into the...
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Ripping the Planning Out of Agile
Recently I was following some twitter feed about #NoEstimates. I’m no expert, but it seems to be a conversation about the fundamental value, or lack of value, that planning provides to teams. What...
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