Sharing our thinking in the open helps connect with others trying to advance the future of digital working. Our archive of articles and links is open and available below.
The Cadence of Accountability
One of the first changes a team notices when making the move from traditional ways of working to something more agile and flexible, is how often the words accountable, responsible and ownership crop up in team discussions. Often used interchangeably, they soon become...
To get the most from your team, give them purpose
Speed is unarguably a competitive advantage for organisations in the digital age. But this can lead to entrenched, outdated thinking and ways of working. But even the best teams struggle with complacency if the org culture and management practices are not designed to...
Business agile is a system, not a methodology
An increasing number of non-technology projects are set up to run agile (small 'a'). They recognise the futility of trying to replicate pure Agile or Scrum projects and instead need to pick and choose the ways of working and elements that fit their needs (see Lee's...
Agility over agile
In software development, over the past decade or more, agile principles have sometimes been overtaken by strict adherence to agile methods (Scrum, Kanban, estimations, standups, etc) at the expense of flexibility and - ironically - agility. Some challenges in IT...
Digital Age Leaders Need Digital Age Development
Until relatively recently, what it takes to lead an organisation, and how to become a leader had barely changed over the course of the 20th century. An employee wishing to climb the hierarchy simply had to gather enough experience and expertise in their job and they...
Connecting the company to connect the experience
Overcoming functional silos is high on the list of pain points of most organisations. Important to know is all silos lead to detrimental insularity. This causes teams to lose alignment with the wider org, which has lots of negative knock-on effects. Silos...
Turning Noise into Knowledge
The meteoric rise of Slack over the past few years has re-energised the digital workplace field, and now with Microsoft Teams starting to become widely adopted in more traditional enterprises, new opportunities are opening up around this class of tools. Most...
Hiring for curiosity
More so than ever before, we see business models becoming more fluid, having to change to keep up with the dynamics of their market environment. Even large, traditional organisations are looking at structures such as Spotify’s tribe model or Haier’s autonomous...
Adopting Scaling Frameworks
When organisations begin ‘going agile’, one topic that seems to be debated endlessly is which scaling framework to use - there are a fair few plus variations to choose from: SAFe, LeSS, scrum of scrums etc. I’ve worked with organisations to implement and dismantle...
Retaining digital talent
The demand for digital talent at all levels of the organisation far outstrips supply. Research by Mortimer Spinks indicates that by 2020 the UK is expected to have a shortage of 800,000 tech workers. Recruiting them costs more and takes longer than any other type of...
Overcoming the challenges of virtual teams
Yesterday morning, I heard my colleague Livio speak at an event hosted by Kemp Little on the challenges of global virtual working. Along with Keith Warburton from Global Business Culture and Marian Bloodworth, Employment Partner at Kemp Little, they explored the...
Transformation is being held back by learned helplessness
In this post, lead consultant Cerys Hearsey explores the barriers created by end-users learned helplessness with Enterprise Social Tools. In 2017, the enterprise collaboration space started to polarise around two approaches - the simplicity and focus on...