25 February 2021 Story matters. On some level, we know the importance of story. At the same time, we often minimize or deride storytelling as frivolous, a waste of time, a distraction from the serious business of doing work. The reality is that story is everything. It is how we think. It is how we…
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28 January 2021 Where do you want to go? What is your dream for the future? What changes are you passionate about making—for yourself, for your organization, for the world? And what is your strategy to get there? Building concrete plans is challenging. The future is a big, fuzzy, uncertain place. We don’t know what…
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Ideas. Words. Sentences. Paragraphs. Whole chapters. Such is the stuff of books. Every book is made up of those structures. The really great ones also have an extra little bit of magic woven through. It’s not possible to read every book that is published. It’s not even possible to buy every book published (Mark has…
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24 November 2020 While Mark and I have both touched on the “liminal state” we currently find ourselves in, there is much more still here in addressing the challenges we all face. We’re all in transit towards something new. While that’s perpetually true—”change is a constant” after all—we’ve always been able to ask someone who…
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We are taking a different approach to our webinar this month. It is a conversation (although we have done those before). It is recorded in advance (we try not do that, but logistics being what they are…). There are times the audio quality isn’t great (because technology). You still get to join us twice. This…
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Traditional project management was built on three pillars or three P’s: project, program, and portfolio. Organizations are starting to recognize the importance of products and services, in the delivery of value to customers, and implementing strategy in organizations. Project managers not only need to understand the role of their project to support the strategy of…
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Decision-makers in modern organizations commonly demand briefings in the form of bullet points or a series of series of bullet points. That leads to trouble, because the bullet point form isn’t capable of presenting faithful representations of every reality or every logical argument. And the root of the problem lies in the nature of the…
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Every profession—and every discipline—has a set of foundational books that define the essential principles, the guiding philosophies and the essential practices of a given domain. Every person is unique. Each of us is a product of our genes, our formative experiences and the path of evolution we have followed into adulthood. For many of us,…
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We Are All Liminal Now It feels almost redundant to say this: we are living through what feels like an enormously unprecedented period. It’s not, wholly. The world has seen crises like this before. But not often. The magnitude—and the visibility—of the Covid-19 pandemic has taken over our imaginations, and our lives, in a way…
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Agile development hit mainstream recognition a long time ago. Yet there is often uncertainty and turmoil around what “agile development” means, in theory and in practice, and the place of testing within it. The confusion affects agile projects and the people in them. There have been some discussion points, such as Mike Cohn’s Agile Testing…
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