I first learnt the power of mulling at university. Something magic would happen if I made a start on assignments and then left them alone for a couple of days. There was no obvious connection between my life and the maths problems I was wrestling with, but somehow the solutions would just seem to emerge…

When your work has a clear focus, you achieve much more. You’re less distracted, more intentional, more centred on the right things. And it feels better. If you have one clear goal for the present moment, you’re much more likely to achieve flow. I’ve written a lot about how backlog refinement can give teams that…

What if your team wants to work in an agile way, but no one else you work with does? Welcome to wagile, the intersection between agile practices and a more traditional waterfall approach. Wagile can get really messy, but that’s not to say it can’t work. You just have to be a bit more thoughtful…

Agile is not about leaders. But if leaders aren’t bought in to at least letting you give it a go, it will be much harder to make the shift to agile. That’s not to say it’s impossible – and I’ll talk in a moment about some practices you can try if you can’t persuade the…

There’s a theme you might spot in my earlier blogs on psychological safety and growth mindset. Both concepts involve tolerating the discomfort of risk taking. The risks might be interpersonal ones, or they might be about trying something in the name of learning, but both require you to stick with things that might feel a…

A growth mindset is the belief that our skills and abilities can be improved through effort. It’s a concept developed by Stanford psychologist Carol Deck, who demonstrated that it’s core to enabling people to take on new challenges. We need to believe we can learn in order to learn. The opposite is called a fixed…

My blog is called agile for everyone, but is agile really for everyone? Some workplace cultures aren’t (yet) set up for this way of working. I think more could adapt to agile than you might think, but there are a few pre-requisites. Over the next few weeks, we’ll explore how to spot if there’s more…

The best managers ask more questions. The Leader Lab cites a study which found that great managers ask five times more questions than average ones: 10 questions in a 15 minute conversation. You might know the benefit of questions from your own experience. Managers who default to asking questions rather than telling you what to…

So, you’ve gotten started with coaching and perhaps are starting to leave some of the basic models behind. What’s next? How can you get better at coaching? As with growing any skill, practice and reflection are key. Find opportunities to put what you’ve been learning into practice, and take a few minutes afterwards to think…

You are not an expert in everything. Hopefully you already know this! But the most difficult hurdle in coaching is to avoid jumping in with your own expertise. As I wrote last week, creating space for others to think without creating answers for them results in much better quality outcomes. But this is difficult to…