Facilitating a meeting means guiding the process to make sure everyone can participate and you meet your goals for the session. It’s all about asking good questions, creating shared thinking spaces and keeping conversations on track. There’s a difference between chairing and facilitating meetings. Whilst a chair actively leads a meeting to reach certain conclusions,…

Strategy and agile can seem at odds. Agile is all about working in short loops, learning and adapting as you go. That seems like the opposite of the long-term approach needed for strategy. But many common problems with strategies could be addressed if they were approached in a more agile way. How often have you…

Last week, I said that great project planning starts by collectively setting outcomes as a project team. But how exactly do you do that? And what else should you include in a project kick-off? How to set outcomes together Collectively deciding what you want to achieve from a project means that everyone involved has ownership…

Like RACIs, project plans have a lot to answer for. Most project plans are hard to read, hard to update, and almost immediately out of date. I’m pretty sceptical of any project documentation that requires lots of time spent up-front to only approximate the reality of what you are doing, and project plans are often…

When we think about accountability, we default to thinking about managers. Managers keep people accountable by telling them what to do, and creating consequences if they don’t do those things. But people aren’t dogs waiting to be biffed on the nose with a rolled up newspaper for peeing on the carpet. When someone fails to…

Last week, we discussed why the RACI model sucks. Planning out responsibilities in detail at the start of the project can prevent you from learning and adapting as you go. A much better approach to divvying up responsibilities is to have a regular, structured conversation about them. That’s the “R” in RACI, but what about…

Working out who should be Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed on a project should make roles much clearer, right? Wrong. Every time someone asks me for a RACI, my heart sinks. I have spent so much time agonising over so many RACIs that only a few people have even skim read. There must be dozens…

I think silence is an underrated agile skill. That may sound odd, but fundamentally agile is a set of tools to help people collaborate and reflect. And you can’t do either of those things without silence. Silence helps you pause, slow down and spot what’s happening. If all your meetings are non-stop talking, no one…

We’ve talked about empowering the team as part of working in an agile way, and how to make collective decisions as part of that. But what if you need to dig into a problem as a group before you make a decision? Here are three of my favourite tools to do just that. Lean coffee…

Last week, we touched on the need for leaders to share power as a necessary criteria for working in an agile way. Flatter power dynamics have all sorts of benefits. Working in a less hierarchal way reduces the pressure on you as a manager. It uses the wisdom of the whole team, including those closest…