At the core of agile is appropriately distributed power. Like facilitation, coaching helps distribute power by equipping people to find their own answers. Coaching creates space for good thinking, without a manager jumping in with the answers all the time. This is good for the coachee, because stretching your thinking is how you develop skills.…

Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman has changed how I think about agile. That’s despite the book being in no sense about agile. It doesn’t even mention it beyond a passing discussion of Kanban. But this book has been fundamental in shifting how I think about time, with some serious lessons for agile working. Many…

Cal Newport’s A World Without Email has a provocative theme: that we should structure our work so as to minimise email and other constant electronic communication that’s become the norm for many of us. It’s another sneaky agile book. Whilst it doesn’t describe itself as being about agile, many of the ideas resonate with agile…

The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney, Jim Huling and Sean Covey is another book like last week’s that seems to me to be sneakily about agile. Despite never mentioning the word ‘agile’, a lot of its key concepts resonate strongly with agile practices and mindsets. It gives a process for implementing strategy without…

Leadership is Language by L. David Marquet is my favourite book about agile that doesn’t describe itself as being about agile. At it’s heart, it argues that leadership is about people, and how we lead people is ultimately about how we talk to them. That’s a very agile idea: prioritising individuals and interactions over processes…

David Allen is a hugely influential writer and thinker on productivity. His book Getting Things Done is a classic for a reason, and introduces a system for personal productivity that I’ve followed for well over a decade. So you can imagine my excitement when he released Team: Getting Things Done with Others a couple of…

The trick with prioritising is not actually prioritising. It’s deprioritising. We’re very good at choosing things we want to do, but understandably much less good at picking what we won’t do. Two pieces of advice make prioritising (and de-prioritising) work much easier: do it regularly and do it together. If you are prioritising on a…

Teams benefit from two types of reflection: thinking about what they did and how they did it. Almost everyone knows they should be thinking about the former, regularly evaluating their work and reviewing how they did against their targets. But the latter gets much less attention. And this is odd, because how we work is…

If you are feeling frustrated by interminable status meetings, or your team is failing to communicate enough, stand-ups might be the solution. These are quick meetings, traditionally held daily, allowing fine grain coordination. Having an efficient, regular check-in like this allows you to get clear on what you are trying to achieve together, hold each…

We’ve already covered the basics you need to know to be a good facilitator and how to get better over time. But if you’re already good, how do you become a great facilitator? Manage your energy and attention It took me an embarrassingly long time to learn, but I’m much worse at facilitating if I’ve…