Across all industries, there is a tremendous desire for more innovation.  Sadly, companies frequently suffer from a cultural habit that stymies creativity: people play the role of Devil’s advocate in a non-constructive, unidimensional fashion. New ideas face a constant barrage of negativity, and promoting them becomes a Herculean task that discourages but the most intrepid innovator. With…

All Agile coaches eventually face the stiff headwinds of resistance to change. Counter-intuitively,  coaches themselves can trigger some of that resistance by inadvertently performing wide-scale identity theft. It is something I have done, and you may have too. This article explains what identity theft is, provides some concrete examples, and looks at a few approaches…

This article is the second of a series of two on boosting the effectiveness of Agile rituals. The first article emphasizes increasing people participation while this article focuses on meeting preparation. Preparation is important because a lack of it can result in long, boring, clumsy, ineffective rituals. Among other things, I think this is partly…