A thread to explore a collection of timeless laws and principles relating to human behaviour in the context of business management

@allenholub.bsky.social “10X programmers actually slow down software delivery” — eventually leading to a steady state where all knowledge is concentrated in one person and they become a key person risk and bottleneck #yow24

“When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only about how to solve the problem. But when I’m finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know I’m wrong.”
-R. Buckminster Fuller

Understand the needs of your employees and involve them early and often in your decision making.

Some leaders resist delegating strategic thinking to the crowd and rightly so, but also fail to leverage the intimate knowledge held by those closest to the market and the problem.

Can’t make up your mind? Solve the problem by flipping a coin!

Not so that chance will decide for you, but the moment the coin is up in the air you will immediately know what side you’re hoping for it to land.

What change would make the use of our resources more optimised towards the delivery of our business strategy?

From the Atlassian Scrum Master description: If the scrum team isn’t humming, that’s the scrum master’s problem. Maybe that means fixing broken computers, moving desks around, or even adjusting the thermostat. 👈 I don’t much care for the SM role, but is this a joke? www.atlassian.com/agile/scrum/...

Product strategy is rooted in two polar opposites: playful curiosity to explore opportunities and sharp observation based on factual data. It’s a true art to combine them both as one cohesive approach.

I wonder if 2025 will be the year we see AI slow down. People think more data/compute/training equals an exponential growth of “intelligence”. I believe it will instead follow a logistic growth pattern where constraints slow growth to the point of not being worth additional effort. Time will tell ✨

The year is 2059. Computers have their own union. Children fly to school on personal air scooters. The outer planets are holiday resorts. Business leaders finally realise canned Agile won’t help them be more competitive. They start looking into PRINCE2 @jasongorman.bsky.social

DEI and psychological safety are not org nice-to-have’s. They are hard requirements for long-term survival. Not only does a safe and diverse environment maximise data input, but is needed to recognise valuable information and evolve it into knowledge. In other words, the foundation for innovation.

I saw a team being challenged by a “facilitator” for not having actions from their retrospective. It’s ok for teams to just talk about what could be done better going forward. An introspective even! Stop chasing. You don’t need outputs to achieve outcomes.

The battle against bias may start at the unconscious end, but is won consciously: Your first thought doesn’t matter, we are all biased, but your second thought and your first action does!

The main challenge with "transformation work", especially as a consultant, is to establish success criteria related to a changed organisational behaviour driving continuous improvement. That’s your goal! NOT a set of deliverables or a state when you are "done".

Despite the name, digital transformation is about people more than it is about technology. Only through people can we achieve meaningful and lasting change in our organisations. The rest is just catering to their needs.

Say it with me:

👉 Customers determine the the outcomes
👉 The outcomes determine the measures of success
👉 The measures of success determine the work
👉 The work determines the skills & tech
👉 The skills & tech determine the teams & architecture

However appealing it may seem, however convincing it may sound, agile is not something you can scale. You just can’t. ❌

Instead, scale your domain/product/use case/problem down.

As consultancies drive relevancy and customer intimacy by becoming more industry specific, it will be increasingly difficult as an individual specialist to serve a growing geographic area. I foresee myself flying more frequently between moments of full remote.