A short field notes series on how Agile becomes something organizations hire… instead of something they become. Agile often enters the organization the same way everything else does. Through staffing. A Scrum Master is added.An Agile Coach is brought in.Teams are...
Articles
to read and share in your journey toward becoming a learning organization.
Advancing Without Illusion
A short field notes series on how progress advances within limits it cannot remove Progress rarely stops where it is argued against. It stops where it is no longer allowed to move. Not explicitly. Not visibly. But in ways that become familiar over time. A proposal...
Why Big IT Bets Are Flawed: Escaping the Silent Graveyard of Digital Execution
Every year, enterprise executives play a high-stakes game of chance with their corporate capital. They authorize large-scale IT initiatives and digital transformations under a reassuring assumption: “Sure, a few projects might slip, but across our broader portfolio,...
Authority Without Control Is Not the Problem
A short field notes series on leaders experiencing loss of control is actually a mismatch between responsibility and where decisions, learning, and coordination now live. The moment does not arrive as a break. You are still accountable. Still expected to explain what...
The Impossible Manager Role
A short series on how the manager role changes as systems scale. What the role carries now was never part of its design The Manager role didn’t change. What it carries did. Managers are still described the same way: Accountable for delivery. Responsible for outcomes....
Story Points and Dark Scrum – The illusion of predictability
In complex product development, corporate hierarchies demand an absolute premium on certainty. To satisfy this demand, enterprise operating systems have institutionalized a ubiquitous ritual: relative size estimation abstracted into Story Points, which are then summed...
Competence and Promotion Systems
A short field notes series on how competence is recognized and how promotion changes what that recognition can carry. Competence is one of the clearest signals organizations know how to recognize. Work is completed reliably.Decisions are sound.Outcomes are visible and...
Revealing lessons in scaling Agile across borders
Hi! I'm Julie Carter, and I want to share my revelation on scaling agile principles to address multi-team dependencies in global product development. As a Scrum master at an enterprise software company, I managed complex features that required seamless coordination...
Builders and Bureaucrats
The divide between builders and bureaucrats is getting exposed more than ever today. Every organization system requires people who can build stuff and folks who administer the enterprise. When the balance skews heavily towards administration, the joy of developing...
Shared Leadership and Alignment
“Not to innovate is the single largest reason for the decline of existing organizations. Not to know how to manage is the single largest reason for failure of new ventures.” - Peter Drucker. Drucker uses the keywords innovation and Management to describe the core...