Our Loud Team Members There is more to engagement then quieting the loud voices. For example, intrinsic motivation and a sense of agency. We thank Ngan Tran for posting an article on LinkedIn; the piece is found at LinkedIn Article, we do not disagree with much of what they write in the paper but have […]

People are Human I realize this piece is likely, nearly certainly, to ruffle some feathers. That is not my intention for sure.  We have written on the impediments to us seeing things truly as it is.  There are many cognitive biases that may plague us. In fact, we dedicated an entire section in our latest […]

Firefighting Hiding things is not a long term strategy We have recently written an article at our Assembly Mag column, Ps and Qs column on the metaphorical firefighter and things we do that encourages this behavior.  There are many variants of this specific failure mode.  To be clear, we are referring to valuing the heavy […]

Limits of Asynchronous Communication In an earlier blog post we wrote along with contributions to a magazine on asynchronous communication. Businesses are forced to make decisions, that they would rather not make, such is the time of Covid.  We cannot just go to the office and continue to work as we once did, perhaps short-term, […]

Career; of Motorcycles and Trucks This blog continues from my last post describing the first part of my career.  We continue with the tire pressure monitoring system.  In those days, and for many years before that, my preferred form of transport was motorcycle.  I had an accident a few years before taking this job that […]

Instead of  No Estimates Instead of no estimates, we should consider adjusting our approach to estimates that eliminate the abuse, and still allows for the answers to the business questions, “does this project improve our bottom line” allowing the business to determine if the company really wants to undertake the project, and if so, do […]

Team Building Phases Teams are not as easy as throw our collection of individuals into a room together and bang, thus is a team created.  We are fond of the description of the steps a team will go through by Bruce Tuckman we list below.  Our experience suggests this list to be a reasonable list of the […]