Jeremy Lawson

Solving the Why - helping teams do better business; and at Double-O Consultants

[Jeremy Lawson @paradigminc]

Lots of talk about how leaders and orgs can empower their people and teams…

Teams and individuals could be thinking about how to empower leaders too

🔹to help teams
🔸to make good choices
🔹safe to have conversations & ideas & ask & be wrong
🔸to trust the team

#empowerment

[Jeremy Lawson @paradigminc]

Practice stopping things. Easy things.

Practice failing. Micro failures.

Break down impossible things into a series of smaller unremarkable steps.

[Jeremy Lawson @paradigminc]

Ensure diverse thinking & representation at the start of the funnel

… worry less about forcing it out the end

1-4-all
solicit more broadly
Worry about bias

[Jeremy Lawson @paradigminc]

Remote working…

Give trust, don’t make people earn it

What feedback loops do you need to make problems obvious rather that nuanced

[Jeremy Lawson @paradigminc]

When you deliver something fast, efficiently, amazing

And nobody cares, or it makes no difference…

#productwaste ‼️

Unvetted problems
Poorly validated solution
Date focused vs outcome
One-and-done

35-75% of deliverables fail to deliver
15% of deliverables ➡️ 60% of value

[Jeremy Lawson @paradigminc]

Trying like crazy to extract certainty where there isn’t any?

💰
⤵️
🚽

[Jeremy Lawson @paradigminc]

What if we had another go at doing Thing A well?

[Jeremy Lawson @paradigminc]

“Thing A isn’t working, Thing B will be better so we’re moving to that”

or maybe

Thing A - done poorly - isn’t working

and we think Thing B - done well - will be better

and we hope really hard that we can do Thing B well

but hope wasn’t enough for A

did we learn from it?

[Jeremy Lawson @paradigminc]

What’s that thing called when

a problem has been around so long

other related problems start getting lumped in

and then other unrelated problems are getting lumped in too

A proposed solution to one of the problems

is inferred to be a silver bullet for the whole mess

[Jeremy Lawson @paradigminc]

@johncutlefish What do we mean by better results?

[Jeremy Lawson @paradigminc]

@johncutlefish adding to some good thoughts already posted here…

agility (less the brand)
emergence

[Jeremy Lawson @paradigminc]

🏎️ hurry up [and do the wrong thing]

🏎️ no time to spend >1min thinking [but current thinking locks in 6mo to deliver]

💭first idea must be the best one.

💭idea is the right answer; hurry up and deliver

💭idea not working well; optimise [instead of change idea]

Ummm 🤔🤔😱😱

[Jeremy Lawson @paradigminc]

at the end of a long day of inspiring speakers… we come back for some #agile fun - thanks #aotbnz @AgileAllianceNZ

[Jeremy Lawson @paradigminc]

#busy isn’t necessarily productive.
#busy isn’t necessarily valuable.
#busy isn’t necessarily on purpose.
#busy isn’t necessarily real, it can be perception often resulting from stress.

Choose not to be #busy.

Understand it. Define the pieces. Define why each thing. Then 👀💡

[Jeremy Lawson @paradigminc]

Wherever your list of work is stored or tracked, I see people struggle over categories and hierarchies and columns and “the right setup”

It to serve 2 purposes; there might not be an elegant, perfect data structure.

👷The goal, outcome, feature, component.
and
🧑‍🍳The work plan

[Jeremy Lawson @paradigminc]

What’s the purpose of your team’s daily #standup?

For some teams it helps notice people away or struggling, e.g. in hybrid / remote teams.

… 🧑‍🌾 is on planned leave, remember? 🕵️ is off sick today

… 🧑‍💻is looking after a sick child, distracted

…👩‍🔧 is emotionally struggling

[Jeremy Lawson @paradigminc]

What’s the purpose of your team’s daily #standup?

For some teams it's to update the status / board / report.

… a backstop when we don’t have a culture of working from the board.

… are things which were waiting/blocked still like that?

[Jeremy Lawson @paradigminc]

What’s the purpose of your team’s daily #standup?

For some teams it's to notice and triage incoming stuff.

… new requests, problems, shoulder-taps.

… discovered a thing that’s not right, or a thing to rework.

… what should we do? Do it now (and stop what we were doing?)

[Jeremy Lawson @paradigminc]

What’s the purpose of your team’s daily #standup?

For some teams it's reminders.

… remember our customer interview this afternoon
… remember timesheets are due
… remember to review that work for me
… remember it’s a holiday tomorrow
… remember any commitments on today

[Jeremy Lawson @paradigminc]

What’s the purpose of your team’s daily #standup?

For some teams it's visibility of work in progress.
(enabling trust, intervention, coordination, etc)

... what are you doing today? what am I doing today?

... sometimes this is already solved by our tools; not always