A blog about people, culture, organisations and teams.
I have been busy working on the second edition of my book, Building Successful Communities of Practice. As it’s 10 years since the first one, there is a lot of new content, including a new communities of practice organisational maturity model, which I have just made available for download.
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On Thursday, 5th February, 25 people who normally mostly meet online, travelled to Liverpool to meet in person. It was a brilliant couple of days connecting with people and ideas. Here’s what happened.
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This post is the write-up of a talk I gave at Fast Flow Conference in October 2025, about Communities of Practice through the lens of learning, knowledge, and ideas flow.
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Last week, I ran a workshop at Agile Cambridge, building on top of my popular blog post Quick icebreakers for online meetings (that don’t suck).
The workshop examined why we use icebreakers, what a good and bad icebreaker looks like and how to select the right ones for specific scenarios. This post summarises that workshop.
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I recently led a leadership training session for a client. During the planning, the evergreen question of “how do we make decisions” came up; this post talks about the framework I introduced to help answer that question.
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How do you know when you’re ready to scale your team(s)?
Jamie Arnold and I have been exploring this topic and have created a handy download to help leaders and teams answer the question.
Continue readingMy friend and work associate Ian Ames has generously offered to sponsor two places on my new course, Building Successful Communities of Practice for underrepresented and marginalised groups within the digital industry.
I asked Ian to tell me more about why he wanted to do this, and this is what he said. If you or someone you know would like to take him up on the offer, jump to the end of the post to find out how to get in touch with him.
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Exciting news! After lots of slide making, video recording and testing, I have just launched a new online course called Building Successful Communities of Practice.
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People often struggle to describe who does what. Getting it wrong can mean that things fall through the cracks, or it becomes so descriptive that it hinders work.
Articulating roles and responsibilities, especially in the 4Ds format, can clarify decision-making, help set expectations within and outside of the team, and foster better collaboration.
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I have been working with leadership teams for a while and have used this workshop to help them align around and articulate their purpose. This exercise allows them to identify opportunities to improve, focus their efforts and better communicate what they do with the rest of the organisation. This post shares the workshop format and a Miroboard that can be downloaded.
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Following last years’ IRL get together, members of the Agile in the Ether Community spent another sunny Friday in Liverpool connecting and sharing ideas. Such a brilliant way to brighten up February.
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While researching for my talk, A Framework for Thinking about Team Memory, Joining Up, and Serendipity in Hybrid Organisations, I came across a term that was new to me but summed up something I had seen and gave me language to describe it.
That team was the Transactive Memory System. This post talks about what it is, why it’s important and some tactics to help build it.
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A few months back, I worked with a client to design their away day. Working with Jamie, Paul and the programme team, we blended team updates with a new board game about planning to make a brilliant day.
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Agile (and other) teams are made up of people with different capabilities together into one multidisciplinary team, collaborating daily towards a common goal.
This workshop is a game that helps people play at creating multidisciplinary teams while thinking about capability needs, learning opportunities and constraints.
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In my last post, A framework for thinking about team memory, joining up and serendipity in hybrid organisations, I introduced a framework for thinking about Team Memory.
I have now turned this into a Miro board template for a workshop, which is available on the Miroverse.
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Last week, I gave a keynote talk at Agile Manchester, based on a previous blog post. The talk was more detailed and had a new framing; this post summarises what I shared.
I have been working with digital, data, and technology organisations for a long time, many of which are in UK government departments. One thing that I have seen people get tripped up on is how they describe teams.
Ambiguity about what a team is can create tensions, rework, and confusion and ultimately get in the way of the work.
To help, I’ve been developing a team taxonomy so that some of my clients and their teams can have better conversations about differences and similarities and hint at the expectations of interactions. This post shares these taxonomies in case they are useful to others, too.
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I have been running Agile in the Ether for over five years; this year, we had a face-to-face event for the first time. It was wonderful and proves you can make real connections over video. In this post, I’ll talk briefly about the intention, the approach and what happened.
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In my previous post Team exercise: Building empathy and understanding with the Capability Comb, I introduced an approach to help a team surface their capabilities and identify opportunities to collaborate.
Since then, I have created a miroboard on the miroverse to use with the workshop. You can get a copy of it here miro.com/miroverse/the-capability-comb-workshop-template . If you use it, please drop me a line and let me know how it goes.
The term outcome is a brilliant way of describing the impact and value of doing something. I also like to use outcomes to help describe the capabilities of people and practices or disciplines. Let me explain why it’s so helpful.
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I have been working with, writing about and speaking on communities of practice for many years now. That content is scattered in various places, like this blog, my company website and other platforms. So, I’ve brought it all together in one place.
Check it out at communitiesofpractice.work
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Back in November last year I wrote up a talk I gave at Lean Agile Brighton called Why can’t we all just get along?
I’ve given the talk at a few more conferences and written it up as an article on InfoQ called Bridging Silos and Overcoming Collaboration Antipatterns in Multidisciplinary Organisations. The most recent time I spoke about it was at Seacon in London, and that 20-minute talk is here; enjoy!
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For a little while, I was encouraging myself out of the house by setting the target of taking regular short videos of the New Brighton lighthouse at the mouth of the Mersey. Here are those videos taken between December 2022 and August 2023.
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This week, I have been back at the Agile Cambridge conference with Agile on the Bench with my co-host, Cara Bermingham.
Agile on the Bench is a friendly, low-fi, lunchtime, outdoor, agile meetup. A mix of 10min, mostly analogy-based talks about all things agile, people, teams, users and getting things done… outside, on a bench, in a park.
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How do we know what’s going on when we’re working in remote or hybrid organisations? How do we get the right information to the right people, find what we need and bump into ideas that can lead to something else? Distributed workplaces make it hard, but not impossible. This post explores some of the ways that can enable sharing that helps teams remember, and people bump into information.
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