English

For the first twelve years of my professional career I knew how to call myself — a business intelligence specialist, a web developer, a mobile UX designer, a project manager. Or, better, I thought I knew who I was. I’ve been the guy who said “that’s not my job” when anything I thought didn’t fit my job description at the time came up. During these past five years as a consultant, thought it has become increasingly harder to say “that’s not my job”, and, also, it has been close to impossibile to pinpoint what my job title could be. ...

Lately I heard a remark along the lines of “…they are worried that with agile we are going to do less stuff” and I replied “It’s not a worry, it’s a certainty”. It made me wonder about the relationships between speed, agility and consistency. More and more often I find myself in situation where I feel the need to slow down agility. I don’t think that going faster should be the goal of agile, but, if anything, maybe, a by-product. ...

Since I started practicing team coaching five years ago, I got in touch with the coaching community at large, only to discover that, historically, most coaching is done in individual, 1:1 settings. Approaching companies and teams systemically like a got used to represents just a specific niche of coaching, of which Agile coaching is an even tinier niche. Since a lot of coaching models are then based on personal, individual change and since I’m always looking for ways of scaling down change, I just did an exercise in understanding how many levels of change should we take into account — only to realize how many of them gets ignored! ...

A lot of retrospectives and conversations I’m involved with lately revolve around the topic of time scarcity or the need for better time management. When people finally can take some time (ah!) to reflect upon what’s causing time scarcity, one common source are interruptions. “Can you ignore notifications?”, more than one person asked me, disgruntled. I can, because I turned off most notifications on most apps. Are you even allowed to do that, at your job? Think about it. ...

Here’s an idea: no company culture is dysfunctional. Even though I’m the first one who usually and gladly makes a list of observations about which and how many dysfunctions I encounter when I meet with a new team, I learned to re-frame my approach. It’s not easy to re-frame the view that all dysfunctions are bad. Truth to be told, and an idea for a follow-up article, I have a sort of Cultural Dysfunctions Bingo™ in my head whenever I start working with a new organization or team. ...

Talk with any consultant and they will tell you: The Problem™ is never the problem. That is a short-hand for saying that complex problem solving is always an exploratory and iterative process: both clients and consultants have to be willing to challenge assumptions and to regroup as soon as they find out what the real problem is. So many client-consultant relationships go bad because each part tends to stick to their guns: client are unwilling to change ideas about what the problem is, or how complex it is, while consultants are unwilling to say an out-of-the-box solution they thought they could work doesn’t really fit. ...

The following is an extremely over-simplified, faux-flowchart that runs into my head every time I tell someone that I help companies solving organizational problems and they say “Basically every company has organizational problems so you must be working A LOT…”, implying that every company in the world must be chasing me down to help them solve their organizational problems. That’s not how it works, of course. It’s more correct to say that every company is on a journey in dealing with their organizational issues, but the points of contact between me and those companies are fewer and further apart than most people would imagine. ...

“Open your calendar, cancel all your recurring meeting” I’ve seen this kind of advice. You probably have seen it too. Many times articles and guides about how to reclaim your time, describe recurring meetings as one of the first poisonous element to eradicate from your agenda. But why? For me, recurring meetings are good. They are a pillars around which I get work done. While working on multiple projects, I can space out meetings in a predictable way for everybody working with me. ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5qTZdRY1gE This article is meant as sort of write-up/translation of me facilitating my first public Bento: I wanted to share the experience with the great people of the Bentoism community, most of which can’t understand Italian. The event Matteo from Fifth Beat proposed me to speak at their Beat Camp event, on December 22nd and 23rd. There were two afternoon session involving 7 speakers, with two tracks and they were about: Life in a pandemic world ...