I’m excited that agilityIRL has begun a new partnership with the Minnesota chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI). It has obvious benefits for agilityIRL, as we will be bringing our training services to a new market. However, it’s more than that. For me it represents tying together two phases of my career and shows...Read More

One of the most common questions that we get when teaching people about Scrum involves the Scrum Master.  Specifically, does a Scrum Master need to be “technical”? In order to answer this question, we first need to explore what it means to be “technical”.  Defining this word isn’t as easy as it seems.  First, everyone...Read More

One of the common questions that we get at agilityIRL is, “How do we find good Scrum Masters?” One of the crucial steps in hiring for any role is the interview. In this blog, I want to provide you with some of my favorite Scrum Master interview questions and techniques. This entry is not intended...Read More

Trust Among Co-Workers, Especially Among Management and Staff Third is trust. Communication is easy; trust is hard. I’ll bet next week’s grocery money that someone who you know and trust may have fumbled their communication about something to you, yet, because there was high trust between you, you still got their meaning.     The...Read More

The Covid-19 pandemic has cast into stark relief the fact that, in this increasingly VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world, THE key to competitive advantage is the organization’s culture. So, what makes someplace a great place to work? Based on my experience, there are five things. And I don’t care what kind of organization...Read More

As we begin Summer 2022, COVID continues to occupy a significant portion of our time and attention. While vaccines, therapies, and drugs have all had a significant impact on hospitalizations and fatalities, the disease remains a significant threat to many, particularly those who are immunocompromised. While a full description and debate of the successes and...Read More

Happy New Year!  We hope that your holiday season was spent with family and friends and that you were able to reflect on everything you accomplished in 2021 while planning for an outstanding 2022. As many of you know, I am a football fan and, as such, I spent part of the break watching the...Read More

As we approach the end of 2021, like many, we are reflecting on the journey that has brought us to the fifth anniversary of the founding of agilityIRL.  This year brought significant change, even as we continued remote coaching and training.     The Big Change In summer of 2021, we celebrated the retirement of...Read More

In Leo Tolstoy’s book, Anna Karenina, he offers this famous quote: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This quote has been applied to many contexts from the obvious familial setting to larger organizations of various shapes, sizes and forms. It’s true that each of these organizations is...Read More

Based on over 4-decades of observational research, I can confidently assert that intellectual laziness is an all-too-common leadership fail. It is a myth that managers manage by the numbers.  So many leaders that I’ve observed in action simply were not skilled thinkers, having little understanding of data, statistical methods, empirical analysis, and probabilistic decision-making.  In...Read More