There's a way to do it better, find it

This famous Thomas Edison quote was on the wall yesterday as we held two group meetings in Edinburgh, Scotland.

At one of the meetings our member Stratos Filalithis, Head of Website & Communication Technologies at the University of Edinburgh shared their progress with making AI useful and usable, including how to improve search and to power virtual assistants.

AI is a regular topic at our group meetings and conferences, including all the confusion and overwhelming hype that comes with it. It makes me happy that during the past months, the conversation seems to have shifted from sheer, almost blind excitement, to using AI to doing things better and actually delivering value.

Getting things done has always been a popular topic…..

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Liberating structures increases engagement and inclusion

When you feel included and engaged, do you do a better job? Do you think teams that in which people work well together produce much better results? Have you noticed the best ideas often come from unexpected sources? Do you want to work at the top of your intelligence and give the same opportunity to others?

These good questions set the stage for the popular book 'The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation' which came out in 2014 and has since changed how we collaborate and innovate.

Carsten G. Lützen works as a playful agile coach at the LEGO Group and has been working on liberating structures for the last few years and also recently created a collection of liberating structures agenda items which you can pick and choose from

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The dark side of agile

Going agile at scale has been both buzz and reality in many large and complex organisations all over the world during the past decade. Whether you’re talking big or small scale, agile comes with many glorious promises.

We both recognise and advocate the benefits of agile. But in this post, we’ll also voice deep concern about what agile has become, and raise a few flags to be aware of, if you want to gain from the hard-earned learnings.

In our peer group meetings and conferences, we’ve heard about the agile reality several times. In a recent member conference call, Christina took a less travelled road within the topic of agile transformations: What's the dark side of our new organisational models, structures and ways of working? Specifically, she talked about how the industry maintains the “perpetual fantasies of the ivory towers and consultancy houses.”

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No more culture change programs. We need a culture revolution

Gallup found 90% of people in Western Europe are not engaged at work. If their study was conducted in the early 1800’s, during the first wave of industrialization which pushed millions of people into unrelenting factory jobs, you might expect it. It was carried out in 2017, which makes it almost unfathomable given the billions spent on culture, leadership and engagement annually.   

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Delivering value to your customers through imperfect projects.

There is always a lot at stake, when you are starting a new project, and several questions often arise quite naturally. Is the team structure right? On the client side as well as on the vendor side? Have we clearly defined the project, what about the budget and scope?

In my experience, it’s often completely different questions that need answering, when embarking on a new project

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