Category Archives: complexity

How Agile Manages Out Innovation

Posted on December 11, 2020 by Liz

The Oatmeal has a fantastic comic on the Backfire Effect that was so popular, they rewrote it with, um, cleaner language. It starts simply. “You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you.” And it goes on to … Continue reading →

Posted in complexity, cynefin | 9 Comments

Yes, and…

Posted on March 5, 2017 by Liz

Imagine two actors standing on stage. “I like your penguin,” the first says. The other turns round, looking at the empty space where one might imagine a penguin could be following. There are two things that can happen. Perhaps the … Continue reading →

Posted in complexity, cynefin, deliberate discovery, real options | 9 Comments

Breaking Boxes

Posted on November 7, 2016 by Liz

I love words. I really, really love words. I like poetry, and reading, and writing, and conversations, and songs with words in, and puns and wordplay and anagrams. I like learning words in different languages, and finding out where words … Continue reading →

Posted in complexity | 7 Comments

Correlated in Retrospect

Posted on May 9, 2016 by Liz

A few  years back, I went to visit a company that had managed to achieve a high level of agility without high levels of coaching or training, shipping several times a day. I was curious as to how they had … Continue reading →

Posted in complexity, cynefin | 4 Comments

The Estimates in #NoEstimates

Posted on May 1, 2015 by Liz

A couple of weeks ago, I tweeted a paraphrase of something that David J. Anderson said at the London Lean Kanban Day: “Probabalistic forecasting will outperform estimation every time”. I added the conference hashtag, and, perhaps most controversially, the #NoEstimates one. … Continue reading →

Posted in complexity, conference | 37 Comments

The Shallow Dive into Chaos

Posted on March 9, 2015 by Liz

For more on the Chaotic domain and subdomains, read Dave Snowden’s blog post, “…to give birth to a dancing star.” The relationship between separating people that I talk about here, and the Chaotic domain, can be seen in Cynthia Kurtz’s work with … Continue reading →

Posted in complexity, cynefin | 3 Comments

Using BDD as a Sensemaking Technique

Posted on July 29, 2014 by Liz

A while back, I wrote about Cynefin, a framework for making sense of the world, and for approaching different situations and problems depending on how much certainty or uncertainty they have. As a quick summary, Cynefin has five domains: Simple … Continue reading →

Posted in bdd, complexity, cynefin | 2 Comments

Goals vs. Capabilities

Posted on June 6, 2014 by Liz

Every project worth doing has a vision, and someone who’s championed that vision and fought for the budget. That person is the primary stakeholder. (This person is the real product owner; anyone else is just a proxy with a title.) In … Continue reading →

Posted in capability red, complexity, stakeholders | 5 Comments

Disorder, or, How I Got a Black Eye

Posted on November 18, 2013 by Liz

In the Cynefin framework, the Disorder domain is the one in the middle. It’s the state of not knowing what kind of causality exists. Over on the right we have the predictable domains of Simple and Complicated, and on the … Continue reading →

Posted in complexity, cynefin, evil hat, real options, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

BDD Before The Tools

Posted on October 24, 2013 by Liz

Another client approached me today about BDD and using tools like Cucumber to automate scenarios. There are a few things I’d love to teams see develop as a focus before heading down the tools path. You may already be doing … Continue reading →

Posted in bdd, complexity, stakeholders | 6 Comments