Curiosity is often the first thing to disappear when businesses feel urgency and the pressure to deliver.
But it’s also the thing that fuels real growth, innovation, and long term business success.

How do you make space for it?

When organisations want to “Go Faster” (with the actual goal of creating more value), the usual playbook (for software products) looks something like this:

• Write code faster (AI tools will save us)

• Plan better, keep people busy

• More efficient tasks

As a manager, it’s natural to assume this is where we should focus our energy.

But here’s the trap: coding is rarely the slowest part of the system.

“Don’t you just love how a small thing jumps to the top of the list? “

I said this in a workshop recently, I was facilitating an executive team as they talked through their roadmap of strategic work they wanted to get done next - thankfully this team is not too hung up on the “by what date” part of that conversation. They are a mature digital business and so, happily their obsessions tend to focus on customer outcomes rather than deliveries by arbitrary dates. 

If you know us at ReBoot Co., you might've seen that a couple of weeks ago we co-hosted a breakfast briefing with none other than Matthew Skelton, co-author of Team Topologies. The session, co-hosted with the fabulous folks at Everest Engineering, brought together leaders we've worked with over the years for a deep-dive into how organisations are actually making flow happen - and how we can empower teams to do the best work of their careers.

Fail Like an AI: A Better Way to Build Products

In the last few weeks, I've been running a beta email campaign for a new product idea. And wow - it's harder than I remembered. Putting something new out into the world, something you've made, and asking people what they think? It's vulnerable. You're exposing a half-formed idea to the risk of being misunderstood, criticised, or worse - ignored. Please validate me! 

Why do so many companies fail to achieve their strategic goals?

One key reason is the lack of focus on how they operate - there’s lots of time invested in new strategy, goals and initiatives - but little thought of what needs to change across the organisation to achieve these cross-functional goals.

The key to improvement is not another “big organisational transformation” but a more adaptive effective way of working.

Red flags for teams not delivering value

Killer Questions for Agile Teams: Are We Truly Delivering Value?

Before the pandemic, while working with a client, I was tasked with collating assessments for over 30 so-called "Agile teams." Each team was judged against 40 questions, each with five defined scoring levels. This assessment had been running for years, a soul-destroying exercise for both me and the teams

You know it’s been a solid twenty-three years since the Agile Manifesto was signed when you start feeling like the grandparent at the party who remembers “the good ol’ days.” Yep, the schisms in the agile community are real, and I often find myself thinking, "Why am I still teaching teams to estimate?"

Agile Australia 2024

This year at Agile Australia I was fortunate to be chosen to speak, and the topic was “Frameless - empower your Agile transformation”. Amid the noisy social media debates declaring whether Agile is dead or alive, I believe it’s crucial to stay focused on what really matters: helping organisations transform to more modern, engaging, and effective ways of working. Rather than getting lost in the noise, we should address the real issues that organisations face, rather than simply claiming, “Agile is dead!” as clickbait.