Teams are about who is in them: The Imaginist

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What does a team do? It depends on who is in it.  The Imaginist decision maker sees teams as “teams of persons”. You can’t determine what is should be done until you analyze who is going to do it. Work cannot be separated from who does it because, for the Imaginst, it’s all about the person. Lots of ex-programmers seem …

Manhattan Bridge under construction-1909

Talking about Teaming: The 7 Languages of Action

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As I try to get “team” better defined, one of the biggest problems I have — and one shared by Requisite Agility as a whole — is that people use words differently to talk about decisions about action. Teams, as I have started defining them, are all about doing something together, working to a purpose. How we talk about decisions …

Adam naming the animals, Christ Church Cathedral, High Street, Dublin (by Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Start with the Naming of Things

Forrest ChristianRequisiteAgility 1 Comment

As I start things back up in support of the Requisite Agility movement, it’s a good idea to begin with the basics: name things clearly. The naming of things is important. In the Jewish Bible, it’s the first thing God has the first man do: And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl …

Closing up at No.9 Park by Peter Hall. (CC BY SA-2.0). Via Flickr

Closing Time (or “So long, Elliot Jaques”)

Forrest ChristianAdmin 5 Comments

It’s closing time. After spending almost all of the last thirty years of my worklife as a consultant, I finally walked away. As of last week, I have returned to the risk career I left a long time ago. I joined a large financial company’s technology risk management oversight group where I’m an internal consultant. As a part of this …

Employees at Mid-Continent Refinery [ca. 1943 Tulsa, OK (LOC). By John Vachon]

How Unemployment Endangers Everything You Love

Forrest ChristianCareers 1 Comment

Happy people are generally happy, no matter what. Unhappy people are generally unhappy no matter what. Whether genetics or childhood environment, it seems to be pretty set by the time you hit your mid-20s. It’s like we have a thermostat that gets set to a particular number. You might have something that changes the temperature suddenly, but the system will …

TITLE: Clarify roles or kill performance

Clarify Roles or Kill Performance—Your Choice

Forrest ChristianChange Leave a Comment

Dr. Eduardo Salas is the Trustee Chair and Pegasus Professor of Psychology at the University of Central Florida, and the author or coauthor of a slew of articles and books on teamwork performance. His findings seem entirely counterintuitive to what many people in software believe. Eschewing roles, they advocate keeping everything completely informal, with everyone cross-training to be able to …

How Bad Is Oil? A Brief Historical Analysis

Forrest ChristianUncategorized 1 Comment

We keep hearing about oil prices and how they have plummeted. But what do you really know about them? If you’re like me — living in a non-oil producing region, getting most of your exposure from price of gas and roofing — it’s high time to take a look. This is strictly from an American point of view, mostly because …

Man thinking at typewriter. (c) everett225. Depositphoto.com

Let Them Eat Their Desks: IT’s New Contractors

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“Hell, this is brilliant!” he said. “I wish I was still an executive so I could push this Task idea onto people.” I was surprised. My companion, an ex-executive for a large US corporation, normally took a dim view of Modern Human Resources. And the Internet economy. I had just mentioned ______’s ideas about going from role-based staffing to tasks-based. …