The team I’m currently part of is under immense pressure and stress, a situation that predates my arrival. I’ve been in meetings where none of the five attendees could even sit down due to stress. Just two weeks after joining, I found myself consoling a tearful colleague who had been berated by the “customer,” despite her best efforts. Personally, I’m apprehensive about conveying any news, whether good or bad, to the customers, as they seem perpetually irate. It’s a concerning environment.

What is important? Really.

Glimpses

Before delving into my thoughts, let me share a few glimpses—recent and past—that have prompted me to ponder this question:

• In Indonesia, an important meeting was abruptly interrupted by news of the death of one of the foundation’s board members.
• Just fifteen minutes ago, my friends and I were at McDonald’s, amidst chaos—fighting and screaming. Shortly...

As you might now the last couple of years have taken quite a toll on my personal life. It was work and my work situation that wore me (and my wife) down.

Before we moved back to Sweden Elin and I decided to try to do something about it, so that we didn’t fall back into a work-life-situation that wore us down again. Therefor we decided to not work full time when we get back.

Wednesdays are my day off. I wanted to share some initial reactions and … eeeh … symptoms.

Just to be clear - I’m ok. I don’t feel bad, stressed or depressed now. But I don’t want to go there again. This is my ways of protection.

I more and more realize that what I’m doing is about change management. It’s involved in more or less every gig I get and I feel that I know just a fraction about what I need to handle it.

However I have three thoughts that have helped me immensely in how to approach change. They calm me down around the nervosity I’ve felt about “changing people”, since both have to do with changing perspective, putting me on the other side.

In this post I wanted to share these ideas, that are not mine mind you, and maybe you will feel a bit calmer too.

Never in my life would I dream of writing a book. But that have happened and we (me and Joakim) are super proud of the result and very humbled by the good reception the book has got.

Never in my life would I dream about me writing another book… But it’s happening. Again. I can’t believe it, this time around again.

This will be a story about my experiences in the hospital that I helped during my two years in Indonesia. I’ve blogged extensively about it here and many of those posts will resurface in the book.

There will soon be a site for the book and I’ll make sure to update this post with the link to that.

In my church, Vasakåren of the Salvation Army, there’s some amazing work being done for people outside the church. All along the lines of William Booth (founder of the Salvation Army);

Soup, soap, Salvation

One of the more impressive ones are led by my good friend Johan. It’s a program that helps people to get job. It’s called “faith, hope and work”¹.

They have had amazing results. About 75% of the people that comes to “Faith, hope and work” gets a job!

My mind was blown away. I learned that the governmental job-finder facility has a hit rate of about 10-25%.

And I did the same erroneous assumption as many of the organizations where agile is started to be used, does. I tried to scale it.

Basically we have a lot things to do, many different wills and opinions as to what is more important and 3 hours to get it done. Can you facilitate that for us?

The end of the first email from my “new”¹ could not have been more direct and to the point. And yet part of me found it a bit scary too.

This is one of the hardest things you encounter in a project or any organization, and now I was going to do it as the first impression.

Therefor I thought that I could list a couple of thoughts and tools that have helped me through the years. Just to revise them for myself at least. You can peak if you want.

There’s high and low stuff here. Some of it might not be suitable for the kind of prioritization that you’re doing. Your...

I have a confession to make:

I think retrospectives are boring

There. It’s out there. I’ve attended many and facilitated even more. I don’t like it. But before you all start to throw wasted fruit and vegetables my way, let me follow that statement up with a contradiction:

I think that retrospecting is the fundament of agile, and what's needed to improve

If agile brought anything new to the IT table it was the idea that we repeatedly, often or even continuously look back on our work, our tools, our output or our environment and try to improve it. Admittedly that was not invented by agile, but that’s how most of us got in contact with it. And it’s the one basic idea that can be found in all agile framework. Because it’s essential to improve.

Anyway - those two statements causes a problem for me, as you probably can...

Remember back in the days when you (or me at least) proudly could say: “I’m a back end developer”? Well, sorry those days are gone since a few years.

Now, front end can mean many different things and quite often, luckily for me, it’s been just feeding data into a already structured framework, but what if you need to set the architecture?

Naturally we turn to the frameworks of choice and … about at this point I run into problems. Because I really have a problem with “big” frameworks like Angular Js, Ember, Aurelia or React. They look nice and I have really tried to learn, at least part of, them. Sometimes I’ve been close, but they just don’t stick. Too much for my poor head.

Maybe Koa and Nancy has destroyed me. I’m now a micro-framework guy. I just want my tools, as...

I sometimes have the good fortune to get questions sent to me via email. Often they are very thought provoking and makes me put some (or in this case considerable) effort behind to be able to get a intelligent answer. Also, I try to share my answers on line to increase the learning possibilities.

I try to answer those questions when I get the can, especially when I see that the person really wants to learn. A really good example of that came to me the other day, when Jocelyn wrote me. He’s about to attend a course on kanban and was required, before the course, to conduct an interview with someone who knew the topic.

I’ve been rereading the remarkable ReInventing Organizations by Fredric Laloux. The first chapter, in particular, is captivating as it delves into the evolutionary history of organizations. It astutely highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of each new organizational stage.

While reading about Amber-Conformist organizations (think strict hierarchical, large organizations), I found a train of thought forming, resonating with my experiences over the past two years, where I’ve encountered many such organizations.

My point here is that residues of this behavior persist in modern organizations. Recognizing and addressing them proactively is crucial to prevent potential issues, as we’ll soon see.

As the name suggests, “Amber-Conformist” organizations value compliance and adherence to instructions. Decision-making and authority in these organizations are centralized at the top of the hierarchy. As you move down the hierarchy, less authority, decision-making, and thinking are expected until, at the lowest level, there’s only action.

To scale this...