Moving to the home of Scrum

Why I look forward to working with Ken Schwaber and being part of Scrum.org, the home of Scrum.

Less than a year ago I was wondering about rather surprising evolutions in my professional life of Scrum. I retrospected to find that some things take time, can’t be rushed, let alone be predicted. Ending up with the feeling of being carried to places one never imagined of entering.

That was June 2012. Now is April 2013.

Over the past years Ken Schwaber and I have developed, almost by accident, a great personal and working relationship. Beyond that, I have an awesome contact and understanding with the Scrum.org team. Both aspects contributed to my well-being, made me feel good, respected, cherished even at times. And that was just fine. It helped, it inspired me in my work, it gave me opportunities to bounce ideas off.

Very recently, my daily times and work got into turbulence, with my stress levels going red. I realized that few people understand, understand what drives and motivates me. Hmm, some would say it’s just frustration born out of stubbornness and impatience. Ken and I tightened the relationship. Until we decided to move it to a formal level. And in no more than 1 week we completely arranged for my move to the home of Scrum and become part of the Scrum.org team.

It wasn’t planned. It happened. It emerged from a chaotic situation of doubts, searching, thinking and many considerations.

Who would have guessed?

Being a bit of an anarchist myself, I consulted with knowledgeable dilettante people in that 1 week. Opinions were unanimous: it won’t be a picnic, it will be an adventure, highly challenging, but fascinating and brilliant. Hmm, Ken himself says it will be a walk in the park. But that’s probably because he knows of many past motions that I have gone through. And, despite some controversy and him being a mule, few people would doubt Ken is an honorable, intelligent and trustworthy person to work with.

Luckily we consider ourselves just about weird enough to work with each other. We are both impulsive, impatient. He’s a mule, I’m stubborn. We have much in common; above all we seem to share many views and values. We go for vision, focus and creativity. And I am proud to be creating a little room of the house of Scrum in Antwerp, Belgium, Europe. I’ll be joining a great team, and serve the communities of Scrum practitioners, promoters of Scrum and our Scrum.org Professional Scrum trainers; thriving on autonomy to work on my mastery in Scrum and Enterprise Scrum from the purpose of making this world a better place to live and work in.

Type I behavior: A way of thinking and an approach to life built around intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, motivators. It is powered by our innate need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

Ken and I made up a little news announcement to express our excitement. Find it here: News – Ken Schwaber and Gunther Verheyen tighten relationship.

Few People Understand

Many people spend their time, full-time, on elbowing a career, improving their personal position, aiming at a promotion, planning a next strategic move, working on political strategies, making more money, ripping off people, whatever it takes.

Few people understand what motivates me. Few people understand:

• My drive to make our world a better place to live and work in;
• My apathy for titles and hierarchy;
• My respect for people as the core of my actions and being.

Few people understand that no promotion, no bonus, no pseudo-moral bribery, no threats have changed or will change these inner drives. Few people understand that no hierarchical layer keeps me from addressing issues, challenging the status-quo or experimenting with improvements.

Few people have the mental openness to understand that I care only about the content of my work, about working with people, about my autonomy (in team, time, tasks and tools, as described in Daniel Pink’s Drive). Don’t come to tell me what you want from me, or try to use me for power games or self-promotion. It only wears me out. I hate it and I start responding emotional and unexpected. Come to work with me and great results may emerge.

I rarely expose this inner drive explicitly because it’s not a pose. Maybe this one-time notice helps. Worst case you now know why we don’t get along or why you feel ignored. In the meantime I have the best work and personal life possible, the greatest career possible; by not minding my career.

A Servant King?

In 2012 one of the communities at my employer found a fun way to reward people. The community handed out virtual badges for specific achievements. The top badge collectors became kings. The kings recently fought a ‘battle’ to determine who would be the conqueror.

The kings had to present themselves to the battle audience with a little movie. My movie was co-created with a terrific colleague and member of El Porco, who I hold accountable for the poetic expressions that might indicate how I’m perceived. Better than any spoken statement could be.

By the way, I gloriously and graciously failed to win the battle.

Writing Scrum Writings

On top of managing the agile offering of Capgemini (Dutch description here) as a Product Owner and mentoring our Scrum coaches and Scrum trainers I also give Professional Scrum trainings.

After my classes I send out a thank you to the participants in which I include some guidelines to prepare for the online assessment they get access to. I also point people to some background readings. Over time I have created a small library of blog notes I’ve written from which I can select some to refer attendants to for additional information on top of the courseware:

• The paper “ING: capturing agility at a large Dutch bank” that the CIO Channels of ING and I co-wrote. It was kindly published by Scrum.org at http://www.scrum.org/About/All-Articles/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/577/ING-Capturing-agility-via-Scrum-at-a-large-Dutch-bank
• A blog note on the paradigm shift that we need in our software development business: http://www.capgemini.com/blog/capping-it-off/2012/04/to-shift-or-not-to-shift-the-software-industry-paradigm/
• A blog note on what is/is not Scrum, and how this “ScrumAnd” mindset opens the road to continuous improvement: http://www.capgemini.com/technology-blog/2012/08/yes-we-do-scrum-and/
• A blog note on how to ‘plan’ agility: http://ullizee.wordpress.com/2012/09/30/agility-cant-be-planned/
• The questionable view of the Scrum Master as ‘impediment hunter’: http://ullizee.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/impediments-and-where-to-find-them/
• The anti-collaborative concept of fixed price bids: http://ullizee.wordpress.com/2012/10/07/fixed-price-bids-an-open-invitation-to-bribe-cajole-lie-and-cheat/
• For the Lean specialists that attend the class and who are in general quite impressed by the lean-ness of Scrum: http://ullizee.wordpress.com/2011/12/18/how-scrum-blends-the-philosophies-of-lean-and-agile/
• Assuring people that they are welcome in the warm ‘House of Scrum’: http://ullizee.wordpress.com/2011/10/22/the-house-of-scrum/
• The bottom-up thinking when the scaling of Scrum is required: http://www.capgemini.com/technology-blog/2012/05/scaling-scrum/
• The differentiation between the rules of the game of Scrum and ways to play the game: http://ullizee.wordpress.com/2013/01/17/ways-to-play-scrum/

I always pick some of following topics to add:

• A short RSA animated movie to illustrate Daniel Pink’s scientific research on what truly motivates people: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
• The original “The New New Product Development Game” paper (1986, Takeuchi and Nonaka) that has been an important inspiration in the development of Scrum.
• Why I recommend the book “Coaching Agile Teams” by Lyssa Adkins to Scrum Masters: http://ullizee.wordpress.com/2013/01/06/take-it-to-the-team/

Fyi. have a look at the most beautiful location I have ever trained in.

Fixed Price bids. An open invitation to bribe, cajole, lie and cheat.

I have been fortunate. Because some things take time and I have had the time to experience Scrum deeply before the demand rose sky high at my local markets. Time and experience formed the foundation upon which I build in some larger scale Scrum transformations that I am involved in.

I have learned much. I have much to learn. Yet, some people ask for my opinion.

A frequently recurring question is on the combination of agile and fixed price bids (and contracts). Here are my thoughts:

I have an opinion

Fixed price bids are an open invitation to bribe, cajole, lie and cheat.

• Fixed price contracts introduce a blaming culture. They don’t aim at collaboration and sharing but at shifting all risk to one of the contracting parties. It invites people and organizations to be dishonest and fight in order not to take the blame (and the penalties). It might end up with the supplier financially getting hung, or the requester getting bad quality or not getting work by devious (and clause-wise) omission.
• Fixed prices deny the very nature of our business. Software development is complex and creative work. There are a lot of elements that influence process and progress, and the number of unpredictable elements surpasses the number of predictable ones.
• Fixed prices thrive on the belief that time, budget and scope can be fixed and planned upfront. Although everybody (at least off the record) acknowledges the truth in the metaphor of the iron triangle of software development, few seem to say it aloud. Hereby, fixing time, budget ànd scope creates only one certainty, i.e. low quality.

I have experience

Fixed prices define ‘success’ as the predicted combination of in-time+on-budget+promised-scope. Research by the Standish group has shown that agile is more successful than a traditional approach, even against these old criteria. This is not a reason to promote the combination! Yield rate is better but still low by setting the wrong expectations in the context of software development, i.e. that the unplannable can be predicted in a plan.

In the early years of my life in agile, I have delivered several fixed price projects successfully with Scrum. I even developed a framework for it. Still, from a contracting point of view it introduced the notion of ‘fixed price-negotiable scope’. Every single time that this notion was neglected or ignored I ended up in a one-way scope negotiation situation. The bleeding, the pain and the war situations never positively contributed to quality, time to market, user satisfaction, ROI, TCO. Blaming and penalties just appeal to a primitive sense of revenge.

In our Professional Scrum courses we work with the people in the class to figure out options to use Scrum. We try to facilitate bottom-up knowledge generation. We consider parameters and complexities that influence IT and software development, to find that in general we can’t be sure we have them all, and that at least some of the known ones are still quite unpredictable.

Agile via Scrum restores the understanding of the true nature of software development, and offers new ways of working and control to deal with uncertainty. It helps us to shift from the industrial to the creative paradigm and to accept that software development and fixed price contracts are not fit for each other.

I have a dream

Against all experience in, proven low yield rate, failures, burnt-out people and caused distress, the belief remains that a fixed price contract offers certainty. Although there is a tangible and incredible way to deal with the natural uncertainty of software development, Scrum. Scrum allows us to collaborate and behave as partners. We can jointly evolve, learn and check regularly on what does/does not work. But it still requires the first, huge step to let go of the false belief in planned certainty.

I have a dream; the dream that IT professionals stop offering on fixed price bids. Because it is unethical, risky and untrustworthy to make that kind of hard-coded promises in a complex and fast-changing environment. It is… unprofessional. And there is a great alternative option.

Training Room with a View

I was recently in Offenbach (near Frankfurt, Germany) to facilitate a Professional Scrum Master training for German colleagues. Our learning & development center in Munich had set up the training in the best room I was ever able to do a training in. We had the 30th floor of the gigantic City Tower completely for us. And it offered a terrific view over the area and lots of daylight in the room.

Was it the location? The frequently passing airplanes? Or the sheer enthusiasm of my colleagues? Fact is that it was truly one of my most enjoyable Professional Scrum journeys so far…

Fyi. The City Tower has a height of 120m, and the top floor is the 31st (so still one above us). The tower is not completely taken by Capgemini, by the way…

Personal Scrum Day Europe Impressions

On 11 July 2012 we organized the first edition of the Scrum Day Europe (for which I previously published the abstracts of Ken Schwaber and myself). 130+ enthusiast people gathered, interacted and connected at the beautiful location of “Pakhuis De Zwijger” near the Amsterdam docks (Netherlands). I was delighted to see so many friends of Scrum; Professional Scrum students, colleagues, clients and personal friends. And I am extremely grateful for the appreciation and the energy received.

Ken Schwaber opened the day with an inspiring talk on the global accomplishments of Scrum, and how well this positive change for the software industry is currently being embraced in Belgium and the Netherlands. He announced he is working on further evolutions of the Scrum framework towards management and organizational improvement.

The CIO of Tele2, Svenja de Vos, talked us through the practicalities of their ‘big bang’, ‘no guts, no glory’-style transition to Scrum.

Subsequently the audience split up to (1) join an OpenSpace, (2) play some agile games and (3) enjoy more perspectives to Scrum (change basics, coaching people and Scrum in a hosting environment).

After lunch the full group joined again in the central room to listen to the highly energetic story of Amir Arooni, member of the ING IT management team. He gave the crowd an honest insight into their findings, impediments and future hopes after a 1+ year, large-scale transformation to Scrum. I was honored to be mentioned by Amir as one of the crucial guides of their transformation.

As Capgemini global leader for Scrum I was asked by Ken to do my talk on the ‘Emergence of the Customer-Oriented Enterprise’, an organizational pattern to build on the Scrum framework to achieve enterprise agility. Beyond the appreciation I received I was particularly glad for getting away with a form of humor. My presentation is free for download. All pictures and presentations of the event are available at the Scrum Day Europe website.

Here’s a very personal selection of (mostly mobile) pictures by friends:

A big thanks to Scrum.org, all co-organizers and I hope to see you next year!

Scrum Day Europe abstracts

On 11 July 2012 we organize the first Scrum Day Europe event in Amsterdam (Netherlands). The aim is to yearly unite executives, CxO persons, thought leaders and practitioners on agility via Scrum. Have a look at the program and register at the website.

Here are the abstracts from the session of Ken Schwaber and of me:

Ken Schwaber (“Scrum and Continuous Improvement”):

“Organizations need to be agile. This may mean responding to opportunities better, solving existing problems, removing waste, or just developing better software. Scrum is a tool many organizations use to gradually become agile. Ken will present a framework for continuous improvement toward agility. Stage by stage, the model demonstrates the application of increasingly sophisticated practices in the areas of value, productivity, quality, product development and change. Ken will show how these relate to metrics and the organization’s unique agility signature. An organizational model that drives continuous improvement is also demonstrated.”

Gunther Verheyen (“Emergence of the Customer-Oriented Enterprise”):

“Scrum and Enterprise Agility – Scrum is a widely adopted framework for complex product development. Gunther Verheyen, Capgemini’s global Scrum leader, has witnessed how Scrum is a powerful mean to adopt the new, Agile paradigm of software development. Gunther will share his observations how Scrum is currently surpassing the walls of the software department. Gunther has a vision that helps people and organizations capitalize on this evolution and use Scrum to grow into Enterprise Agility. Because organizations can do more than just faster and better software development to delight its customers. What emerges, according to Gunther, is the “Customer-Oriented Enterprise”. But Gunther will demonstrate why it is highly unlikely that this is the last stage of organizational evolutions…”

Why It Took Time (to become what I didn’t know I wanted to be)

The terrorism of an alcoholic father left me with serious damages and memories of a loveless youth. Nevertheless I graduated as Industrial Engineer in electronics in 1992, age 22. An opportunistic choice of study as philosophy or literature didn’t offer the same job certainty. Purpose?

Time for a little retrospective exercise. What has happened in the 20 years since my graduation? What has been most influential in becoming who I am today? And why did it take that time?

The formative years

I was deeply disappointed when entering the labor market as my grade created the expectation of thorough technical insights while I had hoped for some staff position, and the possibility to work with teams.

My first job was software engineering on VAX but I remember most the great times I spent in the great country of Ireland. After a little project on OS/2 I moved to a small company in 1993 to do assembler programming on Micro-PIC controllers. My 6 months trial period wasn’t too convincing but a one month prolongation did show some success in planning and purchasing, combined with Borland C++ and Paradox programming.

Blind enthusiasm and overwork burned me out so I left in 1996 to take over a bookshop of a large chain on a franchising base. A client of our shop pointed me towards Nietzsche and his ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ (and later on his other works) was an incredible eye opener. Since then I kept saying that 90% of who I am, I am due to my wife and 9% due to Nietzsche. Nietzsche revealed the bare truth to much of my struggles with life to that date. Although my wife and I had the time of our lives being all around books, and we moved to a bigger shop twice, on the last day of 1998 we had to decide to quit. The reason was the imbalance of income, social life and personal development; and being on the verge of debts.

In 1999 I started as business developer for the first Belgian e-commerce site for books and CDs, where I soon grew into a senior management position. By the end of an exciting but burning period I remember me creating a mega (no, wait, giga) analysis for a complete new back office (from IT to logistics), which was my domain to lead. It only took me 3 hours to get a team through it. Once. I don’t know whether it was that analysis or the complete renewal of our server park, but just after I resigned in 2001, I was offered the position of IT director at the company. Although I did co-write a post-crisis survival business plan for the company, I still decided to leave. I felt too young, too inexperienced and -above all- my views on the people aspect were quite different from our investors and other leading managers. I rightfully left, is my opinion still. Later that year, our first son was born.

The Years of Dedication

In 2001 I started working for a large local (Belgian) consulting company.

For my first project I did a complete functional analysis, took the lead in contracting and other negotiations and continued as ‘project manager’. Management advised me not show the estimates to the team. But I did, and it didn’t prevent the project from ending up break-even where all other fixed prices ended in major losses. But I specifically remember helping a team member through a difficult divorce situation. Without minding the actuals.

In 2003 our second son was born. He turned out to have Down Syndrome. Professionally I got called to urgently lead a new project that seemed unfeasible despite the fancy MS Project promise. It took 15 minutes for 2 software architects to convince me about eXtreme Programming. It just had all elements fixed in the method that I had -to a certain extent- tried to do in my first project: communication, iterations, feedback. In December 2003 I presented this project as the first major production XP implementation in Belgium at Javapolis.

When scaling up with the next phase of the project we added Scrum in 2004. I went well-prepared, i.e. having read his 2 books at that time, to a CSM class by Ken Schwaber. And we replaced our organizational XP practices with Scrum practices and names, but we kept doing the core engineering practices (pair programming, TDD, continuous integration, automated testing).

By the end of 2006 we had successfully delivered 2 more phases of our early Agile project, and applied Scrum + eXtreme Programming in 2 additional large website applications, incorporating extensive front-ends, back-ends, integrations and interfaces. Those projects learned me that inclusion of incremental development of even major UX-components is feasible, and even to be preferred.

Due to lack of respect for our results and for the people I decided to leave in 2007. And to date I’m still struck by the observation of an esteemed colleague and team member that I had never consciously made myself, i.e. that he loved the way I tried to turn a project into a total, 360° experience of joy, fun, energy and… results. Never satisfied with less.

Richard Dawkins deepened my Nietzsche experience by adding a genetic and memetic dimension to it. By the end of the year I started at another consulting company, led and blinded by promises of a management position. Around that time our oldest son, age 6, was diagnosed with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. Having read Richard Dawkins helped in surviving and dealing with the genetic flaws of our 2 children.

The empty management promises finally covered 2 years of my life in stress and agony. I fought, battled and barely survived, before returning to my Agile roots. I realized that I had never cared about any ‘CS*’ certifications or whatever career, that my satisfaction had been in working with teams and clients, joyful projects, and that I still didn’t care about careering. Therefore I was attracted by the community orientation of Ken Schwaber’s new platform, Scrum.org and followed and joined it from the early days in 2009.

2010 did not only see me giving consultancy a last chance at my current employer, but after 2+ years of medical uncertainty and wandering our daughter was born. No genetic problems, not even carrier of DMD. My first professional experience wasn’t too comforting, but I applied my iterative-incremental approach and turned my first project, once more, and once more against all odds, into a 360° success. In the mean time I evolved with Scrum.org and did the Professional Scrum Master assessments (level I and II), and decided to firmly proceed on that path. I applied for Professional Scrum Trainer for which I went to a PSM class by Ken by the end of 2010 in Zürich.

Booming Business

And then, suddenly, there was 2011. Dutch colleagues found me. I developed an internal Scrum training, which was highly appreciated and became very successful. It opened important gates at clients, caused some amazing breakthroughs and I mutated to another division. I followed the early Professional Scrum Product Owner program and soon became Professional Scrum Trainer in PSM and PSPO.

I had a boost in understanding and living Agility, not in the least through the mentoring and lessons by Ken. My perspective quickly broadened. Authors like Daniel Pink (“Drive”) and Nassim Taleb (“The Black Swan”) augmented my general world views, and greatly supported my belief to use people and empiricism to cope with the complexity of our world. I am now the global expert on Scrum at my company (120.000 people worldwide). And the end is not nearly in sight. Scrum has become a substantial part of what we do and offer. We train our consultants and our clients, we coach and guide them, we promote Enterprise Agility and we inject more and more agility into our own organization.

Soon I will be talking at the Scrum Day Europe event that Scrum.org initiated and that we co-organize. I will introduce how I perceive the Emergence of the Customer-Oriented Enterprise. Previous ‘confessions’ gave some insights in what might have influenced how I developed my views. Who knows what will happen next to change how I see things?

Not Future

Some things take time. Beauty. Growing flowers. Becoming what you didn’t know you wanted to be. Unlearning. Mastery. Dedication and determination.

I am still without much formal title or position. I regularly struggle with the gigantic, monstrous machines that corporations tend to be. I regularly want to flee back to the underground when balancing my personal ethics against my desire for impact. Overall however, I manage and it works out… without power games. I am epigenetically (the seeds sown in my youth) unable to play power games, but I’ve learned to use that in my advantage.

In 2012 I am even making enormous progress on my scales of valuation. In the past I usually was merely tolerated, in the best case appreciated.  Here I am now, not just being motivated, but even able to innovate.

Note

I started writing this blog note to give people insight in what it sometimes takes, at least time, to learn and evolve. I was long in doubt whether to continue this text when I started reading Lyssa Adkins’ book Coaching Agile Teams. Having read the first chapter I decided to go for it. Because my message reflects how I became to ‘be’, not only what I ‘do’. Painful sometimes, but honest. Hoping it might help or inspire others. Hoping it helps people understand that it takes time. The path and the patience pay off. I can now go back to Lyssa’s book again and finish reading it.

Emergent Human Performance

How did industrial people take good care of machines? They took them apart, let’s say once a year. They had a close look at the pieces, did some filing on them, added a little oil, changed some gear wheels, did some repainting and put the machine back together.

Great way to handle machines.

But there should have been a notice in the maintenance manuals of such machines saying “Not to be used on human beings”. A Team of people is not a machine you can take apart to examine the individual parts, file or replace some of those parts and put it back together.

People are not replaceable pieces of machinery.

Still, it’s what we do and how we treat them. We use the label ‘resource’, i.e. (see dictionary) a “source of supply that can readily be drawn upon when needed”. And we think we can make up for this totally inappropriate definition by adding ‘Human’ to it. So, what do we mean then? A human form of a replaceable hardware component?

People are not mechanical robots.

Too often people are reduced to just a sum of pseudo-capabilities like a diploma and a cv. But -surprise, surprise- even if different persons have near-identical lists of such ‘properties’, they still have different backgrounds, personalities, private lives, interests, senses of humor, and all those other aspects that make working with people so exciting. But -indeed- it does prevent them from being interchangeable.

Too often is the uniqueness of people blatantly ignored by an overload of ‘HR’ strategies, policies and penalizing KPI’s. And at a yearly performance measurement this human hardware part is investigated against them. And sent home with a set of reprimands that it should interpret as something ‘to learn from’. Does it really come as a surprise if the surveyed object does not feel too motivated by this type of machine-like maintenance procedure?

How then about some positive change? Improve this domain of the world we work in? How can Agile thinking help?

In The Iron Triangle of Valuation I presented the hideous career path that is projected on people in IT. It forces people on a path that typically leads from developer to analyst to project manager. And if one’s lucky the gates of management are opened to have a ‘real’ career. I introduced a triangular-balanced context to replace it, allowing people to prosper and do well in a ‘role’, taking away the focus from ‘position’ and endless stairs.

We can use that base model to fundamentally reform the way we work with people, the way we observe and assess people. Certainly for organizations making the shift in external orientation to a Customer-Oriented Enterprise this is a promising internal re-organization opportunity; it aligns the internal thinking to the external orientation.

The triangle of valuation describes the context that needs to be created first before people can prosper and develop their potential. It demands that organization and individual agree on:

• The individual showing a clear interest in performing a set of tasks and activities (or moving to those tasks),
• That person demonstrating a talent (or having the potential to grow a talent) in performing those tasks and activities,
• The organization’s ability to offer (have or create) a domain in which the tasks and activities can be performed and are valuable.

Intermediate evolutions need to be transparent.

Individual and organization agree on gradual follow-up and evolution. Because it is highly disrespectful to confront people once a year with results from the organization’s perspective without having given the people the chance to adapt and improve. And in the end, the organization is neither getting any benefits from this. The core idea of an evolutionary approach is that, if a yearly review is considered important, there should be no surprises at that time of evaluation. All involved should already be aware of the results that have, or have not been, realized, and what has caused it to be like that.

The clue is that in today’s world of continual change and evolution, there is no reliable way to impose upfront, detailed definitions, expectations and predictions, not even for individual performance. This should be replaced by an incremental path allowing the assessed and the assessor to meet regularly to conversate, learn, interact, review and re-plan. They must travel a common path upon jointly set objectives and forecasted expectations, with a frequent demonstration/summary of progress.

Incremental evolution with room for empirical improvement must be added to respect the individual and lead to true valuation. The individual will perform to the maximum possible, taking into account changing circumstances beyond the individual’s control. At least yearly, but possibly earlier, objectives can be collaboratively reset, and even the base triangle can be reviewed. A win-win situation will emerge. Valuation can take material, financial or non-material forms.

If the legs of the triangle are fixed upon the wrong assumption of total predictions, without room for evolution and incorporation of new insights, valuation will suffer from that fixation, not originate from it.

Agile enterprises embrace people practices.

After the transition from ‘Human Resources’ to ‘people practices’, assessments will be focused on helping and facilitating people, no longer on mere judging. It is the only way to give rise to the emerging individual performance that has the potential of improving overall enterprise results. It’s a model that aims at emerging performance. KPI’s represent a technique that can still be added, but that should be done with the objective of providing information, not be judgmental in itself.

Results will be the result of emergent performance. At least a result will be the hard work itself, even it only pays off in the future. The introspective get-together’s serve to check whether we are still learning from it. That’s why these intermediate reviews take place. Pressure is taken away from hard-coded results and shifted to context, learning and improving. And a yearly retrospective review creates value in stepping out of the normal rush and taking a look at the bigger picture, and insert evolutions to the triangle. IF the base context, expressed in the 3 legs of the triangle of valuation, was in place. What else would be evolving?

And if an intermediate introspection requires a substantial revision of the wider context, as expressed in the triangle, take enough time to close the process and restart.

Agile enterprises embrace emotions.

And finally we can stop blaming people for being “emotional”. AS if we are not in a people business. Emotions are the essence of human nature. And in case of a conflict, look first at the triangle of valuation to check whether the right context is still in place, in the current circumstances.

Is this an emotional, highly personal desire? Of course it is! It would finally create a context that will not only just tolerate deviant people like me, but possibly even appreciate them. That in turn could be a stepping stone to stimulate them and open ways for them to truly innovate.