So much of what is written about leadership is hogwash. There's no recipe to follow. It starts with you and a belief in yourself. A belief in new possibilities. A belief in your abilities to make changes in the world, and an appreciation that you can't do it all on your own! All you need to know about leadership you learned when you were a kid. Cast you mind back to a sunny afternoon hanging out with friends with nothing to do. You see the football out in the yard. "What about a game?" You look around at your pals....

My favourite Agile Manifesto principle is "Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done." As coaches, we naturally work with people helping them form cross-functional teams and install agile practices that drive iterative product development. How many of us throw our energy into improving the environment that people work in? Yes, most agile coaches know how important it is to setup a visual workspace, with cards on a board in the team space, as Xavier illustrates so well on his Visual Management blog. What more can we...

The Open Volcano event was put together in less than 48 hours, when several agile luminaries found themselves stranded in the UK due to volcanic ash induced flight cancellations. Attendees were impressed by how well it turned out. Open Volcano isn't unique, Agile Open Space events are springing up all over the place. They're often low-budget events centered on a specific agile theme, such as: CITCON is about continuous integration and testing, Agile Coach Camp / Gathering explores coaching agile teams, SDTconf delves into simple design and test. You see Open Space Technology is the perfect match for Agile values....

Here's a short interview I gave to Craig Smith from O'Reilly at QCon 2010 in London. I guess you can tell that this is completely ad lib :-) Weird to see yourself captured on film. Only a 4 minute clip. Check out a few agile coaching nuggets wrapped with a smattering of waffle. Let me know what you think!

On Sunday, I went to GOOS Gaggle, a micro-conference on the development ethos described in "Growing Object-Oriented Software Guided by Tests", the new book written by XP stalwarts, Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce. After the main presentations, we moved into Open Space format. I joined a conversation with John Daniels and Willem van den Ende about "Why Start with End-to-End Tests?". Although we agree whole-heartedly with this, John was interested to explore whether this approach is always a good idea? You can read John's write-up of our conversation on his blog. John starts by writing this up on the board....

How would you answer the question on this sticky note? This question "How 'Agile' is the concept of Scrum?" was posed by Lucy, a business analyst with around six months experience on a team attempting to apply Scrum. On face value, her question seems to be asking "Is Scrum a member of the Agile family of methods and frameworks?" Clearly, the answer is "Yes!" Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, the thought-leaders credited with creating Scrum, took part in the summit that created the Agile Manifesto. Plus, the titles of "Agile Software Development with Scrum" and "Agile Project Management with Scrum"...

My next few weeks are pretty packed with agile events! This Tuesday evening, I'll be at the London Scrum User Group giving a book reading from my Agile Coaching book. Roman Pichler will also be reading from his new book "Agile Product Management with Scrum". On Wednesday, I'm off on the Eurostar to Agile Acceptance Testing Days in Belgium where I'll be giving a talk on "Coaching Teams over Acceptance Testing Hurdles". I'd be interested to hear any stories that you have on this topic, if you've got time to add as a comment to this blog... I'll be back...

Look around you and you'll find that many organizations claiming to be Agile or "doing Scrum" are actually doing something else. I call it W-agile. They dress up the work in the trappings of XP and Scrum but really work in nested mini-waterfalls focusing on one big delivery at the end of the project. Often, developers are working in isolation from their business stakeholders which misses the original agile vision. For example, this week I ran a class on Planning with User Stories. Questions asked (see pic) by the people on the course hinted that they were working in a...

Back in 2002, Alistair Cockburn wrote about three levels of practice: learn, detach, transcend that we can apply to our listening, reading and coaching. He used Shu-Ha-Ri from Aikido to illustrate that these three levels of practice are found in other skill areas. Shu, the student copies techniques without adapting them. Ha, the student reflects on what has been learned and breaks free from traditions. Ri, the student is now a practitioner extending the art. In the 2nd edition of Agile Software Development, Alistair adds "You can apply Shu-Ha-Ri to designing courses and writing technique materials." Although he takes care...