Look at your to-do list. Does every entry describe something you can actually do?
‘Email the proposal’ is a task. But ‘New website’, ‘Resolve the staffing issue’ and ‘Improve team morale’ need more thought.
Some entries are
Treating them all as tasks can leave you trying to complete something you have not yet understood.
Continue reading Not everything on your to-do list is a taskIn Getting Things Done, a next action is the next visible, physical activity needed to move something forward.
That might mean:
These actions move us towards completion. But in an uncertain situation, we may not yet know which route will produce the outcome we want.
Sometimes the next action needs to help us learn.
Continue reading Cynefin and GTD: when your next action is an experimentFailure is not usually something organisations want to talk about.
We prefer words like delivery, progress, efficiency and success. Those are good things. But in Agile work, some of the most important learning comes from small failures that happen early enough to do something about them.
The key is not to avoid failure completely.
The key is to make failure safe enough, small enough and visible enough that the team can learn from it.
Continue reading What teams taught me by failing safelyThis is the third post in a short series exploring the Scrum Master role through the four main Cynefin domains:
The first post looked at the clear domain, where simple rules and repeatable practice can help.
The second post looked at the complicated domain, where teams need expertise, analysis and informed judgement.
This post looks at the complex domain.
In the complex domain, the relationship between cause and effect can only be understood afterwards.
The work is uncertain. The team cannot simply apply a checklist or ask an expert for the right answer. There may be no single right answer.
Instead, the team needs to learn through action.
Continue reading Scrum Masters and Cynefin – where learning matters most
