A blog about people, culture, organisations and teams.
Posts about learning and training.
This post is the write-up of a talk I gave at Fast Flow Conference in October 2025, about Communities of Practice through the lens of learning, knowledge, and ideas flow.
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I recently led a leadership training session for a client. During the planning, the evergreen question of “how do we make decisions” came up; this post talks about the framework I introduced to help answer that question.
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In my previous post Team exercise: Building empathy and understanding with the Capability Comb, I introduced an approach to help a team surface their capabilities and identify opportunities to collaborate.
Since then, I have created a miroboard on the miroverse to use with the workshop. You can get a copy of it here miro.com/miroverse/the-capability-comb-workshop-template . If you use it, please drop me a line and let me know how it goes.
The term outcome is a brilliant way of describing the impact and value of doing something. I also like to use outcomes to help describe the capabilities of people and practices or disciplines. Let me explain why it’s so helpful.
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This week, I have been back at the Agile Cambridge conference with Agile on the Bench with my co-host, Cara Bermingham.
Agile on the Bench is a friendly, low-fi, lunchtime, outdoor, agile meetup. A mix of 10min, mostly analogy-based talks about all things agile, people, teams, users and getting things done… outside, on a bench, in a park.
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******Updated 26th Jan 2024******
In my recent post, Why Can’t we all get Along, I discussed the value of overlapping roles in multi/inter/transdisciplinary teams and referred to using the broken comb shape to describe skills and capabilities. In this post, I’ll expand on that theory and add an approach for using it to help teams build empathy, understanding and opportunities for contributions.
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For the last 9 months, I have been collating and sharing blog posts in a weekly newsletter called Posts from Awesome Folks*. I recommend doing it; it helps me keep up to date with what’s on people’s minds.
I have amassed a collection of RSS feeds and shared posts from around 350 authors around the themes of people and culture, organisations and systems, setting and measuring goals and, tools and approaches for teams. These posts come from both individual and organisational blogs, proving that people still blog. I love that people do; I write on my own blog, and I like the permanence of them over social media threads.
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I recently started a newsletter digest of blog posts and articles I like. I started doing it to read more blog posts again; committing to sending something out helps keep me on track and is similar to something I regularly did back when I was at GDS (archived by Tom Banister here). People have started subscribing and telling me how much they appreciate it too, which is an added bonus.
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I recently had the opportunity to work with the awesome people at Citizens Advice, guiding them in creating a capability and progression framework for the newly formed design, data and technology (DDaT) function. Being a forward-thinking organisation, they were open to trying something a bit different; this post describes the approach I used to help them do that.
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A little while back I wrote a post on skills and capability mapping with communities of practice, I have been developing this work further into an organisational-wide approach, under the name of Capability Profile Mapping.
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I run a remote meet-up called Agile in the Ether. A while back I asked twitter followers if I should extend it out to a conference and they said yes, so I did and it was great. This is what happened and what I learnt.
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Feedback is one of the most powerful influences on learning and achievement
Helen Timperley and John Hattie
Many of us facilitate workshops or agile habits regularly and we know if a workshop has gone well if the outcomes are useful. There are also lots of elements of facilitation that we don’t often get feedback on. So here is a tool I use to help think about and frame facilitation feedback.
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I first wrote about skills mapping in my book Building successful communities of practice. This post digs a little deeper into identifying skills and capabilities with communities of practice.
Skills and capability maps help organisations identify gaps and where to invest in skills development. So it makes sense that many want to create them.
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I do a fair bit of training with organisations that want to become more agile. The conversation often starts with “can you give agile training to our staff?”. This is a starting point for a conversation but needs a bit more digging before I can understand what the real need is and what outcome we should be aiming for.
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**Post updated Sept 2023**
I have recently taken up knitting (as anyone who follows me on Instagram will know), and as well as helping me build an increasing collection of brightly coloured hats, it’s helped remind me about the process of learning and how this relates to people learning in general. This post covers five concepts and tips to remember about learning.
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Those of you who read my blog, or follow my twitter account will have seen that I co-run a meet-up called Agile on the Bench. This summer we are taking the idea forward to a one day conference in a campsite.
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There was a great turn out for the third, chilly but sunny Agile on the Bench last Wednesday lunch time, thanks for everyone that made it along and contributing to the discussions.
We had three great speakers, Craig Strong talking about value, Darci Dutcher on goals and the psychology writing things down and John V Willshire talking about flow engines.
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2015 is going to be all about learning and learning to learn. There has been a shift in the way that organisations are run, as the speed of technology and innovation increase, being able to learn and adapt is more and more important in order to keep up. This is why so many organisations are moving to more agile ways of working, which embraces learning and allows for change.
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I recently embarked on a new project with David Lowe to run low cost, low effort meet-up over lunchtime on a park bench, called Agile on the Bench.
It started, like so many good ideas with a random chat in between meetings, what if we did a low cost, very social agile event on a park bench over lunch time?
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I just gave a talk at the awesome Agile 25×20 about riding motorbikes and being implicitly agile, here is what it was about and the slides.
This year I finally got my motorbike licence (yay!), it was an interesting experience in learning new skills and it got me thinking about how we learn and form habits and how does this apply to agile.
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This is a post that I wrote for the Government Digital Service Transformation blog on Agile training which originally appeared over here: https://digitaltransformation.blog.gov.uk/2014/08/11/best-agile-training-just-do-it/
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That’s the conclusion we came to when we asked our practitioners the question we get asked most often: how do I know how to get the best training in agile project management?
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