Tag: teams

Capability comb - illustration of a blue comb

Team exercise: Building empathy and understanding with the Capability Comb

9 March 2023 / / 0 Comments
Reading Time: 3 minutes

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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Three antipatterns One role across many teams Product vs engineering wars X-led organisations

Why can’t we all just get along?

3 November 2022 / / 2 Comments
Reading Time: 10 minutes

I initially gave this talk at Lead Agile Brighton in October 2022, then updated and refined the slide deck for Agile Manchester in May 2023, so I’ve updated this post too.

I’ve noticed an increasingly worrying trend in the industry of focus on specialisms at the expense of collaboration, shared responsibility and valuable outcomes.

There might be many reasons for this, from organisational structures, changing workforces or uncertainty in the world. However, this trend can create silos across departments, between roles, and even in teams.

These silos mean that all the value from a multidisciplinary team is lost, people get pigeonholed, and we lose focus on creating valuable outcomes for our users.

In this post, I will explore this trend, some reasons we might be seeing it, and some approaches and techniques to break those silos down to work together.

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A depiction of overlapping disciplines

Building a progression framework for a multidisciplinary organisation

21 June 2021 / / 0 Comments
Reading Time: 6 minutes

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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The team collaboration party game

29 March 2018 / / 2 Comments
Reading Time: 3 minutes

I recently put a workshop together to take a new team through to help describe some important agile concepts including the benefits of working collaboratively and swarming on tasks; the value of communication; how to self-organise; how limiting work in progress achieves more value and what we mean by T-shaped teams.

The workshop itself was a lot of fun and left us with a bunch of balloons and sweets to share with our colleagues(which can’t be a bad thing), as well as a good grasp of the concepts above.

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