20 New Year’s Resolutions for Managers in a Scrum Environment

The end of the year is nearby, time for some New Year’s resolutions! It has become a tradition for us to provide some help to busy people coming up with some good (enough) new year’s resolutions. This year we want to support Managers out there struggling to survive within a Scrum oriented organization. Here are […]

How to find your ikigai

Ikigai is a Japanese concept meaning “a reason for being“. Everyone, according to the Japanese, has an ikigai. Finding it requires a deep and often lengthy search of self. Such a search is regarded as being very important, since it is believed that discovery of one’s ikigai brings satisfaction and meaning to life. Many (smart) organisations are trying to find a way to motivate […]

12 enemies of adaptability and what to do about it

Hierarchy Top-down, control based hierarchies discourage individual initiative, lead to slower reaction times, and divert energy to “managing up” or what is called politics. These politics will optimize your organization to CYA (Cover Your Ass), loss of productivity, and an aversion of risk, resulting in a standstill culture. Fear Command-and-control systems lead to organizations filled with […]

A Horror Story: Efficiency is Killing Productivity

Are you working in product development? Creative work? Research? Or any other domain where brains are the main asset? YES? Then this story is for you! It’s called: “Efficiency in organisations has become counterproductive!“ Take the holy grail of efficiency: Clarity – Measurements – Accountability, it makes human efforts derail! And yes, I’ve been tricked into […]

The Good, Bad and Ugly of Being 1 Year in a LeSS Huge Adoption

Large-Scale Scrum or LeSS About 1 year ago BASE Company engaged with Co-Learning in order to improve their time to market, productivity and quality using “Agile“. As many other companies their understanding about Agile was limited to the practices, roles and process and mainly focussed on their “development” teams. Together we generated a better understanding setting […]

What Are Effective Job Interview Techniques?

In this article I want to go a bit deeper into the subject of taking job interviews in order to find the right person for the job. How it is done in some companies today. How others make it their business and how you could avoid loosing time and money within the process by doing […]

I language versus responsible behavior

We have done so many things, we have explained so many things, and yet we still need to learn so many things! Even small learnings can contribute to a better and more satisfying life. Exactly what I recently experienced. While creating a customized training for one of our clients I noticed the importance to mention […]

Internal Marketing is a Key Leadership Practice

The hardest part of an organization, and therefore its management, is sharing the enthusiasm with the entire organization, especially when most of the people in there are making one-tenth to one-fiftieth of what top managers make. Selling the company to their customers, or within their market segment, is a piece of cake compared to selling […]

Plörk – Gamification and Group Coaching Combined

Guestblog by Pierre Neis Plork (play and work) is a workshop facilitation format combining the forces of group coaching and the dynamics of games (gamification). Some consider Plork as solution focused coaching in a minimal timeframe. The main reason for Plork is to install a dynamic of permanent change within the company by the dynamics of the […]

How to Grow Beyond Blame and Justification

In the last couple of years a lot of people started to ask me how to get others to change and take responsibility. Most of the time these questions come from people wanting others to do things for them. Sounds familiar? Well that is exactly how it should not be done! As a member of […]