s01e04: on tools (Rico rant)

In this episode, we discuss the anti-pattern that is "yak shaving" - getting lost in work that seems valuable but is ultimately just distracting you from your goal. This can halt momentum in a change initiative as people get lost amongst vast yak farms of waste. Show notes: Seth Godin on Yak Shaving Ren & Stimpy episode on Yak Shaving Day (inspiration for term) Asterix & the 12 tasks Malcolm in the middle - "did you change the lightbulb?"

In this episode, Rico couldn't contain himself and had to rant about his passion for tools. He talks about how Agile made him take a more balanced approach to tools, and how the right tools enable teams and organizations to move one abstraction level higher thus increasing their agility. In the end, Rico also recommends some tools for Agile teams. Collaboration tools Miro: www.miro.com Mural: www.mural.co Knowledge management tools Coda: www.coda.io Notion: www.notion.so Zettelkasten: www.zettelkasten.de

The topic today is a bit of a deep dive into a specific organizational design pattern - the Agile team. The basic building block in Agility. Not all teams are the same, and understanding the nuances impacts your ability to build an organization aligned with your business model. The fashionable thing to say is that we should have feature teams that can deliver an increment every iteration or frequently. And we kinda take that as gospel. I wanted to revisit that idea with you, because I'm not convinced that's true.

In this week's episode, we discuss different approaches for Agile transformations and their respective strengths and weaknesses. Culture bubbles, incubators, and the Big Bang. Plus we had some time in the end for a couple of mailbag questions.

In this week's episode we discuss Tiago's latest article about agile scaling frameworks. We talk about SAFe, about LeSS, Scrum @ Scale, and the other frameworks.