Communities of Practice and Building Capability with Emily Webber

This week’s guest on Intelligent Teams is Simon Huss. Simon is an Executive and Life Coach and a good friend. Simon and I often connect about bringing the body and emotions into the workplace, and I’m excited to share Simon’s world view with the Intelligent Teams audience.Intelligent Teams is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.We covered:Nervous system regulation Micro meditationsGut feelings as a new data streamMind and bodyWorking with anger ‘Difficult people’You can get in touch with Simon and learn more about his work on his website, thank you Simon for coming on Intelligent Teams! Get full access to Intelligent Teams at intelligentteams.substack.com/subscribe

This week’s guest on the Intelligent Teams podcast is Systemic Constellations Facilitator, Coach, Teacher, Trauma Therapist and Writer Zita Tulyahikayo. Zita and I met fortuitously or - as Zita puts it, systemically - in early 2025 in our local North West London gym sauna. We got into a fascinating conversation about ancestral trauma and ancestral gifts, and when she shared that she does systemic work with organisations I knew she’d be an amazing guest on Intelligent Teams. Zita runs public family constellations workshops, and works with organisations and individuals. You can find out about her work on her website and and she writes on the Life Therapy with Zita substack.In this episode we end up talking about our backgrounds from a systemic perspective and it was a real joy to explore together. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to Intelligent Teams to receive more podcasts and writings about bringing the sciences of mind into dialogue with practical wisdom to build high performing Intelligent Teams. I welcome comments with any thoughts or feedback, in whatever format works for you. Get full access to Intelligent Teams at intelligentteams.substack.com/subscribe

This week’s guest on the Intelligent Teams podcast is author, consultant and creator Emily Webber. Emily has been helping technical teams and organisations thrive for well over a decade and has created countless tools and frameworks. In this episode we discussed her work building communities of practice and capabilities, as well as a whistle-stop tour of some of her creations.Practitioners like Emily are at the vanguard of helping teams become more intelligent in a concrete way, and I’ve leant on her work many times over the years. It was a real pleasure to chat to Emily on this episode of Intelligent Teams.If you enjoyed this conversation, you’ll probably enjoy being a subscriber to the Intelligent Teams. Subscribe and receive weekly writings and podcasts about building high performing intelligent teams straight to your inbox. Show notes: Links to Emily’s work: Emily’s homepageCommunities of Practice Team OnionCapability CombsOther articlesForget the Pecking Order At Work - Margaret Heffernen Ted TalkTransactive Memory Systems Get full access to Intelligent Teams at intelligentteams.substack.com/subscribe

This week’s guest is master facilitator and facilitator of learning Charles-Louis de Maere.Charles-Louis is a dear friend and always a source of wisdom and perspective for me personally and for others who are working to help teams collaborate better. This episode is full of practical and theoretical insight into how to facilitate groups and facilitate learning. Some links and resources from the episode: Open Space Technology Kishotenketsu in Storytelling 10 Kishotenketsu principles (Medium - by Francis Laleman): World Café Charles-Louis’ upcoming workshops and trainings and you can find him on LinkedInIf you like this and want more like this, subscribe to Intelligent Teams and you’ll receive a free weekly podcast or article about building high performing teams by bringing together the sciences of mind and practical expertise. If you really really like this and you want to hear more from me, you can also subscribe to Daniel’s Community of Practice to receive Daniel’s Start The Week - a micro newsletter with 3 thought-provoking points to set you up for your week. Get full access to Intelligent Teams at intelligentteams.substack.com/subscribe

This week’s guest on the Intelligent Teams Podcast is Philosopher, Neuroscientist and Podcaster Andrea Hiott. Andrea is the host of the Love and Philosophy - Beyond Dichotomy podcast, where she interviews some of the worlds most eminent thinkers about mind, cognition and experience. Andrea is a researcher at Universität Heidelberg in Utrecht developing her philosophy of Waymaking. I stumbled across Andrea’s work about 6 months ago when researching for my own podcast and have been blown away at the way she integrates thinking and thinkers from across science, philosophy and the humanities. She connects love and poetry with hard science and thorny philosophical problems seamlessly and her curious and holistic way of seeing the world really shines through in this episode. It was really an honour to have Andrea on the podcast. We covered many topics including:* how Andrea became interested in philosophy and the mind* Phenomenology and embodied cognition* Dichotomies in different disciplines and moving beyond boundaries* Philosophy as a way of life and a living approach* Love at work, and why it is so difficult to talk about love* Religion, complexity, awe and connectedness* Workplaces as religions* Identifying as an individual or part of a community* Scrum and Agile at individual and team levels of analysis* Gibson, affordances and sports teams* Waymaking and being embodied in the world* Cultural scaffolding and extended mindIf you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to Intelligent Teams to receive interviews like this with special guests, as well as my writings bringing the sciences of mind into dialogue with practical wisdom. If you really really like this, you can also subscribe to Daniel’s Community of Practice, a short weekly micronewsletter with 3 thought provoking tidbits to get you started in your week. Get full access to Intelligent Teams at intelligentteams.substack.com/subscribe

This week’s guest on the Intelligent Teams podcast is Behavioural Consultant, Coach and Neuroscience Masters student, Ceri Newton-Sargunar. Ceri and I riffed on:* Why leaders should care about emotions* Metaphors to help team understanding* Neuroscientific models for teams* Team cultures* Neurodiversity and Ceri’s own experience with ADHD* Navigating organisational dynamics and contexts* Seeking feedbackCeri is a dear friend, who brings an incredible mix of practical experience and theory to her work and it was a joy to talk to her for Intelligent Teams. If you enjoyed this episode, you can subscribe for free to Intelligent Teams to receive weekly podcasts and blogs about building high performing, intelligent teams Get full access to Intelligent Teams at intelligentteams.substack.com/subscribe

This week’s guest on the Agile On The Mind podcast is my dear friend Yon Borthwick. Yon is a team coach who has worked with teams and individuals within different coaching modalities including Integral Development Coaching, Internal Family Systems, ORSC (Organisational Relational Systems Coaching) and many others. He is currently working as a senior team coach at the Boston Consulting Group. As well as his coaching and team leadership interests, Yon has been the ‘Dungeon Master’ for our weekly Dungeons and Dragons (DnD) group which has been meeting (nearly) weekly since the beginning of the pandemic. If you don’t know what the means, don’t worry. Yon explains what Dungeons and Dragons is, as well as the allure of fantasy role playing games in general. I wanted to invite Yon onto the podcast to discuss the similarities between running a DnD game and being a Scrum Master for a team. Yon has a deep understanding of both team dynamics and the theoretical underpinnings of telling a fun and compelling collaborative story. This was an incredibly rich discussion about how the skills of collaborative storytelling can help a Scrum Master work with their team. Some of the main takeaways for me: * asking the team ‘what kind of story do we want to tell about this work in the future?’* understanding different team roles and skills* the joy of failure, learning, and improvising* after work challenges asking what the ‘loot’, ‘level up’ or even ‘injury’ might be* how to give your team and team members the setup to tell a great story between themThere’s way more, and I’d love to hear what you enjoyed from it. If you enjoyed this episode you can subscribe to receive a free weekly blog or podcast into your inbox with explorations of agility and cognitive science. If you really really enjoyed it, you can upgrade to a paid membership and support me to continue this work. I’m going to take a couple of weeks off over the new year, happy holidays and looking forward to hearing from you in 2025 Get full access to Intelligent Teams at intelligentteams.substack.com/subscribe

Jenny is an independent trainer and facilitator in product development and innovation techniques and behaviours of high performing teams. She works with teams of all kinds, helping them unlock their individual and collective potential. Jenny is passionate about inclusivity and fascinated by all kinds of brains. She delivers immersive and playful learning experiences and workshops which are designed to help everyone contribute to their fullest and have fun.Jenny recently completed a post-grad in ‘The Psychology of Kindness and Wellbeing at Work’. She is a massive fan of Lego Serious Play, and into anything to do with positive psychology, flourishing and personality science.We had a brilliant conversation where we touched on: * the origins of postive psychology* emotional intelligence* strengths based approaches* communication and social styles* the big five personality traits* personality traits and team dynamics* kindness* feedback and non violent communicationThe link to the telomere study Jenny mentioned is in this article.More about Marshall Rosenberg’s nonviolent communication If you enjoyed this, you’ll enjoy more of Agile On The Mind! So do make sure to subscribe to receive weekly posts and podcasts about agility and cognitive science. Get full access to Intelligent Teams at intelligentteams.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of Agile On The Mind I was delighted to welcome Dr Mazviita Chirimuuta to the podcast. Mazviita is a senior lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of award winning The Brain Abstracted (available for free at that link). I heard Mazviita being interviewed on the Brain Inspired podcast and invited her to join me in conversation about the philosophy of science, the simplification strategies that scientists use in their work and how this can apply to people working with teams. As agilists we often think about our work as if it’s science - running experiments with teams and trying to measure to determine reality. So in my classic mode of taking things way too seriously, I was thrilled and honoured to welcome on a Philosopher of Science to discuss this properly. I’ve written about some of Mazviita’s work before on this substack so I was extra excited to have her on the podcast. In this episode Mazviita brought the philosophy, and I brought the team practitioner perspective. It was a blast. We covered some fascinating topics, including:* What does cognitive science rely so much on the study of vision? * What is colour? * How is the study of philosophy useful for scientists?* Simplification strategies in science * Simplification 1 - mathematisation* Is a team more like a biological system or a physical system?* Simplification 2 - analogies* Mind as computer, and cognition as computation * Teams and analogies * Simplification 3 - Reduction* Parts and wholes, the reductionism of Pavlov* Kant and starting from the basics of knowledge* Haptic Realism - what do we bring to our observations of realityIf you enjoyed this conversation, make sure you subscribe to Agile On The Mind to get all future episodes and blog posts straight into your inbox. See you next time. Get full access to Intelligent Teams at intelligentteams.substack.com/subscribe

This week I was delighted to welcome my first honest-to-God Cognitive Scientist onto the programme - Professor Fred Cummins. Fred is an associate professor at the school of computer science and informatics at University College Dublin  where he co-directs the postgraduate cognitive science programme. I encountered Fred through his excellent introduction to cognitive science series on Youtube. As you’ll see in the episode he’s a vivid and enthusiastic communicator of cognitive science. Fred conducts interdisciplinary research into joint speaking which is where two or more people say the same thing at the same time, as found in practices of protest and prayer. Joint speech raises theoretical issues that go to the heart of human experience which we go into in the episode. Fred is also drawn to the study of ritual.I’m not going to lie I was very much in annoying student mode throughout this episode, and whilst I tried to bring the conversation back to teams, there were extended periods where I was just thrilled to be having a conversation about Cognitive Science with a real-life cognitive scientist. Fred insights, questions, metaphors and observations are mind bending and deeply human and it was a great privilege to share this conversation with him. I present this episode of Agile On The Mind with Professor Fred Cummins.Among the topics we covered were:An introduction to cognitive scienceDefinitions of intelligenceIntuitionsKnowing and doing‘Neuro’Is your brain a computer?Embodied and ecological approaches to visionCoordination vs controlJoint SpeechThe power of metaphor and symbolismI hope you enjoy this episode even a fraction as much as I did, I would love to hear your feedback about this post (and this substack), so either leave it a comment or share some feedback with me at your leisure. See you next time Get full access to Intelligent Teams at intelligentteams.substack.com/subscribe