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1000 results for “mike_bowler”
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@mike_bowler @daverooneyca would it be ok if I stop by and say hello for your May 1 AMA?
I can't stay the whole time as I have another event later in the evening. #limitscreentime
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Thanks for your endorsement, @mike_bowler.
Friends, if you can get to #Toronto in Oct., I hope you'll join us! This unconference is for anyone hoping to make product & software work more valuable, sustainable & humane - from HR to execs, product folks to software developers & testers. Bring a colleague! It will be a pleasant surprise.
https://hachyderm.io/@mike_bowler/114973301552006709And, as Mike points out, #agileCoachCamp events happen all over the world, at various times, as you'll see at: https://agilecoachcamp.org/tiki-index.php?page=HomePage
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More entries to the Practice of Practice collection! Grow with your team! Find that empathy everyone is talking about! Build relationships! Learn the system!
systems seeing journalling by @RuthMalan
instrumenting complexity with LEGO from @mike_bowler
https://github.com/maroda/practiceofpractice
#SRE #PracticeOfPractice #ResilienceEngineering #GamePlay #Improvisation
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More entries to the Practice of Practice collection! Grow with your team! Find that empathy everyone is talking about! Build relationships! Learn the system!
systems seeing journalling by @RuthMalan
instrumenting complexity with LEGO from @mike_bowler
https://github.com/maroda/practiceofpractice
#SRE #PracticeOfPractice #ResilienceEngineering #GamePlay #Improvisation
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More entries to the Practice of Practice collection! Grow with your team! Find that empathy everyone is talking about! Build relationships! Learn the system!
systems seeing journalling by @RuthMalan
instrumenting complexity with LEGO from @mike_bowler
https://github.com/maroda/practiceofpractice
#SRE #PracticeOfPractice #ResilienceEngineering #GamePlay #Improvisation
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More entries to the Practice of Practice collection! Grow with your team! Find that empathy everyone is talking about! Build relationships! Learn the system!
systems seeing journalling by @RuthMalan
instrumenting complexity with LEGO from @mike_bowler
https://github.com/maroda/practiceofpractice
#SRE #PracticeOfPractice #ResilienceEngineering #GamePlay #Improvisation
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More entries to the Practice of Practice collection! Grow with your team! Find that empathy everyone is talking about! Build relationships! Learn the system!
systems seeing journalling by @RuthMalan
instrumenting complexity with LEGO from @mike_bowler
https://github.com/maroda/practiceofpractice
#SRE #PracticeOfPractice #ResilienceEngineering #GamePlay #Improvisation
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For those who were at my sessions at #AgileOpenCanada in Victoria this week, more details on all the things I talked about can be found at the URL below. Topics including #PsychologicalSafety anti-anxiety toolkit, using LEGO to teach technical practices, #CleanLanguage, #SixThinkingHats, #ProbabilisticForecasting getting metrics from Jira, and book recommendations around neuroscience, psychology and hypnosis.
https://gargoylesoftware.com/mike_bowler/followup/ #agile
#agile -
A few years ago I was asked to facilitate a multi-team retrospective across a department. It had been previously noted that there seemed to be a psychological safety problem across this department and I was asked to address that specifically, so I did. I introduced the topic, provided some context around psychological safety, and we started to explore what people were noticing and how they felt.
Within about twenty minutes, I and my co-facilitators were receiving panicked messages from managers who had not been invited to the retrospective. They were telling me to stop the conversation and leave it alone. It turned out that people inside the retrospective had felt so uncomfortable just talking about this subject that they had reached out to their own management to get it shut down.
An interesting point is that by the end of the retrospective, everyone inside the room was calm and feeling good about the outcome of the meeting.
Outside the room however, the panic continued for weeks. Various levels of management pulled me into meetings to discuss what had happened. What could have been a clean two-hour retrospective became a weeks-long organizational disruption, triggered not by anything that happened in the room, only by the alarm signals that had spread outward from it.
So what was actually happening?
Continued on my blog: https://blog.mikebowler.ca/2026/05/14/neuroception/
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I just realized that it's been ten years since I first took LEGO® Serious Play® training with Robert Rasmussen. I have this listed on my business cards and it's amazing how many great conversations this starts. LEGO seems so out of place in a business context that people immediately want to know more.
If you haven't heard of it before, LEGO Serious Play is a business facilitation technique that uses LEGO bricks to work through complex problems, requiring creative solutions.
I was first introduced to Serious Play by Ellen Grove and watching her facilitate deep meaningful conversations with just a bit of LEGO was astounding. I could see people opening up and sharing things that they might otherwise not have been willing to discuss. I've also seen creativity burst forth with new and novel solutions to hard problems.
When I first took the training, I didn't understand why it worked. I only knew that if I followed this structure, I'd get some amazing results. It's only later, as I started to study neuroscience and psychology that I began to understand how it was working, and why I was getting the results I was seeing.
Not everything that I do with LEGO is Serious Play btw. I do a number of other exercises with different kits, but that's not today's point.
In one case, I had a team that just wouldn't speak up in a retrospective. I'd watched them for multiple retrospectives over many weeks and it was like pulling teeth to get anyone to say anything. So one week I pulled out the LEGO Serious Play and we filled two full walls of sticky notes. Things that they'd wanted to say all along, but hadn't felt comfortable enough to bring up. That's a typical reaction.
If this sounds interesting and you'd like me to facilitate some Serious Play for your teams, or you just want more information on what I'm doing with it then let's talk.
Some things I've written about this...
⮕ Retrospective: https://unconsciousagile.com/2019/07/12/moose-on-the-table.html
⮕ Team working agreements: https://unconsciousagile.com/2024/03/20/working-agreements.html
⮕ Some of the science, specifically around learning: https://unconsciousagile.com/2025/06/03/improving-learning-with-neuroscience-and-lego.html
#LegoSeriousPlay -
If you're facilitating the daily coordination meeting (standup, daily scrum, whatever you want to call it), and you're doing all the talking, then you're doing it wrong.
The facilitators job is to build the container that allows all the right conversations to happen, not to give a monologue.
Certainly, you may have to ask questions to get people to provide the right information. You may have to interject if people are going off topic, or being long-winded in their comments. You may have to provide context to help people understand what's expected in this meeting. The key is that all of these are points where you are managing the meeting itself, not the content in the meeting.
It's the participants job to contribute to the actual content. They work within the container that you set, and they are the ones who talk about the actual work.
If you really want to participate, then ask someone else to facilitate.
This is also true for retrospectives, and many other meetings.
#MeetingFacilitation -
It was apparently four years ago today that I took this baby picture in the forest. #GreatHornedOwl #Kelowna #WildlifePhotography
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It was apparently four years ago today that I took this baby picture in the forest. #GreatHornedOwl #Kelowna #WildlifePhotography
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When we're asked why something took so long to do, we have a tendency to look at only those things that were under our control. We think about the actual steps we took and how long each took and we often forget about all those times that the work was idle.
Sometimes it was idle because we were blocked and waiting for something else to happen. Sometimes it was idle because we were busy with other tasks and just didn't have time to work on this one.
It's very common for that idle time to be significantly larger than the time spent actually working on the item. If we want to speed up completion of that work, we need to look at reducing that idle time.
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Of all the flow metrics, the only one under our direct control is Work In Progress (WIP). We chose to keep starting new work items even though other work items were already in progress.
If we don't like what the flow metrics are telling us then remember that there is only one that is under our direct control, and it affects all the others.
#FlowMetrics #metrics -
Branching is a great workaround for problems elsewhere in the system that we are unable or unwilling to fix.
Instead of looking for workarounds, what if we actually fixed the other problems in our system?
More at https://agiletechnicalexcellence.com/2024/07/08/why-we-branch.html #TrunkBasedDevelopment
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The work on our board can loosely be grouped into three categories. It’s either active, blocked, or stalled. We tend to spend a lot of time talking about the active and blocked work and have a tendency to forget about the rest, which results in stalled work aging unnecessarily. That in turn will make the overall system less effective and less predictable.
Let’s look at some reasons why work becomes stalled.
https://improvingflow.com/2024/03/06/stalled-work.html #kanban #flow #stalled -
The Kanban Guide talks about optimizing for effectiveness, efficiency, and predictablity. Counterintuitively, we often optimize for busyness instead, which makes the whole system worse. My thoughts at:
https://improvingflow.com/2023/05/20/busyness.html #kanban #busyness -
In 2023, it shouldn't still be a controversial point to say that per-story estimates are a waste of time and that we should stop doing them. Yet, it still is.
More at https://improvingflow.com/2023/07/08/per-story-estimates.html #agile #ProbabilisticForecasting #estimates -
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I'll be at #AgileOpenCanada in Victoria in a few days. If you're there and we don't already know each other then please introduce yourself. #agile
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Team working agreements (sometimes called team norms) are all about how we are going to work together as a group of people. To do this effectively, we need fairly deep and honest conversations, and yet we see many working agreement sessions stay fairly superficial. The approach that Ellen Grove and I use in this article uses LEGO® Serious Play® for the core discussions to get those more meaningful conversations.
https://unconsciousagile.com/2024/03/20/working-agreements.html #retrospective #agile #LegoSeriousPlay
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Ellen Grove and I have updated / refreshed the instructions for our LEGO retrospective "Moose on the Table". If you're doing an in-person retro and are looking for something different to really get people talking, then check this out. Even the quietest groups start to open up when the LEGO comes out.
https://unconsciousagile.com/2019/07/12/moose-on-the-table.html
#retrospective #LegoSeriousPlay #lego -
#ArtAdventCalendar Hiking the Camels Hump, #Lumby BC, Canada. Picture is from the top of one hump, looking across at the other.
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#ArtAdventCalendar Canyon walls made of volcanic rock. This area was actively volcanic about 10 million years ago. #MyraCanyon #Kelowna
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With severe thunderstorms in the forecast, I didn’t want to be on the top of the mountain. So I figured I’d hike through the Myra Canyon, forgetting that we’re in the spring runoff and that the river would be overflowing and fast. I couldn’t even get past the first river crossing but at least it was nice to get outside, even for a short hike. #kelowna #MyraCanyon
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I've been in Portland this week for Agile Open Northwest #AONW This was the first in-person event they've run since covid and was really great to all be back again. So many fabulous conversations on topics ranging from FaST Agile to metrics to psychology to forecasting to AI.
https://www.agileopennorthwest.org/
Next up will be Agile Open Canada in Victoria in May.
https://www.agileopen.ca/ -
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@nxskok 1981, Mike Whitney (six FC appearances to his name when he got the call up for the Old Trafford match - he was the only Aussie front line bowler not to be hit for six by Botham in the course of his second innings century, and eventually it was he who got the beefy one as well).
#cricket #TestCricket #TheAshes #Ashes #AustraliavEngland