In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Jutta Eckstein and John Buck about their new book: Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space and Sociocracy – BOSSA-Nova Why listen to this podcast: • The pressing question: if democracy is good, why aren’t businesses using it • The new book is a theoretical framework for organizations to help agile spread philosophy across whole organizations • Just using Agile company-wide is not enough • In the VUCA times w...
Oct 22, 2018•29 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Fred George about the need to solve “fuzzy problems” and approaches to doing so. Why listen to this podcast: • Fuzzy problems are ones which don’t have precise answers but they are the places where most money is being made in the modern economy • Applying the thinking that works for traditional problems to fuzzy problems causes frustration because the underlying assumption that the problem will have a single solution is wr...
Oct 15, 2018•17 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Todd Little, CEO of LeanKanban Inc about how organizations can use Kanban to identify bottlenecks and improve flow in their business processes. Why listen to this podcast: • Kanban is a more natural way of working for more experienced teams • Kanban tells you to start wherever you are at and make change incrementally • Only if you deeply understand your system can you deeply improve it • Kanban helps collaboration through ...
Oct 09, 2018•11 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Linda Rising about Daniel Kahneman’s work on Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, overcoming bias in the employment process and resisting social pressure in decision making. Why listen to this podcast: • Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast Thinking Slow based on the research he did with Amos Tversky into how the human brain works, for which Kahneman win the 2011 Nobel Prize for Economics, is hard to read. Linda wants to make the...
Oct 01, 2018•27 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Bernie Maloney of Persistent Systems about servant leadership and bringing out human potential. Why listen to this podcast: - Servant leadership is about creating a space through which other people can succeed and stepping back to let them do so. It matters because it requires empathy and compassion. - Organizations that don’t change to the new ways of working are being disrupted out of existence - Teams need to learn new ...
Sep 25, 2018•20 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dave West, Chief Product Owner of Scrum.org about the state of Scrum, the latest revision to the Scrum Guide, the rise of Digital and the way Scrum.org maintains its courseware. Why listen to this podcast: • Scrum continues to be the dominant force in agile/digital/lean startup approaches • As complexity grows in our world the value of Scrum continues to grow • If you’re not doing Scrum per the book it doesn’t mean you’re ...
Sep 17, 2018•26 min
In this podcast recorded at the Agile India conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to John Le Drew about solving technical problems by addressing the people issues. Why listen to this podcast: • Very diverse teams will naturally have conflict, but they still produce better outcomes despite the journey being more of a struggle to get there • Cognitive biases are real and are an evolutionary survival tactic and we need to be very mindful of them • We all like to think th...
Sep 11, 2018•54 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Aurynn Shaw about how DevOps, Microservices and other “technical” approaches are in fact cultural constraints on technical ideas and what’s needed to make the culture sustainable. Key takeaways: * Running and testing a program on the developer desktop is not running the program * You must rethink the approach to building the software based on the way it will be deployed * DevOps isn’t about the tooling – it is about the co...
Sep 03, 2018•32 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Sanjeev Sharma, a Distinguished Engineer at IBM, on the challenges for large enterprises adopting DevOps at scale and what it really means to have a DevOps culture Why listen to this podcast: • There is no single “why” for adopting DevOps – each organisation is unique and the adoption approach should be based around what they are trying to optimize • DevOps is not a methodology – it is a set of guiding principles • As more...
Aug 22, 2018•32 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby about their memories of Gerald M. (Jerry) Weinberg who passed away on the 7th of August 2018. Why listen to this podcast: • Jerry Weinberg was a highly respected thinker and author • He was instrumental in defining some of the key elements of systems thinking and quality practices for software development • The rule of three – one option is a trap, two is a dilemma and three breaks logjam t...
Aug 17, 2018•22 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Michael Cote from Pivotal Labs about “programming the business” to enable support for automation and moving towards DevOps. Why listen to this podcast: • It’s possible to move from deploying on a yearly basis to a daily basis • Adopting a new process or approach often improves things dramatically, frequently because what was being done before was not effective rather than because of the effectiveness of the new way • Chang...
Aug 13, 2018•32 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dan Kreigh about his experiences as the lead structural analyst working on SpaceShipOne and his personal interest in designing and building a flying car. Why listen to this podcast: • Building SpaceShipOne was an iterative and incremental project • There are many parallels between the development of SpaceShipOne and an agile software product • Dan’s definition of a flying car is one that you can drive on the freeway and to...
Aug 01, 2018•21 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Jeff Dalton about the challenges of agile adoption in large organizations and the need to teach agile leaders how to teach so they can lead the cultural shift that is needed Why listen to this podcast: • The marketing of agility is going far better than the actual on the ground adoption • When process-centric, low trust organisations adopt agile they bring that approach to their agile practices • The link between the soft ...
Jul 27, 2018•32 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Edith Harbaugh of Launch Darkly on the way she and her cofounder have deliberately engineered their organisation’s culture Why listen to this podcast: • A good engineering culture is one where there is a lot of respect for different people and roles • Start by good intent on behalf of your colleagues – everyone is doing their best • Be open to continually learning – mistakes will happen, learn from them in a blame-free way...
Jul 20, 2018•16 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke with Matt Abrahams of BoldEcho and Stanford Graduate School of Business on becoming effective communicators, especially around speaking in public. Why listen to this podcast: • Everyone has a story to tell • Make sure you understand who you are speaking to and what it is that you can do to help them • It’s important to structuring your message in such a way as to make it easy for your audience to understand • All communicatio...
Jul 02, 2018•15 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke with Pooja Brown, VP of Engineering at Docusign about building great engineering culture. Why listen to this podcast: • Great culture comes when people are aligned with the organisation’s mission • There are ways to bring the voice of the customer to the ears of the team and doing so creates empathy and results in better products • Transparency and openness around what matters to the company helps ensure people align with tho...
Jun 25, 2018•18 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke with Jarrod Overson of Shape Security about the reason for and the content in the Beyond Being an Individual Contributor track at QCon San Francisco, and he offers advice for current and aspirant technical leaders. Why listen to this podcast: • Many technologists get the opportunity to move into leadership roles but receive no training or guidance about what skills such a role needs • Solving other people’s problems as quickl...
Jun 18, 2018•24 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke with Susan McIntosh, an InfoQ editor, agile practitioner and scrum master who works in the area of cultural change about the impacts that the lack of diversity in tech has and some ways to address the inherent imbalances in the system. Why listen to this podcast: • There is a significant diversity challenge in the information technology industry • Women are the primary decision makers in shopping but the IT industry as a whol...
Jun 10, 2018•20 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Chris Manuel who heads the global test engineering service for Mindtree about continuous testing, cultural change and creating a culture of quality in organisations Why listen to this podcast: • The application portfolio of every organisation has become much more complex and this needs different ways of approaching the testing challenges that just having legions of people banging away at keyboards • The value of moving awa...
May 28, 2018•28 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dominica DeGrandis about time thieves, making work visible, the important themes from the DevOps Enterprise Summit and ways to be more productive. Why listen to this podcast: • If we can understand the thieves of time better we can get some time back from our overburdened work-life • Having too much work in progress is the mother of all the other thieves of time • Much of our work is based on arbitrary rather than real due...
May 21, 2018•26 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Steve Holyer about collaboration, culture and teams, and the state of the Agile Fluency projects. Why listen to this podcast: • Diverse lived experiences make people better individuals and team members • How important psychological safety is for teams • We all have unconscious biases and our language reflects this • The value in the Agile Fluency Model is the outcomes we can produce by using it • The Agile Fluency Model he...
May 14, 2018•21 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Shannon Mason, Laureen Knudsen and Steve Wolfe about a wide range of topics from agile marketing to using data effectively to drive strategy, to organisation incentives and neuroscience. Why listen to this podcast: • While there are differences in the application of agile ideas in different domains, the principles apply across the board • An effective agile environment produces good data for executive decision making • To ...
May 08, 2018•41 min
This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences. In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Diana Larsen about organisational design for team effectiveness, having the best possible worklife and the evolution of the Agile Fluency Model Why listen to this podcast: • Organisation design is a distinct subset of organisation development • For teams to be effective, every team needs a clear purpose – why are we doing th...
Apr 30, 2018•31 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, talks to Tony Grout and Chris Matts about building an IT risk management framework at a large bank and using that as a catalyst for a digital transformation. Why listen to this podcast: • Just deploying another prescriptive method will not make an organisation agile and adaptive • A risk management framework can be a catalyst for change • The components of a simple framework which enables adaptation at the team level while ensuring...
Apr 23, 2018•39 min
In this podcast recorded at Agile 2017, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Ahmed Sidky and Michael Robillard of Riot Games about their experiences in product management for a comprehensive gaming experience Why listen to this podcast: • The need for a framework to make really tough product decisions • The importance of a clear strategy when faced with many good ideas - selecting which ones not to pursue • In the Agile community most of the conversation is about being bette...
Apr 16, 2018•27 min
In this podcast recorded at Agile 2017, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke Troy Magennis about his talks at the conference on “I love the smell of data in the morning” and “10 ways to choose what to start next” Why listen to this podcast: • The absence of data means all you have is an opinion • The simplest way to start gathering data in software development is to put the starting date/time on one corner, the ending date/time on another corner and use different colour post-it...
Apr 13, 2018•12 min
In this podcast recorded at Agile 2017, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Katherine Kirk, Sally Freudenberg & Chris Corriere on Inclusive Collaboration, Neurodiversity and Creating Safe Spaces Why listen to this podcast: • Neurodiversity is the idea that things like autism, bi-polar disorder, dyslexia and ADHD are not “disabilities”, rather they are normal variations in the human genome • The tech industry is an industry of thinkers and we know that diverse teams are more...
Mar 26, 2018•37 min
This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences. In this podcast recorded at Agile 2017, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Heidi Helfand about Dynamic Reteaming Why listen to this podcast: • Team change is real – we might as well get good at it • People come and go from teams all the time for many different reasons • A missing level in Tuckman’s model of team formation – Stagnating, when you keep a team together for too l...
Mar 05, 2018•15 min
This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences. In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Mike Bryzek – CTO and founder of Flow.io about his background in philanthropy, his current role at Flow.io and how they have empowered developers and adopted testing in production in order to raise the quality of their software. Why listen to this podcast: • The value of volunteerism and philanthropy for good through focusin...
Feb 26, 2018•30 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Harsh Sinha, CTO of TransferWise about deliberately designing organisational culture. Why listen to this podcast: • The organisation is structured in lots of autonomous, independent teams each one of which is focused on meeting a specific customer need • For a startup the biggest competitive edge is speed, and this organisation structure supports and enables speed of decision making and responding to customer needs • Princ...
Feb 19, 2018•23 min
