The Humanizing Work Show: Recent Episodes
Humanizing Work
Most projects start green but end up in crisis mode. Instead, make your project "Earn Green" by directly tackling risk and complexity first. We’ll share real-world examples of how sequencing work this way makes the end of the project calm and peaceful, even when you can't ship incrementally. Whether you're a project manager seeking on-time delivery or an Agile advocate looking to make a difference, this episode offers practical insights to transform your project outcomes.
Key topics:
- The pitfalls of traditional green-yellow-red status reporting
- How to "earn green" by addressing complexity early
- Balancing Agile principles with non-incremental delivery constraints
- Practical skills for recognizing and tackling project risks
- Real-world success stories from Adobe's transformation
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/earn-green/
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In this action-packed episode of the Humanizing Work Show, hosts Peter and Richard break down the art of delivering thoughtful, articulate responses to unexpected questions. Whether you're a coach, nonprofit leader, or professional looking to enhance your communication skills, this episode offers concrete strategies you can start using today.
Learn five key techniques to master impromptu speaking:
- Develop your "vocabulary" through daily writing exercises
- Use recording and transcription to refine your thoughts
- Practice in low-stakes environments to build confidence
- Employ mental models to quickly analyze complex situations
- Shift your focus from self to others by getting curious about what they really need
Richard shares his personal journey of developing these skills, offering relatable examples and actionable advice. You'll also get a preview of an upcoming workshop designed to help you put these techniques into practice.
Don't let unexpected questions leave you speechless. Tune in now to gain the tools you need to speak confidently and effectively in any situation. Transform your on-the-spot responses from a source of stress to a powerful professional asset.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/on-the-spot-questions/
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Is your Daily Scrum dragging on? In this episode, Peter & Richard dive into a real-world case of a 20-person Scrum team struggling with long, ineffective Daily Scrums. We explore why simply changing the format isn't always the answer and uncover deeper issues in team structure and work organization. Learn how to identify if Scrum is the right fit for your team, when to consider alternatives like Kanban, and practical steps to improve collaboration and efficiency. Whether you're an Agile coach, Scrum Master, or team member, you'll gain valuable insights on optimizing your Agile practices for better results.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/daily-scrum-taking-too-long/
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Is there one true Agile? In this episode of the Humanizing Work Show we break down the three Agile tribes—People, Performance, and Process—and discuss why the conflict between them is surface-level and how they can be integrated for greater success.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/agiles-three-tribes-people-performance-and-process/
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In this episode of the Humanizing Work Show, hosts Peter Green and Richard Lawrence dive into the art of setting effective team goals that drive motivation and performance. Discover the research-backed reasons why some goals inspire while others fall flat. Learn five actionable tips on how to set goals that your team will embrace, covering the Source, Size, Category, Criteria, and Persistence of the goals.
Key Points Covered:
- Why setting good team goals is crucial for performance and motivation.
- The importance of team-set goals versus management-assigned goals.
- How to find the right level of granularity for your team goals.
- Different categories of goals based on the complexity of work, using the Cynefin framework.
- Criteria for creating motivating team goals.
- Knowing when to pivot away from goals that no longer serve the team.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/setting-team-goals/
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Locke & Latham on Goal Setting: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/074959789190021K
Hackman & Wageman:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2393703?origin=crossref
https://hbr.org/2009/05/why-teams-dont-work
Cynefin Primer:
https://www.humanizingwork.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-cynefin/
Richard facilitated a session at Agile2024 on “Addressing the Psychological Costs of Agile.” In this episode, he dives into the fishbowl facilitation method used in the session as well as some of the key takeaways from the conversation.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/fishbowl-and-psych-costs-of-agile/
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In this episode, we address the most common mistakes leaders make when communicating important decisions and information by sharing three proven strategies to ensure your decisions create clarity and alignment throughout your organization. Misalignment and miscommunication can lead to confusion and inefficiency, but with the right approach, you can keep everyone on the same page.
Tl;dr on the three strategies:
- Align & Assign: Discover how to end every leadership meeting with a clear plan for what needs to be communicated, who will communicate it, and by when.
- Communicate & Listen: Learn a structured method for leaders to effectively share decisions and solicit concerns, ensuring teams are heard and decisions can be executed effectively.
- Return & Report: Understand the importance of closing the loop by reporting back on the communication efforts and capturing key insights from your team.
By implementing these strategies, you can prevent communication train wrecks and foster a culture of transparency and engagement. Don’t miss out on these actionable tips to improve your organization's communication!
Sponsored by Humanizing Work: Helping leaders lead empowered teams, product people turn ideas into visions, and teams collaborate better on complex work. Visit humanizingwork.com to learn more.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/leadership-communication-strategies/
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Organizations succeed or fail in large part based on the quality of their leadership. But most so-called “leadership teams” aren’t really teams—they’re just leaders who have meetings. In this episode, we look at why and how to launch a cross-functional leadership team so it achieves meaningful results.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/launch-an-effective-leadership-team/
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What can we learn about effective teamwork from the world of professional music? In this episode, Peter shares insights from his recent experiences playing in various musical groups and draws parallels to creating high-performing teams in any work environment.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/5-lessons-from-music/
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In this episode, we introduce you to two polar explorers that vividly illustrate our tendency to see leadership potential in babblers, braggarts, and braggarts regardless of their actual competence. We share several ways you can bring things back into balance, separating actual effectiveness from the noise, whether you’re the quiet high-performer or the leader trying to build an effective team.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/amundsens-and-shackletons/
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You may not be aware that Richard has a flock of ducks. Recently, Richard’s ducks had the most traumatic day of their lives, and it generated some unexpected lessons for humans at work. In this episode, Peter and Richard reflect on what happened and some lessons we learned to lead change more effectively.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/duck-canopy-incident/
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Big companies are eliminating roles like Agile Coach and ScrumMaster. In this episode, we look at why that might be happening, what to do if you’ve fallen victim to the layoffs, and why there’s still hope for the future.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/agile-jobs-are-vanishing/
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A recent Gallup study reported that only 30% of workers in the US are engaged or motivated in their work. And this has all kinds of negative consequences, at work and beyond. In this episode, we dig into the research and share some practical things you can do about it.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/employee-engagement-is-terrible/
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In too many organizations, the product and engineering teams operate in an adversarial, dysfunctional way. Great products never result from this setup. In this episode, Richard and Peter share the antidote to such a situation, clarifying where to draw the line on specific responsibilities for product leaders and engineering, and where (and how) to collaborate effectively. It’s a complex boundary, with lots of trade-offs, but great organizations constantly improve how they navigate those in service of their vision and strategy.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/boundary-between-product-engineering-leadership/
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It can be frustrating to find yourself in a situation where you see a problem but don’t have the power to fix—and the people who do have the power don’t seem to care. In this episode, we expand on the advice we often give our clients, “If you can’t fix it, make it more visible,” and we show how you can use that approach to influence a solution when you don’t have authority to just fix things.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/cant-fix-it-make-it-more-visible/
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In a case of “drinking our own champagne,” we applied the tools we teach for dealing with resistance to change to a real conflict on our team. Peter wanted to make a big change to our WordPress theme. Richard had some strong resistance to that change. Something had to give. Listen in to see how we used that resistance as a resource to come up with a breakthrough solution.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/how-we-dealt-with-resistance-to-change/
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Is strategy part of the Product Owner role? Not just in theory, but in the real world? We interviewed POs to find out how strategy shows up in their responsibilities. In this episode, we share what we learned and what we recommend to our clients when it comes to POs and product strategy.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/do-product-owners-do-strategy/
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In this episode, we’ll share how strategy connects with mission and vision, and how to communicate the key aspects of your strategy using our Strategy Steps Canvas. We use Tesla’s 2006 strategy as a real-world example, demonstrating how the strategy steps approach connects concrete outcomes to long term impact. Tune in to see how you can use our canvas to simplify and effectively communicate your strategic plans. Get your free PDF of the Strategy Steps Canvas on the episode page.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/strategy-steps-canvas/
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In this episode, Richard digs into the causes and fixes for burnout and disengagement on Agile (or ostensibly Agile) teams. Agile teams should be the most motivating teams to be on—opportunity for autonomy, mastery, and purpose are built right in. But, too often, that’s not how it plays out. Tune in to learn how to avoid or address some common patterns that create burnout and disengagement.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/burnout-and-disengagement-on-agile-teams/
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When, like the children’s book character Alexander, you’re having a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day at work, how do you turn things around? In this episode, Peter shares four strategies he used to do just that on what started out as a really tough trail run, strategies that are just as powerful at work.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/four-trail-strategies-to-transform-a-bad-day-at-work/
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How we manage our work has to fit the nature of the work. And, too often, it doesn’t, which leads to waste and frustration. In this episode, Richard and Peter walk through 3 styles of process that go with 4 different kinds of work.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/make-your-process-fit-your-work/
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A great vision statement can create alignment, increase engagement, and improve business outcomes. But too many vision statements are corporate-speak buzzword bingo. And those can be worse than no vision statement at all. In this episode, Peter and Richard explain what makes a vision statement worth writing and share a quick, collaborative process to create one for your product, team, or organization.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/craft-a-vision-statement-not-corporate-speak/
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In this episode, David J Bland, author of “Testing Business Ideas” joins Peter and Richard to talk about how to use Lean Startup-style experiments in any kind of business.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/tackle-risk-with-david-bland/
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One of the trickiest problems leaders face is getting org structure right. This is even harder in Agile orgs because there are strong opinions out there about the perfect team structure that often don’t apply easily in real orgs. In this episode, Peter and Richard share 6 principles you can use to reason about the right team structure for your context.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/get-agile-org-structure-right/
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We all know early feedback on work can be useful, but it’s hard to do. We want to show people things when they’re all polished and when we feel proud of the product. Not to mention, most people don’t know how to give feedback well. In this episode, Richard and Peter introduce an approach to getting feedback that solves these problems and makes early feedback low-risk, productive, and encouraging.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/getting-feedback-on-wip/
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Why is change so hard? Why do we say we want to make changes but then, so often, fail to actually make the change stick? In this episode, Richard and Peter dive into psychologists Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s work on immunity to change and how to overcome it.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/immunity-to-change/
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Typical status reports start out green, go yellow if issues pop up, and only turn red if things get really, really bad. In this episode, Peter and Richard explain why status reports should have to “earn green” and how you can use this mindset to find good places to start on any initiative (even if you’re not actually creating status reports).
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/incremental-small-slice-approach-gives-real-progress/
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Conflict is a natural result of trying to get things done with other people–we have different perspectives and want different things. It’s easy for that to turn into a battle of egos, but it doesn't have to. You can move through conflict gracefully, coming out of it with better outcomes, both in terms of the decision and the relationship.
In this episode, Peter and Richard share the 3 tools they find most useful for resolving conflict and producing great outcomes.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/3-tools-to-resolve-conflict/
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Leaders have a huge impact on whether Agile teams in their organization are going to be successful or not. In this episode, Peter and Richard share the most important things leaders need to know if they want to help their Agile teams get the best results.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/leading-agile-teams/
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There are times when it doesn’t feel possible to break or renegotiate a commitment, but you also can’t see how to deliver on it. You feel stuck. So what do you do then?
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/overcommitted-and-feeling-stuck/
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People spend a ton of time in meetings these days, and too many meetings are just a waste of time. In this episode, Peter and Richard talk through how to determine which meetings are worth having and which can go asynchronous, and they introduce the DAVID approach to ensuring the meeting you do have are worth the time.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/fix-your-meetings-with-david/
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Richard and Peter get paid to teach leaders and coaches how to coach more effectively—and it works. So, what happens when Peter spends 20 minutes trying to teach ChatGPT how to coach?
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/train-chatgpt-ai-to-coach/
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Are use cases an essential partner to user stories for Agile teams? Agile Manifesto co-author Alistair Cockburn thinks so. In this episode, Richard and Peter discuss use cases and user stories with Alistair, including some practical steps to get started with lightweight use cases as a complementary tool for your Agile product development.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/alistair-cockburn-on-use-cases-user-stories
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In this episode, Richard and Peter explore what cross-functional teams are, why they're crucial to Agile methods like Scrum, and how to navigate some common challenges in creating and maintaining these teams.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/cross-functional-teams-real-world-challenges/
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Have you or your team ever felt like prioritizing your work is like a hostage negotiation with your stakeholders…and you don’t have the leverage to get a good outcome? In this episode, Richard chats with Dean Peters about what he calls “feature hostage negotiation.” They dig into where it comes from, what problems it causes, and how to respond if you’re a product manager in that situation.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/feature-hostage-negotiation/
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It’s January, and people are setting goals and New Year’s resolutions. But how do you pick the right ones? It can be overwhelming, and you can end up picking no goal at all or just picking ones that are easy to define. In this episode, Richard and Peter share a simple process using the Theory of Constraints to find just the right personal and work goals for 2024.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/set-the-right-goals/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter give actionable advice for how to get unstuck when your team’s retrospectives produce lots of good ideas for change but never seem to lead to actual changes getting implemented. They share an agenda for a special retrospective you can do to address that exact challenge.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/inspecting-without-adapting/
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Richard and Peter introduced the concept of culture signals in episode 71. But because of the examples in that episode, many people got the misconception that culture signals were only for CEOs. Not at all!
In this episode they share 7 inspirational examples of mid-level managers, team leads, and individual contributors creating effective culture signals, and they review how you can do the same in your environment.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/culture-signals-for-everyone/
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Most leadership teams adopt their style by accident and end up with wasteful meetings and unnecessarily noise and conflict. In this episode, Peter and Richard share an approach for figuring out the right kind of leadership team style for you based on your context. They describe the tools that fit each style and when your team might shift from one to another, drawing lessons from great music groups and sports teams.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/finding-the-right-style-for-your-leadership-team/
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Are you looking at your task list today and dreading it a bit? In this replay from the October 2023 Humanizing Work Meetup session, Richard and Peter share three recent situations when they were feeling a little burned out, and what they did to fix it. They walk through a process to think and communicate about Purpose and Vision at the micro level. That process took them less than five minutes in their examples, and energized them to make their work meaningful that day. Learn how you can do the same thing to tackle the day with energy, even when the tasks aren't something you're looking forward to.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/overcoming-burnout-daily-purpose-and-vision/
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Coaches usually focus on skills like facilitation, team formation, and conflict resolution. In this episode, Peter and Richard argue that none of those things matter if a team doesn’t get product ownership right, so coaches need to be fluent in product skills and able to coach their clients to get better in that area. Included in our conversation:
- The risk of over-focus in skill development
- Why being able to coach PO skills doesn’t necessarily make you a good PO
- Why fluency in this area is a must-have for any ScrumMaster or coach
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/how-coaches-benefit-from-po-skills/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter talk about the business case for getting better at product backlog refinement. What’s the financial and human cost of bad backlogs? Way more than most people realize. Here’s why it matters and what to do about it.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/biz-case-for-better-backlogs/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter answer a listener question about whether an Agile approach can work with a customer-funded project model or whether you have to change your funding approach to work in an Agile way. They address the implications of Agile for things like funding, why project funding works for some orgs, and how to change things like funding in an Agile way.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/agile-and-project-funding/
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In this special episode, Peter and Richard have a conversation with a long-time listener, client, and community member about how their thinking on Scrum has (and hasn’t) changed over the years.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/thinking-on-scrum-changed/
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These days, every leader seems to want empowered individuals and teams. But how do you actually get real empowerment? Just saying, “You’re empowered!” doesn’t seem to work reliably. In this Humanizing Work Community Meetup session, we explored a step-by-step path to increasing an individual or team’s empowerment in a particular area of responsibility. We walk through how to use this approach on two real examples, a COO that wants to empower their team to make M&A decisions, and a Product Leader that wants to empower developers to own decisions around a big change to the pricing model.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/meetup-replay-a-path-to-real-empowerment/
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It’s episode 100 of the Humanizing Work Show! In this episode, Richard and Peter highlight their favorite episodes so far and why they’re worth revisiting. Then, they reflect on how their thinking has changed since the show started, what they’ve learned from producing the show, and what they hope is true 100 episodes from now.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/celebrating-100-episodes
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In this episode, Richard and Peter discuss how to work with stakeholders who always bring solution requests, like detailed requirements or technical specifications. How can you have an effective conversation to identify the underlying problem so you can collaborate with your team to solve the problem well?
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/from-solution-to-problem/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question: “What are your thoughts on all these ScrumMaster and Agile Coach layoffs? Many companies seem to be eliminating these roles altogether. What do you make of it?”
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/scrummaster-agile-coach-layoffs/
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Surveys show people say less than a quarter of the meetings they attend are a valuable use of their time. In this recording of the August Humanizing Work Meetup, Peter introduces the 6 goals an effective facilitator achieves in every meeting and how to use those to ensure your meetings are reliably worth the participants’ time.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/great-facilitators-accomplish-these-6-goals/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question: “I just got promoted from developer to development manager, and I want to do my new role well. What should I be thinking about? What should I avoid?” Tune in to learn 3 ways new managers often mess things up and 3 things to do instead.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/mistakes-new-managers-make/
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Another “Scrum is terrible and here’s why” post went viral on social media recently. In this episode, Richard and Peter reflect on the post, the responses to it, and what we can learn from the whole thing.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/the-latest-viral-scrum-criticism/
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You've seen them on LinkedIn: the “manager bad, leader good” infographics and listicles. But there are over a million people in the US with "manager" in their job title—surely there are lots of good ones.
In this episode, Peter and Richard explore the origin of the manager vs leader meme and reflect on whether it's actually useful for improving leadership.
Episode page: : https://www.humanizingwork.com/manager-vs-leader-meme/
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Leaders walk a tightrope, creating clarity for teams with an inspiring vision while acknowledging the uncertainty of future predictions. In this episode, Peter delves into a pivotal moment for Adobe execs, one that showcases the art of communicating big shifts with clarity and integrity. From that example and dozens more, we’ll then distill the six critical tools top leaders use to paint a vivid vision while embracing the uncertain roadmap to reach it. From owning the potential downsides of a choice to communicating how and when we’ll pivot, this episode sheds light on how inspiring leaders balance ambition with grounded realism. Whether you're spearheading a corporate transformation or setting team OKRs, these insights will empower you to lead with conviction and honesty.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/communicating-in-uncertainty/
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Backlog refinement is critical for any agile team—if your backlog isn’t in good shape, everything downstream falls apart. But there’s a common set of mistakes almost everyone makes when it comes to backlog refinement, mistakes that make it overwhelming for Product Owners, frustrating for teams, and ultimately ineffective for everyone involved.
In this rebroadcast of the July 2023 Humanizing Work Community Meetup session, Richard looks at those top 5 backlog refinement mistakes and how to fix each one.
We host these free community meetups on the third Thursday of every month. Sign up for future community sessions at https://www.meetup.com/humanizingwork/
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/top-5-backlog-refinement-mistakes-meetup-rebroadcast
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Scrum’s rarely used “Abnormal Sprint Termination” rule can help a team strike a nice balance between the need to focus, the need to be responsive, and the desire to make and keep commitments. In this episode, we give a few examples of using this rule to get good results, and what to do if your team is struggling to make and keep commitments.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/commitments-in-scrum-and-sprint-terminations/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter talk about quick wins, how they often emphasize the quick part but miss the win, and what to do instead at the start of a big initiative.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/purposeful-quick-wins/
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In this episode, Richard explains the distinction between collaborating and coordinating, when to do one or the other, and the implications for team structure, tools, and geography.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/collaborate-vs-coordinate-episode/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter discuss an article in Business Insider, “The reality of Big Tech's 'fake work' problem.” They discuss the incentives that create over-hiring and “fake work” and the antidote to it. Is it all just lazy managers, as the article suggests?
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/fake-work/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question: “All my stakeholders want all their stuff right now. What do I do?”
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/stakeholders-want-it-all/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question: “My team members always grab things to work on separately in parallel. How can I get us collaborating more as a team?”
By the way, watch to the end for a crazy discount on the Humanizing Work Team Launch Sequence.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/get-my-team-to-collaborate/
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Developing effective leadership skills can be challenging. It's difficult to even describe what makes a leader effective, let alone create a practical plan to improve your own leadership capabilities. In this episode, Peter & Richard introduce their favorite leadership development tool: The Leadership Circle.
This model provides language to identify behaviors that limit a leader's effectiveness. It also highlights capabilities that are associated with effective leadership. By using the model to assess your own leadership, you can learn how to reduce those limiting behaviors and increase your effectiveness.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/cracking-the-code-of-effective-leadership-with-the-leadership-circle/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter interview world-class mountain bike coach Lee McCormack. If you’re a coach or leader of any kind—or if you just care about your own growth and development—this episode is packed with advice and inspiration.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/lee-mccormack-interview/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter talk about sprint goals. When are they useful? What might you do instead?
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/sprint-goal/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter answer a question that’s essentially: “Most of the standard Product Ownership advice doesn’t seem to apply to my situation. Am I just doing Product Ownership wrong?” They discuss two modes of Product Ownership—visionary and facilitating—and when each one is the right approach.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/visionary-vs-facilitating-product-ownership/
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Complex problems, whether in product development or organizational change require an experimental approach. In this episode, Richard and Peter answer a question about how to design good experiments (or probes, to use the Cynefin term).
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/designing-good-experiments/
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In this episode, Peter and Richard sit down with Melissa Boggs to talk about the unique challenges senior leaders face in Agile orgs and how that led us to create our 2019 senior leader retreat. Melissa talks about her experience as a participant at the 2019 event, and the trio shares their vision for the 2023 retreat, now that Melissa has joined Richard and Peter as a co-facilitator.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/senior-leadership-challenges-in-agile-orgs/
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In this episode, Peter tell the story of a time where his own reactive tendencies limited his effectiveness—in a big way—in an interaction with his CEO. Richard interviews Peter about what he learned from the experience, how he’d handle it now, and what advice he has for other leaders in challenging situations.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/peter-apologizes-to-the-ceo/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter share their favorite tool for figuring out what to do in a frustrating situation where you don’t have the power to just fix it, including a few real examples.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/own-influence-respond-episode/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter look at how customer research tools are useful in all kinds of contexts beyond product development. Got a relationship with a stakeholder at work that you’d like to improve? Learn how you can use customer research tools to better understand that stakeholder’s needs and how you and your team can help solve them.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/theyre-all-customers/
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How do you assess the health of a team? You could conduct surveys and interviews of team members and stakeholders. You could look at the results the team produces. You could watch them work for a week or two. Or, as Peter & Richard explain in this Humanizing Work Show episode, you could just observe a team’s Daily Scrum (aka Daily Standup) and learn 80% of what you need to know about health of a team.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/15-minutes-reveal-team-health/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question: “Our team is adopting Scrum, how does my role (as a developer) change?” Obviously, you’ll be doing Scrum now and you weren’t before, but beyond the obvious, there are three big ways you can expect your work to change.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/developer-in-scrum/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question: “How much should we standardize across our organization? Is it important that our sprint lengths match, that we estimate the same way, that we use the same tools, that we report the same metrics, etc.?” Obviously, standardizing everything isn’t going to work, but neither will standardizing nothing. So, where do you draw the line?
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/how-much-standardization/
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In this episode, Richard answers the question: “What should I focus on as a new Product Owner?” Being a Scrum Product Owner is a big job, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed, so Richard breaks down what’s most important to focus on in the early days and in what sequence.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/new-product-owner-focus/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question: “What should I focus on as a new ScrumMaster?” They explain why focusing on making your team do Scrum well is tempting but a dead end and what you should focus on instead.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/new-scrummaster-focus/
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Why does Zappos celebrate wildly inefficient customer service calls? Why did FAVI brick up the window that allowed managers to see what was happening on the factory floor? Culture signals.
In this episode, Richard and Peter explain how culture signals work and how leaders can design their own culture signals to create the changes they want to see.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/culture-signals-episode/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question: “I get the basic definitions of the Scrum roles. In the real world, though, what do these roles look like when they’re done well?” Hear their take on what it means to be a great ScrumMaster, Product Owner, or Scrum developer, beyond the “by the book” Scrum Guide answers.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/scrum-roles-in-the-real-world/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question: “What are your thoughts on including managers in retrospectives?” Even if a manger wants to be helpful, the answer is complicated…
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/managers-in-retros/
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In this episode, Richard answers the question: “Our team is trying to use Scrum, but we get a lot of interruptions, a lot of work that pops up mid-sprint. How do we handle that kind of thing well?” He explains how to borrow a couple of concepts from Kanban to accommodate emergent work on a Scrum team in a healthy way.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/dealing-with-interruptions-on-a-scrum-team/
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Just saying “you’re empowered” doesn’t make it happen. In this episode, Peter and Richard offer a more nuanced way to think about empowerment and a structured path to increase the level of empowerment for your employees and teams.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/path-to-empowerment/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter share an agenda you can use for a Sprint Review meeting—or for any meeting where you want to share and get feedback on complex, meaningful work-in-progress. Too many Sprint Reviews are a demo with no useful feedback or a deep dive into the weeds on problem-solving. The best review meetings combine a deliberate demo with a well-structured feedback session. Learn how you can have this kind of review.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/ReviewAgenda/
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Feature Mining is a technique for figuring out where to start on a big, complex idea. Following up on a Feature Mining webinar on February 6, 2023, in this episode, Richard and Peter answer questions from the webinar and from other workshops on the topic of Feature Mining. If you’re not familiar with the Feature Mining technique, don’t worry, there’s a short intro to it before the Q&A.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/feature-mining-qa-episode/
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In the previous episode of the show, Peter and Richard mentioned the importance of team coaching to increase your chances of a healthy, successful team. In this episode, they look at the seven skills all great coaches master.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/seven-skills-all-great-coaches-master/
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The health of teams has a direct impact on organizational results as well as on individuals’ happiness in their work. In this episode, Richard and Peter outline the 6 conditions that researchers J Richard Hackman and Ruth Wegeman have discovered are critical for a team to be healthy and effective. They also cover what you can do to contribute to those conditions, whether you’re a leader or a junior team member.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/these-six-things-improve-how-teams-work/
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People often assume prioritization—whether for a Scrum product backlog or a personal todo list—is an analytical problem best solved with value calculations and spreadsheets. But it turns out that great product people tend to use intuition, gut feel, rather than analysis to prioritize. In this episode, Peter and Richard introduce a set of heuristics gathered from the best product people that you can use to prioritize work quickly and intuitively.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/secret-to-easier-prioritization/
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The Sprint Retrospective is perhaps the most important event in Scrum. In this episode, Richard and Peter share their two favorite ways to make the Sprint Retrospective meeting way more effective. If your team’s retros have become boring, repetitive, or just a waste of time, these two key moves will bring them back to life.
Episode page: https://humanizingwork.com/better-sprint-retrospectives-episode/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter dig into how to have an effective Sprint Review meeting. Great Sprint Reviews, achieve 3 goals and answer 3 key questions. Learn how do accomplish this on your team. (And discover why “Sprint Demo” is too limited a name for this meeting.)
While this is explicitly Scrum-focused, it’s really about how to have a meeting to review a body of work as a team, whether you’re using Scrum or not.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/effective-sprint-reviews-episode/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter give 3 quick tips you can use to have a more effective Daily Scrum right away. Too many teams waste this important meeting on a boring status report instead of using it to create team alignment and make every day matter.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/daily-scrum-episode/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter dig into the 3 conditions for an effective Sprint Planning meeting. While this is explicitly Scrum-focused, it’s really about how to have a good team planning meeting, whether you’re using Scrum or not.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/effective-sprint-planning-episode/
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Peter and Richard are often asked: “Why do you guys like Scrum so much? It seems like a lot of meetings, and I see a lot of teams struggling with it. But you recommend it for a lot of situations, and it seems like you’ve thought a lot about it.”
In this episode, they explain why Scrum works when it works and why it’s still their favorite approach for product development, including outside of software development.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/why-scrum-works-when-it-works/
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In organizations where teams and individuals are empowered to own and direct their own work, what do managers do? Is there even a role for a manager in an empowered org? In this episode, Richard and Peter introduce the Humanizing Work Three Jobs of Management model, showing how skillful managers can add significant value in their role.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/three-jobs-of-management-hw-show/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter take on the challenge of so-called “technical stories,” backlog items that emerge from a development team and that don’t represent a clear slice of customer value. How should a product owner handle these? Are “technical stories” even a thing?
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/technical-stories/
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Making clear commitments and having regular discussions about accountability is a hallmark of every successful organization and, outside of work, every successful relationship. In this episode, Peter covers how to make a commitment with integrity, how to honorably break or renegotiate a commitment when necessary, and how to have effective conversations about accountability.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/commitments-accountability/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter talk with Mark Ethier, founder of leading audio production software company iZotope. Even if you’ve never heard of iZotope, you’ve heard the results of their products—they’ve won Emmy, Oscar, and NAMM awards for their contributions to TV, film, and music production.
Among other topics in this dense episode, Richard, Peter, and Mark discuss how iZotope went through different “stages” of Agile, what Mark has learned in two decades as a leader, how to develop managers, and the future of work and of music.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/mark-ethier-founder-izotope/
Connect with Mark: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markethier/
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Leaders often have to make difficult decisions in the presence of uncertainty and complexity. And they need to involve others in the process—sometimes to make a decision collaboratively, sometimes just to bring everyone along.
In this episode, Peter introduces the 3ID Pattern, a structure for making decisions in uncertain times, which also works for communicating clearly about a decision that has already been made.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/3id-decision-making-pattern/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter talk with leadership coach and speaker Melissa Boggs. We dig into a range of topics, including her former role as Chief ScrumMaster at Scrum Alliance, the lesser-known challenges of leadership, coaching and being coached, and the ways the rules of work need to change to create more human-centric organizations.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/melissa-boggs-interview/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter look into a recent report from the US Surgeon General on “Workplace Mental Health & Well-Being” as well as the business media’s puzzling reporting on it. Spoiler alert: the Surgeon General has a lot to say about why making work fit humans matters and the mainstream business media can’t make sense of it.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/surgeon-general-report/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter take on two related questions: “Can those Agile success surveys be believed?” and “How should we think about measuring the success of our own Agile adoption?”
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/measuring-the-success-of-agile-adoption/
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In October 2022, Peter ran across the Grand Canyon, not just once, but twice in a single day. In October 2019, Peter could barely run a mile. In this episode, Richard interviews Peter about this huge transformation in his life and the lessons for individuals and teams who want to create their own sustainable, positive changes.
Episode page: https://humanizingwork.com/couch-to-running-45-miles-across-the-grand-canyon/
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We’ve just returned from hosting the 2022 edition of our annual Humanizing Work Conference in Veil, Colorado. On the last day of the conference, we asked a few of the participants to share an idea or concept they picked up that was particularly meaningful or useful to them, that they thought you might benefit from hearing.
In this episode, you’ll get a glimpse into the takeaways from seven participants on ideas you can use at work right away.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/humanizing-work-2022-conference-participant-takeaways/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter interview Vivian Rhoads, President of the Women’s Health business unit at Pharmavite. Vivian has adapted ideas and practices from agile software development to build highly-productive innovation teams in the vitamin and supplement space. Vivian’s work at Pharmavite reduced their cycle time for new innovations from a few years down to a few months and increased throughput from a 1 or 2 new products each year to a few dozen. This episode has great insights for anyone trying to take agile beyond the typical software context.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/agile-cpg-innovation-with-vivian-rhoads/
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In this episode, Richard shares our favorite tool for helping Product Owners restore some sanity to their lives. The PO Board is a way to structure the Product Backlog so that the Product Owner knows exactly what to focus on, at what level of detail, and with which stakeholders on any given day. We’ve taught this approach to thousands of Product Owners, and they regularly report that it has been a huge help in bringing some order to a job that is too chaotic and stressful too often.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/poboard/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question: “I was in a 1:1 with my boss and I shared a problem I was observing on the team. She reminded me of her motto: ‘don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.’ The challenge was that I didn’t have a solution. Should I wait to share the problem until I’ve come up with a solution?”
They also get into why managers shouldn’t say this, even if their intentions are good, and what to do instead.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/dont-bring-me-problems-bring-me-solutions/
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This episode includes an excerpt from one of our monthly Humanizing Work Conference Alumni community sessions. In the session, Peter shared a 20 minute presentation about his circuitous career path and five lessons he’s learned along the way.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/5-lessons-in-career-development
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In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question: “Do we really need a retrospective every sprint? It seems like a waste to do them that often.”
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/do-we-really-need-a-retrospective-every-sprint/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question: “We want to get better at having uncomfortable conversations on our team. We either avoid them or don’t handle them well. How can we improve at this?”
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/having-uncomfortable-conversations-on-a-team/
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Leading the kind of culture change that produces an engaged, empowered, human-centric organization can be exhausting and difficult. In this episode, Hart Shafer, the CEO of TheraSpecs, explains why it’s worth it.
This is an excerpt from our Deep Dive episode on Hiring, check out the show notes for links to that full episode, which is packed with good ideas for anyone who leads or participates in the hiring process.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/why-the-effort-to-humanize-work-is-worth-it/
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Hiring is hard everywhere. But it’s particularly challenging for human-centric organizations that want to hire for self-organization and collaboration. The differences between good and bad candidates are hard—or impossible—to determine from resume reviews and traditional job interviews.
In this episode, Peter and Richard share a breakthrough hiring approach developed by their friends Hart Shafer and Annette Zinky of TheraSpecs. You’ll hear the story of how and why Hart and Annette developed a new way of hiring, and you’ll learn how to implement a similar method to transform your own hiring.
Another client who just tried a little of this approach for a key position told us, “It felt like I suddenly had interviewing superpowers!”
In this episode, Richard answers a question from a friend in the non-profit world: “I came across a template for creating a ‘user guide for working with me.’ Are these used in the business world, and if so, do they work out in practice?”
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/should-you-make-a-user-manual-for-me/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question, “How do we know whether an item on our Product Backlog should be a User Story or a Task?”
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/backlog-stories-vs-tasks/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter dig into the popular “5 Whys” root cause analysis technique, including the limitations of the technique and why the question “why?’ can get you in trouble.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/whats-wrong-with-the-5-whys/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question, “How do you overcome resistance to change?”
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/overcoming-resistance-to-change/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question: what’s your take on “enforced team fun”? Many teams have an expectation that everyone will participate in things like birthday celebrations and morale building events, despite the strong possibility that some on the team would experience stress and anxiety, and no evidence that holding those events increases engagement on the team. There are things outside of individual task execution that should be expected on a team, but “enforced team fun” isn’t going to help and is likely hurting.
Episode Page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/what-many-leaders-get-wrong-when-trying-to-build-team-engagement/
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Peter and Richard mentioned in an earlier episode that they’re not fans of epics for agile teams and product owners. In this episode, they explain why and what to do instead.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/why-we-dont-like-epics/
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The Peter Principle is the idea that people get promoted until they hit the level where they’re no longer competent enough to get promoted again. In this episode, Richard and Peter discuss what this means, whether it’s always true, and how management can escape the Peter Principle.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/the-peter-principle-management/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question, what’s the best size for an agile team? The Scrum Guide says 5-9, but how does the Humanizing Work team think about it?
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/whats-the-right-size-for-an-agile-team/
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In this episode Peter and Richard talk with Nicole Forsythe. Nicole is a librarian turned leader of Agile coaches. We discuss a variety of topics including: how work is broken and what to do about it; navigating career transitions; practical advice for agile coaches; and what we can learn from the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton. The conversation was interesting and practical, and we’re thrilled to share it.
Episode page: https://humanizingwork.com/nicole-forsythe-on-career-transitions-agile-coaching-and-antarctic-exploration/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter take on the question: “My team members only want to work on their specialties. What can I do to get them to pull from the top of the backlog?”
Richard answers with a vivid story about food prep, common sense, and “grilling next week’s chicken.”
Episode page: https://humanizingwork.com/grilling-next-weeks-chicken-or-how-to-get-people-to-work-outside-their-specialty/
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Peter checks in from the beach in Ghana, Africa, sharing his thoughts on his time in Africa and his takeaways from the World Trade Promotion Organizations conference, where he gave a keynote.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/hw-africa-wtpo-conference/
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It's been 8 years since Peter created an animated illustration of Laloux's book Reinventing Organizations (the source of the term "teal organization" that's become popular in the Agile community). Since then, that video has hundreds of thousands of views and the overview illustration from the video is used all over the internet as an illustration for the model. Since releasing that video, we've learned quite a bit about the model, including its roots in the research of Clare Graves and the Spiral Dynamics model described by Don Beck and Chris Cowan. A better understanding of those roots helped us see some important nuance that was missing a bit from the Laloux model. In this video, Peter gives a quick intro, then shares a version of a keynote talk he was asked to present at the World Trade Promotion Organization, where he describes how he currently thinks of and uses the model. Then, Richard and Peter have a brief discussion of their differing viewpoints on the usefulness of the model.
A course participant recently asked, “Is user story fatigue a real thing?” Richard and Peter tackle that question and try to get at the question behind the question. If it feels like user stories are more trouble than they’re worth for your team, this episode is for you.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/user-story-fatigue/
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In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question: “What should I do if people won’t participate in retros?” It can feel like you’re failing as a facilitator, but sometimes there’s more going on.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/when-people-dont-participate-in-retros/
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Most people know how useful feedback can be. But the actual experience of getting feedback is so often ineffective or even painful. In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question, "How do you get useful feedback?" by sharing a six-step approach that avoids some of the most common feedback challenges.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/how-to-get-useful-feedback/
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Our standard advice is that we should structure teams to contain complexity. Complex work is inherently emergent, and you need close collaboration with team members to address that emergence effectively. This is much harder to do when a team spans time zones. The feedback loop to get all team members aware of and adapting to the new information can be up to a full day, a glacial pace compared to that of a co-located team.
In this episode, we share a few strategies that we’ve seen companies use to transition over time to better locate complexity within team boundaries, resulting in much faster feedback, better decisions and outcomes, and higher engagement on those teams.
Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/complexity-and-cross-geo-teams/
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Humanizing Work Snapshots are brief episodes where we share examples of the ways we’re working to humanizing our own complex work. In this episode, the Humanizing Work team reflects on an example of how we prioritized our own work for a team collaboration day when it wasn’t obvious what to focus on.
Check out the episode page for an image we refer to in this episode.
We host four Humanizing Work Communities of Practice. On the first Friday of each month, alumni of our annual conference meet to stay connected and dig into advanced topics about humanizing their work. On the second through fourth Fridays, our ScrumMaster, Product Owner, and leadership communities meet.
In this episode, Peter and Richard talk with Luke Hohmann, best known as the creator of Innovation Games. We discuss how Luke moved from high-level figure skating into software development, how Innovation Games started, and what he’s doing now with his new company, FirstRoot, to bring participatory budgeting to schools.
Episode page:
https://www.humanizingwork.com/luke-hohmann-on-figure-skating-innovation-games-and-participatory-budgeting/
Connect with Luke:
https://twitter.com/lukehohmann
https://firstroot.co/
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Sometimes a management team decides they want to use something like Scrum to organize their own work. But they’re not building a product, so what should their backlog look like? In this mailbag episode, Peter and Richard answer the question, “How do we create a good backlog for our management team?”
In this episode, Richard and Peter answer a question that comes up frequently when we’re working with leaders in an organization considering agile adoption. Sometimes, picking which team goes first is straightforward, but not always, and there are a few important trade-offs to keep in mind.
Episode page: humanizingwork.com/picking-a-pilot-team-for-agile-adoption/
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