Category Archives: Innovation

“It’s a mixed up muddled up shook up world”

I suppose we can all agree, after reading any newspaper, that the outside world is… mixed up, muddled up and shook up. Do we let ourselves see that this is also true of the world and the people immediately around us?  And maybe — ah! — even ourselves? Agile and Scrum are ways to work […]

Strategy as Distributed Phronesis – Nonaka

Some of you will recognize this name.  He is one of the two men who wrote The New New Product Development Game, which directly lead to the creation and naming of Scrum. Here is the slide deck on “Strategy as Distributed Phronesis.” Sounds like a mouthful, but it has some great stuff . I think […]

6 Myths of Product Development

This is a very useful article in the HBR, by Stefan Thomke and Donald Reinertson.  Reinertson is well known in the lean-agile community.  It is excellent.  Go here to buy it for $6.  Well worth it. Here are the myths or fallacies they mention: 1. High utilization of resources will improve performance. By ‘resources’ they […]

Something Unexpected

What do we do when something unexpected happens? “The readiness is all,” said Hamlet. So we must be ready.  Ready to meet that new thing, that innovation, that crazy idea, that new person…more than half-way. Yes, we may be skeptical. Yes, as Polonius says (careful grandmotherly type that he may be)…we must try our friends […]

“Ozymandias” – Creativity can take some courage

It is hard sometimes to be creative, to create.  We wonder, will our creation ever survive.  I have spoken already of a book called The Courage to Create by Rollo May. Here is a short poem by Shelley, Ozymandias: I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of […]

Creation myth

It is Sunday morning as I write. I like to read different bibles, from different cultures. It is my intuition that while they are all different, they are also all trying to give us pointers towards the truth. Sometimes the pointers are a bit rusty and bent, but if we use a bit of imagination […]

Complex Adaptive Systems

Self-organization, which I just wrote about, is only one of the ideas that contributes to the success of complex adaptive systems. While I am not convinced CAS (complex adaptive systems) have been fully figured out, the idea has a lot to add. In fact, the idea in science is that E=MC(2) is only a working […]

Against Central Planning

Do we like central planning?  No. In general, to some of us it seems simpler to have one central brain plan everything, to assume that that brain has it right and that “everything will work out for the best in this best of all possible worlds” if the central planner plans it for us rationally. […]