Focus On What You Can Control

Over the years (decades by now) that I’ve worked in industry and academia, I noticed a common pattern in organizations that don’t perform well or that have great difficulty delivering on expectations: a culture has taken hold that explains phenomena in and around the organization in terms of factors that are not under the control … Read more

The Illusion of Alignment

As I work with teams in dozens of companies, I’ve noticed an interesting pattern over the years. When I start to work with the team and we go through introductions and the preliminaries, everything looks peachy and wonderful. As we get into the work at hand and I (innocently) start to ask questions, a certain … Read more

The End of Process

With the constantly increasing connectivity and data collection in everything from websites to the Internet of Things, collecting accurate measurements about user and system behavior in the field is becoming increasingly feasible and easy. This is causing a shift in the way we develop and evolve systems, away from requirements and instead focusing on the … Read more

Why Your Corporate Culture Is Wrong

One of the human traits that I tend to forget about (and I believe many with me) is that we ignore well over 99 percent of all the information that our senses receive. If you don’t believe me, take the selective attention test as a case in point. In many ways, focusing our mental energy … Read more