Please send an email to rethinkandfocus@gmail.com for questions and feedback Thanks a lot.
Interested in eBOOKs with the yearly content of my Blog before 08-Dec-22? Please check Downloads in the main pages below.
Pressing any picture will bring you to the source/reference I used, same for the text in blue. Enjoy!!
“When you show deep empathy toward others, their defensive energy goes down, and positive energy replaces it. That’s when you can get more creative in solving problems.” -- Stephen Covey
In the last couple of days several issues happened that could have been managed better with a little bit more empathy and imagination to be somebody else - for creative problem solving.
Our current government is a coalition of three parties and all together are lacking a base level of empathy in the meantime. Too much discussion and battling, not really solution oriented and the population started to complain month ago.
At work a decision has been finally taken after a long time of negotiation and now the community is split in two camps. The one is happy that all stays unchanged and we keep going as before. The other camp that was driving for a disruption, something new, scale-able and reliable, will now get a lot of pushback as money, time and resources are limited.
Finally an issue in the project that could have been avoided with a little bit more communication between the team members and a higher level of empathy - walking some time in the shoes of a team member and taking a different perspective. As this did not happen, we had an escalation and did clean up the mess today, could have been avoided. Maybe next time.
Enjoy your weekend and go for a walk.
Artificial intelligence is transforming our world — it is on all of us to make sure that it goes well
Comparing Population Pyramids Around the World
Finland is on track to meet some of the world's most ambitious carbon neutrality targets. This is how it has done it
The Definitive Guide to Scrum PDF
How to Create a Culture of Change Acceptance
Roberto Ferraro: Measure the right thing
Olina Glindevi: THE COACH vs THE MENTOR
Once again a great sketchnote from Tanmay Vora today. More details about the Creative Commons license mentioned in the top left of the picture, see at CC BY-NC-ND.
Besides the Website Builder that I am currently using for my BLOG on the new website hosting platform from ONE.com, I could also use Wordpress offered by them as alternative and maybe better to run a BLOG? To be confirmed.
As I do not have enough time right now, to easily switch between the two environments, I started with a test environment some weeks ago. See Wordpress-BLOG-Test. I am still far away from being an expert, but started with some easy and obvious functionality. The long list of available plug-ins is very helpful to come to a pretty professional environment quickly, with respect to security, quality and maintenance.
One of the advantages I see already is that Wordpress offers a unique URL for each BLOG post, similar to the setup of my previous hosting company. Want to give it a try? See [29-May-23] The Six Leadership Styles by Daniel Goleman for example. Thanks in advance for checking, as I did install a visitor counter plug-in today, more traffic might be realized quickly? We will see, looking forward to your interest :-)
FREE resources to use, to master AI if you want to succeed in the next years
Tomorrow is Whit Monday and on Thursday 08 -Jun-23 we will have Corpus Christi, two more public holidays in Germany and two more 4-day-work weeks.
After 93 years (1930) Germany did play against Canada in the Ice Hockey World Championship final again today. They lost the game 5:2, but did win a medal for the first time after 70 years (1953). Well done and congratulations, a great team effort and success.
I will be enjoying the day off tomorrow.
The 10 Must-Read Articles for Talent Professionals This Week (26-May-23)
How to effectively use the concept of Fluid Scrum Teams in SAFe
ABC of a People-First Organizational Culture
The world's first ever AI ballet will soon be in theatres
How to Learn Anything with the Feynman Technique
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool." -- Richard P. Feynman, American - Physicist May 11, 1918 - February 15, 1988
The final decision about the champion did happen in the 89th minute of 90 minutes on the last game day of 34 days. Bayern Munich did win the 11th consecutive title today, because Borussia Dortmund was not able to win at home, how painful. In the end it is just a game, who cares?
Maybe for most of the people, but not for the Executive Board of Bayern Munich, the dismissed two of their leading managers directly after the game finished. They just do not know, what deep respect for people means, even when the performance was not as expected. I just stop mentioning it ...
Much better was the German Ice Hockey team in the half-final of the World Championship in Finland against the USA today. 4:3 after overtime for Germany, now we play in the final tomorrow afternoon. A great success, respect.
Due to the latest updates of our Agile SAFe framework - SAFe 6.0 is a comprehensive update from version 5.1 and includes many new and advanced practices alongside a new Big Picture (BP) and terminology updates - some training might be useful?
"The gamification theory in education is that learners learn best when they are also having fun. Not only this – they also learn best when they have goals, targets and achievements to reach for, of course in a way the learner still perceives as fun."
Our idea was to combine a necessary refresh of the agile roles, what was required anyway as the proper common understanding of roles & responsibilities is key for success, with an introduction to the latest changes in SAFe. We approached it top down, starting with the management team and later on with all Scrum Masters and Product Owners. Every workshop finished with a quiz, just to check how successful the session was for the participants.
Next step is to do a train-the-trainer approach for all our agile teams, hosted by the Product Owner (PO) and/or Scrum Master (SM). My proposal was to use a little bit of gamification at the beginning of the sessions and start with the quiz this time. I think a good idea to check the current level of understanding in the teams and a "smart" way of making knowledge gaps transparent for everybody quickly. When you know, what you do not know it will be much easier to motivate people to learn something new and refresh their existing knowledge base.
I finished a 1st version of the quiz today. Now we will do some testing, adjustments and final approval to go ahead with the PO & SM team. I will keep you posted.
Human-centred Learning: Pedagogy for the AI age
How investing in big science benefits industrial innovation
We spoke to 12 small business leaders about the keys to their success – this is what they told us
Finally only one night left before the German soccer league has the most thrilling final ever, or maybe in the last 15 years.
"The joy of sport is its unpredictability. There are the favorites, the perennial winners, but there is also a place for the underdogs – the dreamers.
But for too many years such against-the-odds romance has been absent from Germany’s Bundesliga, with Bayern Munich winning a record 10 consecutive league titles to rid the championship of any surprises in the last decade.
In fact, the last season Bayern didn’t win the championship was the 2011/12 campaign, when now Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp guided Borussia Dortmund to the title."
Tough times ask for new approaches, why not some more happiness? Give it a try.
Busy times and no real time for more text today, but pictures will do as alternative, for sure.
Are You Drowning in Email? 3 Strategies for Dealing with the Deluge
Incidental Comics: Squeeze the Day
16 Ways to calm yourself when life is getting tough
Tina Turner, ‘Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll’ whose triumphant career made her world-famous, dies at 83
The Skill Will Matrix
We are not like butterflies, but have the potential to change ourselves in us. Easy for skills, just unlearn what you know and learn something new. Much more difficult for attitude, this takes time and effort, sometimes not possible at all.
In any case personal change only works, when you see a benefit for yourself in changing. It can be an intrinsic or extrinsic motivator, who cares, but you need to see it first. And surprise, surprise your persistence energy will normally be much higher than the energy to get in motion. Nobody said it is easy ...
And when you finally come into motion, other people might be blocking you?
The Tallest Poppy - How the workforce is cutting ambitious women down.
SMART HELP – 7 QUESTIONS TO ASK BEFORE HELPING
How Recruiting Has Changed in the Past 20 Years, According to 5 Talent Leaders
AhaSlides is a platform to help you make interactive presentations
Achieving climate goals and renewable targets first requires solving the storage conundrum
ERIK DE BOS: The Agile Maturity Assessment
Why Your Boss Lacks Emotional Intelligence
As mentioned yesterday I did hear back already today from the NextGenLab team and was invited for the Reverse Mentoring Kick-off meeting mid June 2023. It could have been luck, or I was just one of the few Baby Boomers interested in the concept, who cares. In the end I am in and looking forward to the upcoming activities.
Selective Attention - Is the process of directing our awareness to relevant stimuli while ignoring irrelevant stimuli in the environment.
Works well for the Generation topic and me in the moment. I found the Employee Evolution picture today and two TED talks that perfectly fit as well. When you properly look at the picture you will quickly realize that it is all about circumstances and personal willingness to change or to start an evolution for change. It has nothing to do with the generation you might be belonging to!!
The compelling reason why the financial sector must invest in boosting Earth's biodiversity
Why Mastering AI Is Key to Job Security, Says One Recruiting Leader
Besides all the days we had to celebrate during the last week and a wide variety of pictures to select from, also some helpful frameworks like the SWOT analysis and De Bono's Thinking Hats.
The next week will be 5 working days and starts with our Sprint 3 Demo on Monday, then 6 weeks are over already and we have another 4 weeks to go, to reach our goal for the current 3 month period. The 6th two weeks period is reserved for innovation, knowledge sharing, training and some exploration activities besides the next 2-day planning phase.
After the coming week we have two more weeks with just 4 working days, as Whit Monday (29-May-23) and Corpus Christi (08-Jun-23) are public holidays in Germany. The May/June period is really great every year.
How four-day-week trials are working out in the UK
Gen Z is bringing the optimism on gender equity. Companies need to keep up
Maybe next week I hear already back from the NextGenLab team that offered the reverse mentoring program for all generations. We will see. My BLOG hosting company managed to fix the daily visitor counter, now it is just 2 hours behind the current time, what is perfectly fine for me.
Have a great, interesting and surprising week:
From Conformity to Growth: Why Culture Fitness Prevails Over Culture Fit
The 10 Must-Read Articles for Talent Professionals This Week (19-May-23)
Good picture from The New Happy newsletter today. I did share some useful links related to Tools and Newsletters via the Interesting Links section in the menu above. I will add further helpful content there when available.
Interested in your strength and weakness? Ask your family, a friend or colleague for feedback and a list of your blind spots. If this is not your preferred way of approaching it, try a SWOT analysis - "SWOT analysis is a great way to effectively evaluate a person, campaign, strategy or product". Give it a try.
With your result, what is next? You can ignore the outcome and stay in your comfort zone, completely up to you and perfectly fine. Or you can try to work further on your strength and improve it to the next level - e.g. from Superwoman to Superwoman 2.0 - why not?
Finally you can select one of your weakness, I am sure there is more than one, and improve it over time. To lift up your base level of skills and capabilities further. The choice is yours, BUT ...
Video: 3 Rights Every Scrum Master Needs to Succeed
unFIX: Jurgen’s Checklist for Workshop Organizers
The changing role of libraries, according to a professor for children and youth services
World Bee Day: Analysing bees' remarkable abilities in learning and decision-making
Today is a public holiday in Germany, Ascension Day, the same day we celebrate Father's Day here. Different than in the USA where it is happening on the third Sunday in June.
When we have a public holiday on a Thursday a lot of people take Friday off - the bridge day, to enjoy a long weekend. This means not a lot of people in the office/homeoffice tomorrow, only our colleagues in other countries like India for example. I will be working and enjoy a quiet day.
On Tuesday our NextGenLab participants (a group of Gen Z employees) did organize a BrownBag Lunch to share some details about their done and planned activities. One of their ideas for the near future is to do a Reverse Mentoring program. Gen Z members are mentoring other generations to share some of their perspectives and insights, for the benefit of both sides. On Tuesday they were still searching for volunteers to participate in the program. I used the opportunity to fill in their questionnaire to apply for the program. Will be interesting to see, who gets selected in the end. Maybe I am lucky?
Will definitely be fun and an interesting interaction, given the fact that my two younger daughters are Gen Z as well.
WHEN YOU LOSE YOURSELF
Agile Coaching Growth Wheel
How plastic credits could tackle the social impacts of climate change
47 Habits of Highly Successful Employees
Why the VP of Microsoft Teams says meetings are bankrupting our time and energy
Besides Growth and Customer we selected Simplification as one of our main focus areas for this fiscal year. An easy way to do this is to say NO more often and to reduce the number of options you have before the final decision. Sounds smart, but requires some mindset change.
The daily visitor counter of my BLOG hosting company is still improving. When I checked the counter today it was just missing the last 5 hours, much better than 5 days before.
The Playbook for Navigating Uncertainty
90 books to further your agile learning today
Enjoy the power of pictures and some interesting links, just in case you are interested and have some spare time available?
‘The Power Is Inside of You’ – Jon Gordon, Jade Gordon & Doug Conant on How to Use Positive Leadership to Make a Difference
How to help Scrum Teams embrace self-management
How banana waste upcycling is kick-starting Uganda’s circular economy
12 Things Every Type A Person Wishes You Knew
The One Simple Tactic Recruiters Can Use to Find Great Candidates — and Boost Internal Mobility
Quick recap of the European Song Contest from yesterday evening. Another year another last place for Germany. The song was much better than the final position, but we have to accept the result and add the experience to our collection of failures. Looking closer into the many
rumors and conspiracies around the German outcome will not make a change, so we better focus on a different strategy for a future success.
Another 4-day work week is coming up as next Thursday is Ascension Day, a public holiday in Germany (week 20). Week 21 is a 5-day work week and then we have week 22 and 23 with 4 work days again. The last public holidays before the long break until 03-Oct-23.
Yesterday I did spend some time to look into the capabilities and functionality of Wordpress that could be the alternative for BLOG writing offered by my website hosting company? The challenge and/or opportunity is to find the right balance between the available functionality and, what is really necessary to write easily and quickly. See my current test results, just starting ...
Have a great next week:
Visualized: The Daily Routines of Famous Creatives
The 10 Must-Read Articles for Talent Professionals This Week (12-May-23)
A SWOT analysis is a strategic planning tool used to evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of a business, project, or individual
Just in case you do not know all the brands listed for Gen Z don't worry, Fashion and Candy in the list of another 8 Apps.
Today is the Japan-Day Duesseldorf/NRW 2023 for example. An interesting program during the whole day and a Japanese fireworks in the late evening.
400 Japanese companies based in Duesseldorf
After isolated Japanese “scouts” started coming to Duesseldorf as of 1952, the trading firm of Mitsubishi was listed in the local Commercial Register in 1954. The trading house of Okura & Co. followed in 1957. The Japanese community grew – slowly at first, but then very quickly – keeping time with Japan’s international commercial success. Today the Japanese community in Duesseldorf is the third-largest in Europe after London and Paris. Around 8,400 Japanese nationals live in the Duesseldorf city area alone, with some 14,800 in North Rhine-Westphalia as a whole. Almost 620 Japanese companies are operating in NRW, around 400 of them in the state capital itself. Japanese companies in North Rhine-Westphalia employ more than 52,600 people (as in 2020).
Also today is the Spring ball at our dance school, but we decided not to go there. The lazy monkey on the one shoulder did win against the motivation monkey on the other shoulder. It sometimes happens.
Finally the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest tonight, this time in Liverpool as the event could not take place in the Ukraine, the 2022 winner country. One daughter will be at the Spring ball the other one will be watching the song contest with us, really a cult event for committed
fans. As long as the band representing Germany is not ending up on the last place, we will all be happy. We have a long history of last places in the past years.
Critique of the 9 box grid
Although the 9 box grid provides a clear way of managing talent and performance, it is not undisputed.
Its biggest shortcoming is arguably its connection to traditional performance management, characterized by a once-a-year, subjective rating by one’s manager. Many companies, including Accenture and Deloitte, have moved away from annual performance reviews, opting for continuous feedback instead. This provides more opportunities to improve performance as well as more data points to accurately assess performance. We highly recommend measuring performance using as many objective data points as possible.
What is the 9-Box Performance Grid?
The 9 Box Grid: A Practitioner’s Guide
What Is The 9-Box Grid Model? 9-Box Grid Model In A Nutshell
In a meeting of our project TRIFECTA (Product Management, Release Train Engineer and System Architect) today we discussed the proper recognition of high performers in the team as well as how to support the team members struggling or needing some outside help.
As two of the three Trifecta members are baby boomers we have experience with the 9-Box Performance Grid from e.g. previous companies, asssignments or projects. In our new roles we are not only heading the project, we are also responsible and kind of the role models for an agile mindset.
Our solution is easy and obvious for and engineer, reuse: Copy an existing and well established model, take the valid critique above serious and transfer the idea into our new agile environment. Instead of one supervisor doing the review once per year, we are asking the whole team to do an assessment of all team members, voluntary and anonymous. This will definitely guarantee many objective data points and hopefully will lead us to a common perspective in the 9-box Grid by team. We will see and are for sure supporting the idea of self-managed and self-responsible teams.
20 DANGEROUS TRAPS INTELLIGENT LEADERS STUMBLE INTO BY ACCIDENT
Today we had our first #Spirit Day in the fiscal year that just started on 01-Apr-23. One full day for learning in the whole company. We had a lot of different topics and information sessions to choose from, no meetings and daily tasks to be taken care of.
After a small project status call in the morning, also a kind of learning about the progress we are making :-) , the next two session were about writing text that somebody else wants to read and our new glas fiber strategy. Then I did watch some Youtube videos of the OMR Festival 2023.
I did close my day with an Agile role workshop hosted by our SAFe Practice Consultants (SPCs). Besides the roles descripton and responsibilities, we did also cover the changes coming with the new SAFe 6.0 framework. A great learning experience, very interactive and with an open discussion about issues we are facing in the moment. A quiz with 10 questions to verify the learning did close the session. Right answers and the speed to answer did drive the number of points you could collect.
Fun fact - I think I was the only participant without a SAFe certification, but finished the quiz on the first place. That made my day for sure :-)
Between the different learning sessions during my day I did also share some "5-minute learning" bites to my colleagues, team members and audience. Some examples:
Back by popular demand: Google Cloud products in 4 words or less (2022 edition)
The art of leading in the AI age
As a main topic today was working agile and an agile transformation, some related articles, more or less:
“AGILE” HAS LOST ITS MEANING
Digital Transformation Is So Yesterday
AI Content Detection Accuracy
The Future of Recruiting 2023
I am still in contact with the ONE.COM support team. They are working on fixing the daily visitor counter, in the moment still two days behind the current day. But for the loading performance of the start page the feedback is not good so far. The current environment is not really sufficient for a BLOG, but I am looking into their Wordpress functionality as alternative solution. We will see.
The picture today is taken from a Frank Sonnenberg post - Are You Living the Life That You’re Meant to Live?
Some more interesting links for today:
Mojo: The Programming Language for AI That Is Up To 35000x Faster Than Python
The GROWTH Model of Coaching by Kenneth Acha
4 SIMPLE QUESTIONS TO CLARIFY COMPLEX CHALLENGES
A brief history of tech skepticism
Is fungi the most underused resource in the fight against climate change?
COVID-19 is no longer a global health emergency. Here's what it means
Baby Boomers consist of people born from 1946-1964—making them 56-74 years old as of 2020. Baby Boomers were given the name due to a surge in births during the economic boom after World War II. While they didn’t grow up with technology like Gen Z, they are catching up. Even though more than half, 68%, of the generation own a smartphone, they are more likely to be accessing the internet using a desktop or laptop.
Gen Z is made up of anyone born in 1997 and later. As of 2020, they include people ages 23 and under. Older Gen Zs are starting to make purchasing decisions on their own. Gen Z is now the largest generation, making up more than 90 million people.
As ADSHARK is from North Dakota, United States all data above are related to the US population! Interested in global 2023 data, check the United Nations World Population Dashboard for example?
To make it more specific, I was born in 1962 (a baby boomer) and my two younger daughters are from 2000 and 2003 (both Generation [Gen] Z, year range of 1997–2012).
The Gen Z is now entering more and more the workforce, not only as Interns like most of my applicants, but also as employees. Just lately some of our Gen Z employees founded a NextGenLab to get heard and take action. They had a day with most of our Senior Leadership team members and are strong in marketing their ideas via the internal communication channels.
In my opinion a great opportunity for us in two ways. 1st to better understand their opinion about and needs for the company products, as they are not only entering the workfoce, but also the customer base. And 2nd to balance the upcoming exodus of the Baby Boomer generation and workforce into retirement, e.g. I have another 6 years to go.
Time enough for the required knowledge transfer, regular experience exchange and some mentoring and coaching in both directions. We are short with talents and skilled workers already, the only solution is to train, grow and develop the existing community. Let's start better sooner than later.
The better we will be in doing these transfer activities and the more we talk about it, the easier we can attract new talents from the outside, also a necessary strategy to think about and start quickly.
Investment into plastics circularity can help us reach our climate goals faster
5 Ways Smart People Beat Stress
Here Are the 2023 LinkedIn Top Companies
The Dark Side of Scrum is quicker, easier and more seductive... but it's not Scrum as defined in The Scrum Guide
The factory tour was great fun and we learned a lot about the company.
"Since 1829, addi has been producing exclusively at the Altena site in Germany. The company is managed in the 6th generation by the owner family. In addition, addi has been involved in local social projects for many years and supports many associations and institutions. addi stands for openness and transparency. Buy “Made in Germany” and help us to continue to act in a socially responsible manner in the sense of sustainability."
30% coverage of the German market, customers in 59 countries and 93% of all products Made in Germany, most of the material from regional suppliers. This and many more information was shared in the opening session. Afterwards we did take a 90 minutes factory tour, the staff did work on a Saturday only for the visitors.
Interesting and unexpected to see that it takes 25 steps to manufacture a knitting needle. High quality is the main focus and in order to guarantee this they are always looking for new talents with sensitive fingers. They find a lot in other professions, like hair dresser, baker or pastry cooks.
A great weekend with a nice hotel and food in the Sauerland region.
The 10 Must-Read Articles for Talent Professionals This Week (05-May-23)
How to assess your organisation’s digital maturity, honestly
Goodbye ChatGPT: These (New) AI Tools Will Leave You Speechless
Thanks to Leadership Freak Dan Rockwell for his Blog post and pictures today.
We left early at home to get to Altena in time. After a nice dinner we will get prepared to start the ADDI factory tour tomorrow morning at 09.00 AM. Our hotel is close to the factory in walking distance.
First stop after checkin and on a short walk around the hotel was a wool shop on the other side of the street. The owner is also famous for her Youtube channel, so we had a short fan-moment, just joking :-)
Have a great weekend, we will definitely have fun ...
Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?
AI Content Detector False Positives – Accused Of Using Chat GPT Or Other AI?
How the pandemic has influenced our happiness at work
The Power of Mindset: How Curiosity And Humility Can Drive Career Success
Interesting, what kind of holidays are referenced to one single day. Besides the obvious Star Wars Day on May 4th I found 26 other entries. There might be many more? World Password Day and
National Candied Orange Peel Day are two great examples.
The coffee meeting with the CEO and the HR lead was very interesting yesterday. Possibly the group of participants was a little bit too large to get into a real discussion, but we covered several topics and could get some rare insights into the thinking process of our leadership team. A really great opportunity.
Today I had the "opposite" meeting with 4 of our Interns for a coffee chat in the Tower Cafe. Also a great experience and really interesting perspectives about a lot of topics, business and none business. With people from France, Africa, Germany and India at the same table, it is easy to find discussion points. Sports, food, cooking, religion and Haribo are only a few examples. More to come ...
We also had the official announcement of the so called "PI Champion" in one of our project teams today. The best junior team member selected by the Product Owner and Scrum Master based on proposals of the team for the last three month project phase. We did run this as a Proof of Concept for this idea, to motivate and recognize the good work of our younger and fairly new team members. To get them up to speed quickly. It did work out pretty well and the selected team members were really happy, but did not have a thank you speech prepared. Maybe next time? The test will proceed in this team and we think about promoting the idea in other teams as well.
Finally some words about our new Architecture 2.0 approach. We had a technical framework in place, to transport files from our on premise environment into the Google Cloud (GCP). We started roughly two years ago and did setup a new environment from scratch, based on open source and cloud technologies. During the last ~24 month the environment did grow, we made mistakes and learned a lot, changed directions and the scope, and adjusted the capabilities over time. In the meantime it is working well, but we were sure that more is possible.
So we defined the Architecture 2.0 approach. Come up with a fast, simple, standardized, fully automated, scalable and reliable solution that uses latest technology and does, what the existing solution is already doing. But keeping the mistakes and learning from the last two years in mind by reducing the scope to the least necessary. We selected the best guys from all involved teams supporting the end-to-end solution and gave them the ownership to come up with something new in the least possible time, the faster the better. As we wanted to replace the existing solution as quickly as possible.
The self-organized and -managed team did take on this task bravely and came up with useful parts of the solution faster than expected. Really great teamwork and spirit, to get something done together, for the benefit of the whole project. Counts for the experts in the dedicated small task force team, as well as all the other team members who made the move of the experts possible, by standing in for their previous assignments. Nobody dropped a ball, well done TEAM!!
‘The Godfather of A.I.’ Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead
Your Employees Are Already Using Generative AI: Here Are Guidelines to Help Them Use It Responsibly
My webhosting company is still struggling with getting the daily visitors right. So far they are just 4 days late. The history statistic for year, month and parts of the week are fine, but no daily information is available. They are not giving up, what is the good news of the day.
Another 6 month seem to be over, because today we did get the link for the two times per year employee survey. As always voluntary and anonymous participation. Interesting scenario in an International company. The competition for highest percentage of participants per country is on now and we will see several reminders to be part of the final result.
After the previous survey we had already a discussion about the possible south-north incline in results. The more you come to northern countries the lower are the positive votes. On average Germans will not vote higher than a 4 on a 1 - 5 scale, because there is always room for improvement.
I was most wondering about a question related to the activities after the last survey. "Did you realize that different teams and/or groups of managers did take action? Yes/No" - Yes there were some activities, but did they really make a change to the positive? This should have been the question in my opinion.
5 Takeaways from LinkedIn’s New Global Talent Trends Report
Do the recent banking disruptions make recession more likely? Chief economists explain
Future of jobs 2023: These are the most in-demand skills now - and beyond
20 UNEXPECTED FIRSTS THAT MAKE AVERAGE LEADERS REMARKABLE
The Musical visit today was great, very close to the Dirty Dancing film, good music, dancing and acting on a very small stage. A lot of fun for the whole family.
With respect to the future jobs topic of today, you can have a look at:
Interesting details and Infographics summarizing great content. Besides that not a lot happened during the public holiday today. Going back to work tomorrow and looking forward to the promising topics for the rest of this week. Have a great time ...
Dr. Travis Bradberry: What Makes A Leader?
THE STATE OF ORGANIZATIONS 2023 REPORT | MCKINSEY & COMPANY
What Motivates Employees Today? Recognition, Growth and Fun!
20 jobs that GPT-4 will replace as per written by GPT-4
Highlight of the week was the 2-day offsite workshop, great location, food, content and outcome. Could be the start of a longer coaching of the new team that just came together last week?
The next week will be even better, a 4-day workweek, starting with a public holiday tomorrow on 01-May-23:
20 ESSENTIAL 4-DAY WORKWEEK STATISTICS [2023]: BENEFITS + REVENUE
Four-Day Workweek: Everything You Should Know
We will be enjoying the Dirty Dancing Musical that is currently on tour in Duesseldorf. Then on Wednesday the already mentioned coffee talk with our CEO and the head of HR. Might be a good opportunity to discuss some burning topics from an employee perspective?
On Friday I will be leaving early as we have to be in time for the addi factory tour on Saturday morning 09.00 AM. It was a birthday present for my wife two years ago, but could not happen so far due to COVID-19 restrictions.
addi respectively the company Selter as a successful family business in the middle of the green heart of North Rhine-Westphalia, the Sauerland. Here innovation meets tradition. In our valley in Altena, we produce knitting needles and crochet hooks of the highest quality with the brand name “addi” in the 6th generation and ship them to customers in 59 different countries.
Interesting for my wife and her knitting & crochet hobby and for me as mechanical engineer, to see the factory process and their facility in Germany. Will be a fun week for sure.
The 9 to 5 Workday is Dead. Here's What to Do Instead
Are Developers Needed in the Age of AI?
Understand ‘Microstress,’ Say No to Being ‘Voluntold,’ and More – The Leadership That Works Newsletter
Feeling Overwhelmed at Work? These 16 Tips Can Help
The 10 Must-Read Articles for Talent Professionals This Week (28-Apr-23)
Which countries are leading the way with hydrogen?
“Sometimes to learn you need to unlearn.”
The history of #AI
We had an interesting situation in the German soccer league yesterday. The referee made a mistake, as he committed today, and did not give a penalty kick. The game ended 1:1 and the team that wants to win the league this year lost two points.
In the last ten years always the same team did win and nearly 10% of the inhabitants in Germany did not see another team at the top during their lifetime so far. This year it could be different as the top team from the previous years is struggling. There are 34 games every season and you can get 3 points for every game you win. So enough time and opportunities to win the league when you are pretty consistent in delivering your performance, what the team from yesterday is not doing by the way!!
In the end everybody is complaining about the referee today and the one mistake he made, and not the team that did not play good enough to win the game without needing the penalty kick. And nobody knows, if the penalty kick would have been a goal in the end.
So as in the last 10 years all other teams in the league are making too much mistakes and are not playing consistently enough to get a new team on the top. Might happen again this season? Stop complaining about referees and play as good as possible and necessary to win the cup --> Keep Going, Keep Growing or Play in the Puddles! as written on the pictures.
Based on the feedback I got and my personal impression as host, I would say the workshop was a success. The first day was all about team building and leaving the comfort zone. The second day about understanding the strength and weakness of the two teams coming together, some first common ground and ideas, and finally to agree first common steps that make sense in the current situation. More to come ...
Another step on my way to become a "Feel-Good Manager" not as part of HR, but directly out of the same department with all required insights to be of help. Makes a lot of sense in the current situation, where another reorganization and general change is just around the corner. "When I feel good, all around me will be feeling good as well" is my slogan and an extension of my Release Train Engineer (RTE) assignment to the next level, as far as I see it.
Next Monday is a public holiday in Germany (01-May-23, May Day), a good start of the week. Then on Wednesday the opportunity for a coffee meeting with our CEO, our head of HR and 20+ colleagues. Looking forward to it and might be a chance to address the Feel-Good Manager idea?
Agile Product Manifesto
Why is Agile Coaching ‘More’ than Knowing The Process?
Fairphone's 2022 Impact Report
How Smart is ChatGPT?
Charted: There are more mobile phones than people in the world
7 Learning and Talent Leaders Share the Best Career Advice They’ve Ever Received
Not a really great participation, but it was voluntary and nevertheless
I will provide some ideas related to the mentioned topics below:
Coaching
Mentoring
We’re Huge Fans of Online Mentoring Platforms (So We Made a List of 26 of Them)
Mentoring Trends We’re Seeing In 2023: From The CEO’s Desk
Leadership
The 25 Best Leadership Websites You Need to Check Out This Year
100 Best Leadership Blogs
Agile
Workshop formats
Surprises
Mapped: The State of Democracy Around the World
There is so much more related to all the proposed topics, I just made a quick selection for YOU today.
Due to the 2-day offsite workshop starting tomorrow, I will be back on Friday. Have fun and try checking some of the links above, if you have a little bit spare time available.
Finished the Sprint-1 Demo today with some technical issues. Even with preparation something can go wrong and it did today. Next time we will be better. One day to go for the offsite workshop, most parts are covered in the meantime.
And you have still one day to share your feedback, see the MENTI link in the headline, thanks in advance for participating.
5 QUESTIONS THAT TRIGGER POSITIVE THINKING
Global ocean surface temperatures reach a record high, and the other nature and climate news you need to read this week
Here's why making phone calls can be great for young people's wellbeing
Why You Need Sponsors (Not Just Mentors)—and How to Find Them
3 new and emerging jobs you can get hired for this year
"World Book and Copyright Day is a celebration to promote the enjoyment of books and reading. Each year, on 23 April, celebrations take place all over the world to recognize the scope of books - a link between the past and the future, a bridge between generations and across cultures. On this occasion, UNESCO and the international organizations representing the three major sectors of the book industry - publishers, booksellers and libraries, select the World Book Capital for a year to maintain, through its own initiatives, the impetus of the Day’s celebrations."
Gen Zers are bookworms but say they're shunning e-books because of eye strain, digital detoxing and their love for libraries
Just in case you had no time or motivation yet to participate in my voluntary and anonymous feedback collection, there are still 2 days left. Please use the link https://www.menti.com/27ksa3j43s to share your opinion and ideas, thanks a lot in advance.
Tomorrow we have the Sprint-1 demo of our current 3-month project phase, not a lot to show yet, but always a good opportunity to stay in contact with the customers and stakeholders. And to gather some early feedback in the current phase.
Besides that 2 days left to finish my concept sheet with the detailed timing of each activity for the 2-day offsite workshop starting on Wednesday. Really looking forward to it.
Wish you a creative and successful week with some learning experience.
"Starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling the plane on the way down." -- Reid Hoffman
Global EV Production: BYD Surpasses Tesla
The 10 Must-Read Articles for Talent Professionals This Week (21-Apr-23)
The Future Of Computing: Supercloud And Sky Computing
How to Encourage Employees to Break the Rules:
What drives workplace rule-breaking and when it’s worth encouraging it by GUSTAVO RAZZETTI
“Reading an hour a day is only 4% of your day. But that 4% will put you at the top of your field within 10 years. Find the time.” – Patrick Bet-David, taken from 41 Fearless Patrick Bet-David Quotes That’ll Motivate You
“When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.” -- Maya Angelou, taken from The 100 Best Quotes About Reading
"The first Earth Day in 1970 mobilized millions of Americans from all walks of life, giving birth to a broad new movement to protect the planet. On April 22, 1970, 20 million Americans — 10% of the U.S. population at the time — took to streets, college campuses and hundreds of cities to protest environmental ignorance and demand a new way forward. The first Earth Day is credited with launching the modern environmental movement. Earth Day is now recognized as the planet’s largest civic event each year."
What drives us - the keys to our motivation is a perfect fit to my MOTIVATION workshop from Wednesday.
Have a great weekend.
Barry Humphries, Australian comedian best known for alter-ego Dame Edna Everage, dies aged 89
My phrase of the week is definitely "Rapid Unscheduled Disassemply". In the agile mindset - fail fast, fail often as long as you learn something out of it - SpaceX had a great time until 4 minutes after lift off and a perfect learning experience. A lot of sensors did collect data and the next time it will be better, for sure. A quite expensive MVP I would say - "(MVP) is a concept from Lean Startup that stresses the impact of learning in new product development. Eric Ries, defined an MVP as that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort." - a little bit like a crash test with a real Bugatti Veyron for $1.9 Million, painful but it needs to happen.
The MOTIVATION workshop on Wednesday was great and the team had a surprising learning experience I would say - a challenge to change. The outcome was very helpful and can be implemented easily in the coming weeks.
Today the concept and content of the two day offsite workshop for next week was approved by my customer, just one small change could be added in 5 minutes. Will be fun and I am really looking forward to it. A lot of reuse from previous workshops combined with some new stuff - copy and transfer - good when you have a growing portfolio of activities that you can easily combine for new requirements.
After feedback from the support team I could switch the Start page of my BLOG back to the small Welcome page that starts much faster than this page. Hopefully they could gather enough data - like SpaceX this week - to improve the environment for the next launch :-), we will see and experience shortly?
Just in case you did not have the chance and time yet to participate in my feedback collection via MENTI https://www.menti.com/27ksa3j43s please do so NOW or in the coming days, would be very much appreciated, to come up with topics that you are interested in or that make you happy? So far we have e.g. mentoring, coaching, workshop formats, leadership and agile as proposals, but only from two participants in the survey :-( from around 100 vistors daily not a lot!! A little bit more would be great - participation is anonymous - don't worry.
Many of us cannot imagine our lives without the Internet. But the technology is still young; only 60% of the world’s population was online in 2020.
WHEN DEVELOPMENT WORKS AND WHEN TO LET THEM GO
Paraphrase Plagiarism Checker – Is Quillbot Plagiarism?
4 TOOLS FOR SELF-REFLECTION EVERY LEADER NEEDS
Listen & Learn with these 12 Agile Podcasts
Our Brain Typically Overlooks This Brilliant Problem-Solving Strategy
Recalibrating assumptions on AI
Dependencies Make Us Better
Some lines out of the video:
"Imagine what the world would be like if we decided to share and exchange in more powerful first experiences. Would we feel more loved? Would we feel more connected? Would we feel more brave? Most importantly, would we feel more human? Each and every one of us has so much to experience if we allow ourselves the gift of another powerful first experience."
For a short period of time I had to switch the Start Page of my BLOG back to the initial BLOG 2.0 page, to give the technical support team time to measure the real performance and loading times. The daily visitor counter is still having issues, but some improvement is already visible.
At work I did get a new laptop today after 5 years, as the old hardware was not compatible with the new Windows 11 operating system anymore. I am not a Windows or Mac fan, because I am more into Linux. But in a work environment Windows is still the standard, so you just have to get used to it and learn about the changes. The Windows logo is now in the middle of the menu bar and not on the left side anymore. Hopefully this UX (User experience) adjustment was not too expensive :-) The rest of the look and feel is getting closer to a Mac is what I heard from a colleague, who cares.
The best thing was a super smooth transition between the two laptops, thanks a lot to the support team, just login and waiting for the initial profile load and setup. Then I could proceed with my work as before, with double the memory and much more power now, a good day.
Tomorrow is the MOTIVATION workshop with a team of 13 people and the concept for the 2-day offsite event next week is nearly finished. One of the ideas will be Speed Feedback. At the end of Day-1 the 6 participants will have the opportunity to give each other feedback for one minute each. So 5-times giving and getting feedback will be a very good learning experience and a good preparation for Day-2. What did go well and what could be improved? What do the others know or did realize during the day that is not known to the individual? Will be an interesting approach, let's see.
Artificial Intelligence (AI): Technology Mind Map - Infographic
These outdated mindsets and regulations are holding back urban mobility: Experts
10 SURPRISING JOB INTERVIEW QUESTIONS THAT IDENTIFY THE RIGHT PEOPLE
Building Your Own Agile Team Maturity Assessment
The 𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐝 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐂𝐲𝐜𝐥𝐞 provides a roadmap for how we can continually adapt, grow, and evolve.
"The Johari window is an exercise that helps you gain a better understanding of yourself and how others see you. It was created by psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham in 1955 as part of their work on group dynamics. Fun fact: “Johari” is a combination of their first names."
6 Easy Tricks That Will Make You Way More Productive
I mentioned my BLOG post from yesterday on LinkedIn and did even create a dedicated post there with major parts of the content. And I referenced Dr. Miriam Meckel, who did also participate in the TV discussion about AI.
The next three days I will be at our Campus in Duesseldorf, Monday to onboard a new Intern, Tuesday to get a new laptop (the old one was not Windows11 compliant) and on Wednesday to host another Motivation workshop. Besides that the preparation for the 2 day offsite workshop in 2 weeks is ongoing. The main topics are clear, but the details need to be worked out and a proper timing is still required.
The 10 Must-Read Articles for Talent Professionals This Week (14-Apr-23)
Mapped: The Ancient Seven Wonders of the World
The 12 Biggest AI Mistakes You Must Avoid
Liberate SAFe's Agile Release Trains with outcome-oriented goals
Here's why ChatGPT raises issues of trust
Last Thursday there was a TV discussion about AI and the transition that we are already in or that is ahead of us. It covered e.g. topics like AI ethics, general control initiatives/processes/institutions, personal data protection, Watermarks for AI generated videos, pictures or text,
where do we stand technically and what can be expected in the near future?
The also from Elon Musk supported initiative - Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter from 22-Mar-23 - was part of the discussion as well. Musk wants to pause AI development for 6 month, but why? Because he has so much insights into the current technology development progress, or he wants to catch up with other AI leaders?
A guy who plans to connect brains with computers (Neuralink), develops software for self-driving cars (Autopilot) and is working on the Tesla Bot to manufacture his cars much faster, definitely has the insights. And he did found a new artificial intelligence company called X.AI on 09-Mar-23 - really interesting, especially the timing. But let's believe in the positive of people before the opposite can be confirmed.
The most interesting part of the discussion was the topic, if AI is able to think or not?
THINKING: "the process of forming an opinion or idea about something, or the opinions or ideas formed by this process"
To avoid the discussion or philosophical exchange, if any AI system is able to think or not, what might be really difficult to proof by the way, it could be easily solved by using a different nomenclature or words?
A useful analogy might be the naming issues/conflicts of vegetarian or vegan sausages, burgers or bacon? Why should something that looks like a sausage or has the form of a sausage, but is out of e.g. pea protein, be called sausage? Only because the marketing department is not smart enough to find new names or the customers are so used to the "old" names that a change or transition is not possible or takes too long? As a side note I did ask ChatGPT to help:
"I plan to do a marketing campaign for a vegan sausage and I am looking for product names. Can you please propose 20 appropriate names, the words sausage, vegan, veggie and meat are not allowed? Some fantasy names would be great." - here examples:
Herb & Spice Links
Savory Bites
Plant Delights
Nature's Bangers
Zesty Sticks
Faux Franks
Garden Grinds
Vitality Bites
Bold Bites
Flavor Fusions
Pure Energy Links
Earthy Snackables
Wholesome Bites
Some are not so bad ...
Back to the new names idea. As Apple starts everything with "i" and Elon Musk with "X", why not using "AI"? Like proposed in the headline - AI-thinking. This would give some clarity and could manage expectations, kind of a Watermark? Something to think about ...
"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein, German - Physicist March 14, 1879 - April 18, 1955
Please share some feedback via the MENTI link in the headline, would be really great and very much appreciated. All voluntary and anonymous, thanks a lot in advance !!
As planned I did try the AI Content Detector and Plagiarism Checker today. The first impression was really good, GREEN background for Original text (written by me) and RED background for AI generated text by ChatGPT. Thanks to Jon for giving me free access to the tool, pretty interesting technology.
The Plagiarism check works really well, assuming the webpage is known, mine was not in the used search index yet. Some more development is still required for mixed text with Original and AI parts, but slow progress is better than no progress!!
Better together: Let’s start getting ecosystems right.
Scotland to launch the world's first self-driving commuter bus fleet
Owning houseplants can boost your mental health – here’s how to pick the right one
The Most In-Demand Jobs Right Now (13-Apr-23)
AutoGPTs could Transform the World At the Speed of A.I.
Why Scrum (or Agile)? Poster
Escape the speed trap: 5 metrics that outrun velocity
Same message as yesterday - The daily visitor counter of my web hosting company is still not working properly - their technical team is working on it, we will see how fast this solves the problem?
In the discussion with the service agent I mentioned the slow loading speed of the start page and he proposed GTmetrix to find improvement ideas. By connecting the new Welcome page to my web address the GTmetrix Grade improved from F to B in the meantime. Same for the SEO score, no complaints about the slow speed anymore.
2nd change is to add a new counter on the Welcome page, just to double check the clicks, as the daily visitor count is still not working. And then the request to ask for YOUR opinion and ideas in the coming 14 days, just use the MENTI link in the headline or here. Thanks a lot in advance any feedback is very much appreciated.
The picture today is like a Venn Diagram - "Venn diagrams are diagrams used to visually depict sets, relationships between sets, and operations on sets. The Venn diagram shows the relationship among sets using circles and the area they cover concerning each other.
A Venn diagram, also known as a set diagram, depicts several set operations like set intersection, set union, and set difference. We may also use it to represent subsets of a set."
90 years ago Montserrat Caballé was born, "a Spanish operatic soprano, admired for her versatility and phrasing and for her performances in the operas of Giuseppe Verdi, Gaetano Donizetti, and Richard Strauss." You might know her from the opening song of the Barcelona Olympics together with Freddie Mercury? She died Oct-2018.
61 years ago my Scottish friend was born, he is celebrating his birthday today, congratulations and party on.
In the coming days I will have a look into the capabilities of Originality.AI - "by far the most accurate AI (Chat GPT, GPT-2, GPT-3, GPT-4, Bard and ONLY Paraphrase Detection (quillbot)) Content Detection tool on the market."
Exploring the Future of Skill-based Organisations
Try creating your own personal SWOT for career development or at your team level
These book summaries will save you 1000+ hours of reading
Ageling on Agile: A great new Fluid Scrum Teams use case
The Evolution Of AI: Transforming The World One Algorithm At A Time
The daily visitor counter of my web hosting company is still not working properly, but I learned today that I am not the only one who realized it. Hopefully it gets fixed quickly?
I have seen the Comic Agile cartoon today and it did perfectly fit to my post from yesterday about "the power of words". This time the word is PROJECT and the meaning of it according to PMI (Project Management Institute) versus the Scrum Guide.
PMI: "All projects are a temporary effort to create value through a unique product, service or result. All projects have a beginning and an end. They have a team, a budget, a schedule and a set of expectations the team needs to meet. Each project is unique and differs from routine operations—the ongoing activities of an organization—because projects reach a conclusion once the goal is achieved."
Scrum Guide: "Scrum is a lightweight framework that helps people, teams and organizations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems. Scrum employs an iterative, incremental approach to optimize predictability and to control risk. Scrum engages groups of people who collectively have all the skills and expertise to do the work and share or acquire such skills as needed. Scrum combines four formal events for inspection and adaptation within a containing event, the Sprint. These events work because they implement the empirical Scrum pillars of transparency, inspection, and adaptation."
Similar words and similar content I would say and the same is mentioned in the cartoon. The difference is more an ideological one and the responsibility of the team doing the work - in the PMI Waterfall world they have their line management taking care - in the Scrum Agile world the teams are self-managed, -organized and -responsible, what makes a big difference.
With my 4 years experience in the Agile world and 26 years in the Waterfall world before, I clearly see advantages for the self-managed teams and their motivation, only issues is the line management that is loosing more and more control / responsibility, without any proper replacement for it. Taking over an agile role could be a great way out, but this requires a personal change, what is not so easy to do.
Maybe the new Management 3.0 practice - Connection Circles - could be a good approach to get some clarity for the necessary change, just give it a try?
I selected the VALUES picture today, because I will be using the topic personal and team values in one of my coming workshops. Interested to find out your personal values?
The Ultimate List of Core Values And How To Find Yours
The Ultimate List of 400 Personal Values (PDF)
"We cannot control the way people interpret our ideas or thoughts, but we can control the words and tones we choose to convey them. Peace is built on understanding, and wars are built on misunderstandings. Never underestimate the power of a single word, and never recklessly throw around words. One wrong word, or misinterpreted word, can change the meaning of an entire sentence - and even start a war. And one right word, or one kind word, can grant you the heavens and open doors." -- Suzy Kassem
As you can see on the Tanmay Vora picture, to make the difference clear between e.g. the words CHANGE and TRANSFORMATION, you have to spend some time and effort that is really worth it to avoid any misunderstanding or misinterpretation later on. Especially in international teams and work environments with a lot of none native speakers (English for example) you will quickly realize that team members will translate words into their own language to better understand and grasp the meaning.
As you can see from the example links below, there is a lot of help already available, purely focusing on English as the language. Now assume you have 3 - 4 different languages in a team, how many possibilities you will have to misunderstand each other? A lot!! So spending quality time on agreeing on a common understanding in the team is really necessary to be successful:
WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE? Many words are often used interchangeably, even when they have distinct meanings
DiffSense - compare and contrast word meanings
What is the Difference Between ...
SYNONYMS FOR difference - Thesaurus / difference
"agreeing on a common understanding" is a little bit like Planning Poker
"an agile estimating and planning technique that is consensus based. To start a poker planning session, the product owner or customer reads one of their user stories or describes a feature to the estimators.
The estimators discuss the feature, asking questions of the product owner as needed. When the feature has been fully discussed, each estimator privately selects one card to represent his or her estimate. All cards are then revealed at the same time. If all estimators selected the same value, that becomes the estimate."
Same value is similar to a common understanding - a prerequisite to be successful together as one team.
Today the hosting environment is working smoothly, no bank holiday - lucky me. I have a service ticket open as the daily visitors have not been counted on 4 days in one week and the loading of the first page should be much faster. My SEO tool is complaining about this one.
Change management toolkit tips tools and techniques PDF
100 Best Quotes of All Time
9 Skills You Should Learn That Pay Dividends Forever
The Intersection Of AI And Human Creativity: Can Machines Really Be Creative?
The PI Planning is SAFe's best idea
Amazon declares War on ETL
Expand Your Technical Knowledge in 2023 with these Must-Read books
Easter Sunday and the best possible movie on TV - Life of Brian - from Monty Python. Possibly not the preferred movie of the church, but a great learning experience of British humor and if you like to get a Latin lesson.
Next film after this is Monty Python and the Holy Grail (from 1975), an even more special kind of humor.
My website hoster seems to have a technical issues today, on Sunday. So I will finish the post quickly, have a great next week.
The 10 Must-Read Articles for Talent Professionals This Week (07-Apr-23)
See the Key Findings From the Gartner 2023 Board of Directors Survey
Sailing towards the twin transition: How shipping can use digital to decarbonize
100 AI tools which make your task easy and everyday life easy
"Probably Picasso's most famous work, Guernica is certainly his most powerful political statement, painted as an immediate reaction to the Nazi's devastating casual bombing practice on the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War."
A great artist with an interesting journey during his private and "business" life. Have a great Easter time.
Today is Good Friday a bank holiday in Gemany and a lot of other countries, even the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is closed. Means for me some days off, as next Monday is a bank holiday in Germany as well and then I have 3 more days holiday. Well deserved after two pretty busy weeks. The planning for the next 3 month project phase did go smoothly and we closed it with a Team Building session yesterday.
We had face-to-face sessions at 4 different locations in 3 different countries and the rest of the team did participate online. Not everybody lives close enough to a company location, to get their easily for a one day get-together. The team members who did come together at one location had a lot of fun and I am pretty sure this was not the last time to close a planning phase with a team event.
As I made some small marketing for my personal BLOG yesterday during the team event and my daughter is spreading the info about the existance of my BLOG with her friends lately, I am just using the opportunity to welcome some new readers today. As I am a strong believer of treating new and existing customers in the same way, also a warm welcome message to my one-time, many-time and every-time readers. Your support is very much appreciated every day!!
I did write my first BLOG post on 04-Jul-2016, some excerpts below:
Why now? After nearly 10 years working for my company I took the opportunity for a voluntary leave, as I needed a change and was not happy anymore with the current situation as IT Manager. I am in Garden Leave now, having suffcient time to look for new opportunities and to RethinkAndFocus. A Blog or Online
Diary looks like a good idea to share my thoughts regularly and to describe, what is happening during my current journey in a central place?
To be very clear at the end of this introduction. I am doing this for me and not for money. The links and references I am using are there to support my thoughts and arguments and not for any sponsoring or advertising purposes.
So in summary my personal journal with a lot of diverse, interesting and fun content, with details as far as I am searching for it. Looking for more? You can download all my BLOG posts since 2016 as eBOOKs from my Downloads page for FREE. You are welcome ...
The Teambuilding session yesterday had two focus points. A Personality Type overview for the whole team and to come up with an Elevator Pitch for our project. A lot of fun and time to leave the personal comfort zone. We used the 16Personalities test, great effort-outcome ratio, and a lot of details and supporting material are available. More personality test:
The 23 Best Personality Tests In Ranking Order (2023 Update)
14 Free Personality Tests That’ll Help You Figure Yourself Out
12 Free Personality Tests You Can Take Online Today
We had a 70+ % return rate in the team, could cover all 16 Personality Types in the team and were pretty in line with the country profiles. A great outcome and team spirit!!
DISAPPOINTMENT – NAVIGATING A DELIGHTFUL PAST
If you open a meeting with icebreakers, end with these wrap-up equivalents for better closure
Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2023
3 ways cities can promote new, greener mobility services
Do You Understand the Impact of Your Leadership?
Accelerating performance in a winner-takes-most world
Here's why making phone calls can be great for young people's wellbeing
“Your real personality identity is not an option, it is the foundation for your happiness and health.” -- Diana Dentinger
Was the comment of Geraldine GAUTHIER in her post that used the iceberg picture and analogy. The whole picture with the topics above and below the water line are a great fit for the workshop that I did agree to host last Monday. It will be a 2-day offsite session end of Apr-23 with part of the senior management team. The 1st day is going to be very personal, about e.g. personal maps, values, motivation and team building. On the 2nd day we will be working on the upcoming transformation and what needs to happen until 2025 - focus areas will be customer, people, simplification and growth. I am just preparing the concept and content, a combination of reusing parts of my previous workshops and some new topics/ideas - copy and transfer - one of my beliefs.
"Manage the system, not the people" is the Agile Leadership guideline from Management 3.0 - check out more of their practices. Preparing the right environment to work and giving people the chance and a lot of different opportunities, to find their own way and to grow beyond expectations - that is what we are looking for in 2023.
COULD ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LAUNCH MISSILES – I ASKED CHATGPT
COMPLETE THESE 10 SENTENCES BEFORE SEEKING RECOMMENDATIONS
3 Powerful Ways To Stay Positive
3 REASONS PEOPLE FOLLOW YOU
I have seen the video on LinkedIn today with the headline "See how Coaching can help you break your mental barriers". As the difference between Coaching and Mentoring is not easy to define and understand, here the try to explain it from the article referenced above.
"Whether this individual takes support from a coach or a mentor, depends on many things. If you need to discover the journey from Point A to Point B by exploring yourself, then you should choose a coach. Choose a mentor if you want instructions and lessons from previous experiences." I think the monkey behaves like a dog coach in the video as both discover the journey over the river, with the monkey in the lead. What do you think?
The coming week has just 4 working days, as next Friday is a bank holiday in Germany (Good Friday). The same with Easter Monday on 10-Apr-23. Until then four busy days left with the two new Interns arriving tomorrow and the next 3 month project phase starting with two days planning and the team building session and come-together on Thursday. Get ready to rumble ...
The 10 Must-Read Articles for Talent Professionals This Week (31-Mar-23)
Here are 8 ways the world can tackle water scarcity
6G Is Coming: What Will Be The Business Impact?
Who spends the longest time in retirement?
The Finnish Secret to Happiness? Knowing When You Have Enough.
Simon Sinek's Golden Circle TED talk is one of my all time favorites. He is using three simple circles to explain a lot of interesting topics and connections. Always good to see again.
Changing one letter can mean a lot as in the Malcom X quote, the benefits of reading of books could be applied to Blogs as well, why not? And the Emojis for Engineers picture might be a little bit too harsh, but we understand humor and are able to change over time. I have "The project is finished" face very often.
How to Build a Data-Driven Company: The Ultimate Guide
Navigating the VUCA World with the 5Ks of Japanese Manufacturing
Manufacturing is the most targeted sector by cyberattacks. Here's why increased security matters
Be the change you want to see. Be a change agent and become a role model. "Large-scale change can only occur when massive numbers of people rally around a common opportunity. At an individual level, they must want to actively contribute. Collectively, they must be unified in the pursuit of achieving the goal together." from The 8 Steps for Leading Change by John Kotter
"It's very difficult to innovate without requiring people to do something different. And whenever you require people to do something different, you're talking about change." -- John P. Kotter, American - Educator Born: February 25, 1947
Everything is well prepared for the 2 planning days next week. We have enough content for three month work and our kick-off presentation is nearly finished. Only the homework for the Team Building session needs some more speed as the response rate is below 50% so far. In order to have a statistical relevant result my target is 75% or more. But as the participation is voluntary, too much pressure will not help. Regular daily reminders have to be the solution until next week Wednesday, we will see.
In the last two days I could agree to host two new workshops for April. The Motivation Driver workshop again for a whole department and a new workshop for 2 days off-site that will be discussed in more details on Monday. With my portfolio of workshop content I am ready to fill 2 days by reusing existing content in combination with some new ideas, depending on the requirements of my customer. More to come ...
Leading the Five-Generation Workforce – The Leadership That Works Newsletter
What is green steel and why does the world need more of it?
WHY WE OVERCOMPLICATE THINGS
4 REASONS WE MAKE DUMB DECISIONS AND 7 WAYS TO MAKE SMART DECISIONS
Gartner: 4 Emerging Technologies You Need to Know About
Ecosystems for the rest of us
Thriving in the AI Revolution: Eight Essential Insights for Navigating the ChatGPT Era
Why smart siting of renewable energy is crucial for people and planet
Huge Group Calls for Temporary Pause on AI More Advanced Than GPT-4
Have a great and relaxing weekend.
Great achievement and a really sustainable approach taken by Fairphone. The operating system was updated for 7 years, the phone hardware is still supported and you can buy spare parts for the modular system. Really a role model.
Yesterday the Belgian team did win against the German soccer team for the 1st time after 69 years. A great success for Belgium and their team that is in a positive flow in the moment anyway. For the German team the already difficult situation is getting even worse. A lot to be done until the UEFA EURO 2024 starts in Germany on 14-Jun-2024.
Finally the visit of King Charles III in Germany today. I wanted to check, when the last British King did visit Germany, but was not really successful. His mother was just too long the Queen.
A COMEDY MAKES PFIZER’S CHIEF CORPORATE AFFAIRS OFFICER FEEL ALONE
Are You Honorable or Afraid of Getting Caught?
AI And You: How ChatGPT Can Take Your Career To The Next Level
As everything is more or less related to change it is an ongoing topic to write about.
Yesterday we had our System Demo to finish the current 3 month project phase. A really good overview of the work we have done, presenting our end-to-end solution in a combined demo of several teams. We are getting better in delivering the committed work and in improving our tools and way of working in parallel. Going forward it needs to be even more simple, standardized, fast and scalable.
A way to do this is to question/change the status quo, automate as much as possible and involve all required parties as early as possible. Especially the necessary change is causing some issues and areas of fear. People start to get concerned that we are sawing the branch that they are still sitting on. The 4 practices on the picture will be helping a lot going forward with this change.
The Germany wide strike yesterday was not leading to the expected chaos as a lot of people did adapt as needed. No public/private transport by plane, train and bus was not at all leading to the traffic jams that everybody was forecasting before. People stayed at home, thanks to the COVID-19 experiences from the last two years, or used the remaining transport systems besides their own cars - e.g. bikes, taxis or e-scooter. As every employee is responsible to come to the office in time, they had not a lot of choice. yesterday Hopefully the next negotiations between the unions and companies will lead to results shortly, we had enough strikes this year already.
Where are Clean Energy Technologies Manufactured?
Collaboration Superpowers: Virtual Team Celebrations
Use AI to Your Advantage by Harnessing These Skills and Capabilities
9 Signs You're A Highly Sensitive Person
Action on clean hydrogen is needed to deliver net-zero by 2050. Here's how
The Steal like an Artist video very well supports my personal belief that "Stealing with Pride" and "Copy and Transfer" is not just a minor proof of the laziness of engineers, but also an appreciation of the work of other people. Using their great work and idea as basis for reuse or a new development is a high level of valuation. Think about it.
Spending the 1hour and 6 minutes on the Leadership and Purpose video with Simon Sinek is really worth it. Yes you can do a lot in one hour, but this video is full of great ideas, story telling, real life examples and a basis for further learning and investigation. Great stuff!! Some related material to check out:
THE VISION OF FOUR SEASONS
Bob Chapman, CEO and Chairman at Barry-Wehmiller Companies, Inc
“Everyone wants to contribute. Trust them. Leaders are everywhere. Find them. Some people are on a mission. Celebrate them. Others wish things were different. Listen to them. Everybody matters. Show them.” – Bob Chapman
Had a busy last week and the coming week will be even more busy. We start with the System Demo tomorrow, the presentation of our project results from the last 10 weeks. A lot of good stuff to show to our stakeholders and as great motivation for the coming three month. Tuesday the workshop with the homework, the team is expected to come up with a slogan or logo for their project. Will be interesting to see, how the different personality types will handle this.
On Tuesday we will be starting with our Innovation, Knowledge Sharing and Learning phase, always happening in the last two weeks of a 3-month project phase, we call it IP-Sprint. For the rest of the week we will be preparing the next planning phase starting 04-Apr-23. Much to do ...
Grant Snider: The Two Types of Stories: Expanded Edition
Chat GPT-4: The AI-Powered Best Friend We've Always Dreamed Of?
20 Steps to Achieving Anything by Daryl Daughtry, Publisher
8 Top Tips to Boost Your Learning (Infograph)
“Management is about telling people what to do, and leadership is about allowing people to do what they’re capable of doing.” – Bob Chapman, taken from 25 Inspirational Business Process Improvement Quotes
"Earth Hour 2023 to rally more people than ever to join the Biggest Hour for Earth" on 25-Mar-2023 at 08.30 PM your local time.
After a two days break back to the blogging fun. Sometimes you just need to focus on something else to refresh your mind. A lot of good stories and links came up during this time, a small collection for you today.
During table tennis training yesterday I did play against a much younger team member, I assume the age difference was 40+ years? Experience and overview beats youth and speed. Exactly the same, what I experience when I play against our oldest player who is 80+. You can run as fast as you want when you are always too late and the other player takes advantage of your weak points. Something the younger player had to accept as well in the end after losing two sets and the game. Next time is a new chance ...
Yesterday I had a coffee break with three of our Interns. A really interesting come-together, one coming from Vietnam, from India and Zimbabwe. All students in Germany, even speaking German, respect. These kind of meetings are great for cultural awareness, we had an interesting discussion about Easter, what it is and how to celebrate it. Next month we have three new starters from Germany, France and Cameroon to extend the already very diverse community. Looking forward to it.
Do you remember your school times and how you handled making your homework? I am confident it has nothing to do with skills, but is mainly driven by your attitude!! For the next two workshops I did ask the participants to prepare a small homework, just doing a personality test, as we will use the results during the session. After several reminders there are still people who are not aware, their listening or reading skills need some updates, and the majority of the rest is just waiting until the last minute. You can still do it on the day of the workshop, in the bus or before the lesson like in school, you could make something up or just copy the result of a colleague? 10 - 40 years after they finished school and nothing really changed, must be attitude. With the result of their personality test they might understand better why? We will see next Tuesday.
Ten great illustrations on #personaldevelopment and #growth
7 WAYS TO MEET THE NEED TO FEEL SEEN, HEARD, AND UNDERSTOOD
Frank Sonnenberg: Terrible Role Models Make Great Teachers
Video: He's The Best Teacher Ever , Teacher of Life Lessons
The Top 4 Examples Of How ChatGPT Can Be Used In Telecom
3 WAYS TO BRING YOUR BEST SELF
How vertical farms could boost food production in India
How many steps a day do we really need to take? Here are the facts
Here's how to get older adults exercising
The 10 Must-Read Articles for Talent Professionals This Week (24-Mar-23)
"World Down Syndrome Day (WDSD), 21 March, is a global awareness day which has been officially observed by the United Nations since 2012. The date for WDSD being the 21st day of the 3rd month, was selected to signify the uniqueness of the triplication (trisomy) of the 21st chromosome which causes Down syndrome."
See two impressive lists of successful people:
10 Inspiring Famous People with Down Syndrome (2023)
10 Of The Most Successful People With Down Syndrome (2019)
"I always say I am Pablo Pineda and that I have Down’s syndrome. There is a big difference between 'having' and 'being.' 'Being' can crush you down and 'having' shows it is only one feature." – Pablo Pineda, the first European with DS to graduate with a university degree - taken from 21 Quotes from Extraordinary Individuals with Down Syndrome
Verbal to Visual video: The Map of Emotions
Jason Sudeikis and ‘Ted Lasso’ cast meet with Biden for mental health discussion
3 WAYS DOGS AND PEOPLE RISE
5 Reasons Why Most Attempts to Create a Coaching Culture Fail
3 strategies that can future-proof the global food system
"People with Down syndrome can do anything. They just do it at their own pace. Give them a chance, and you will be rewarded beyond your greatest expectations." -- Madeline Stuart, taken from Madeline Stuart Quotes
"The World Happiness Report research leverages six key factors to help explain variation in self-reported levels of happiness across the world: social support, income, health, freedom, generosity, and absence of corruption. Governments are increasingly using this analysis to orient policies towards happiness.
Finland remains in the top position for the sixth year in a row. Lithuania is the only new country in the top twenty, up more than 30 places since 2017. War-torn Afghanistan and Lebanon remain the two unhappiest countries in the survey, with average life evaluations more than five points lower (on a scale running from 0 to 10) than in the ten happiest countries."
"The IPCC prepares comprehensive Assessment Reports about knowledge on climate change, its causes, potential impacts and response options. The IPCC also produces Special Reports, which are an assessment on a specific issue and Methodology Reports, which provide practical guidelines for the preparation of greenhouse gas inventories."
AR6 Synthesis Report - Climate Change 2023
Are you a micromanager? Or do you just work for one? 5 ways to tell
10 Bad Habits You Must Eliminate from Your Daily Routine
Everything you need to know about hydrogen in the clean energy transition
Achieving climate goals and renewable targets first requires solving the storage conundrum
For Meteorologist spring time started 01-Mar-23 according to the calendar it is tomorrow, the weather does already know and the temperatures go up. Time for gardening, we did start with first activities yesterday.
Just in case you are interested in all my BLOG posts from 2023 until 17-Mar-23 as PDF file in the moment, have a look on the Downloads page. The small eBOOK is available there.
Next week is kind of "the calm before the storm" week, a lot of preparation tasks for two workhops, our final system demo, 5 days innovation & training activities and the planning for our next 3 month project period. Hosting the workshops will be a lot of learning for the participants and fun for me, looking forward to it.
GPT-4 Is Here: Unleashing the Power of Multimodal AI and Redefining the Future of Communication
The 10 Must-Read Articles for Talent Professionals This Week (17-Mar-23)
How Africa’s new Free Trade Area will turbocharge the continent’s agriculture industry
Affordable childcare is possible — and access to it would benefit us all
5 months ago, I asked 70 LinkedIn creators: "What is the ONE book that most impacted your career?
Have a great next week ...
More details about Usain Bolt
After a discussion with my wife we came to the conclusion that a circle or several circles could be a good approach to explain and present content as well. We are not the first ones :-)
Some examples on the picture and as link below:
10+ Types of Diagrams and How to Choose the Right One
What is the DISC Model?
I like the Venn Diagram a lot, you just have to find the right text in the different fields to give it some content and value.
"There's this famous observation that I totally believe: Great startup ideas are the ones that lie in the intersection of the Venn diagram of 'is a good idea' and 'looks like a bad idea.' So you want most people to think it's a bad idea and thus not compete with you until you get giant. But for it to secretly be good." -- Sam Altman
Two years ago from today I was still on my old BLOG hosting website and the counter did show 500,000 overall readers. Just a small anniversary today. With my switch to the new hosting website and provider on 08-Dec-22 the counter was at 1,109,000. Since then there is no real counter anymore and I have to rely on their Website analytics information. The last month total visits number was 2,915. No idea how the old counter and the new way of counting visitors match? But as I have no possibility to influence it, why bother about the topic anymore?
According to the analytics I had 12,085 total visits since 08-Dec-22.
"You can create value with breakthrough innovation, incremental refinement, or complex coordination. Great companies often do two of these. The very best companies do all three." -- Sam Altman, taken from 200 Sam Altman Quotes
There are many triangles used to explain topics and priority setting alternatives. Besides the Success one, there is also the Iron Triangle or sometimes called the Golden Triangle of Project Management for example.
Today we have seen a first review of our new technical solution architecture, the 2.0 version of our status quo. Two more weeks to see the 1st MVP. Everybody is looking towards it, as we are on a really good track. Our challenge will be to put the green dot in the right place on the square that I came up with today. Reliability will be key as well as quality, but the new solution has to be fast and simple as well. The faster the better, as we need to scale up the daily/weekly delivery pretty fast.
And, not so easy for developers during their process, in the end the solution has to be operated by another team with less expertise. So it should be simple to maintain and reliable to reduce the effort of the new team taking over the responsibility in the future. Some more discussion might be needed, to agree the priorities and properly place the dot. Will keep you posted.
LET GO – 4 REMEDIES FOR EXHAUSTED CONTROL FREAKS
A Simple Guide to The (New) ChatGPT API with Python
Tokyo wants to build a future-proof city. Here’s how
Between Minds: Thought Leader vs Do Leader Source: Mindset and JESS3
How CFOs further value creation by leading on sustainability
Actions the best CEOs are taking in 2023
Google search was launched 1997, 26 years ago so easy for a lot of parents to be older than Google. On the kids side age has a different perspective, all people above 20 are old when they are around 10+.
A new release of the Scale Agile Framework version 6.0 came out today. See What’s New in SAFe 6.0
Why skills development is vital for shipping’s green transition
Hiring in 2023: How Talent Leaders Are Navigating a Changing Market
Do You Want to Be Heard or Understood?
What is ‘dark data’ and how is it adding to all of our carbon footprints?
7 LIGHT-WEIGHT LEADERSHIP PRACTICES THAT DELIVER HEAVY-WEIGHT RESULTS
Investing in Automated Hyperintelligence or Hyperintelligent AI, or how to win the global AI race
Personal user manuals - The approach you never knew you needed
Decision-Making: The 10-10-10 Method
Source Youtube: Little Girl Leads Horse || ViralHog
This was the quote related to the video, found on LinkedIn today:
“A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” —John Maxwell
My immediate interpretation was - who has the line/leash has the say - and my wife's comment even better - now I do understand why your line managers want to stay in their role/positions :-)
In the next Team Building workshop after the Planning phase of our project, we will be closer looking into the Personality Types we have in our project and teams. I will be using the 16Personalities test that is also featured in My new business page. The test results are distributed in 4 different roles (Analysts, Diplomats, Sentinels and Explorers), each with 4 different types. We will just be counting the number of people per role and type, to keep their personal privacy. Even the participation in the test is voluntary, no pressure. On the picture some details and the known distribution by the countries represented in our project - Brazil, Germany, India and Portugal. Will be interesting to find out the details.
A great night with a lot of surprises and interesting stories. 4 Oscars for a German film, actress in leading and supporting role over age 60, and
Ke Huy Quan who did appear in an India Jones film as kid for the first time and did not play in any film for 20 years, wins the actor in a supporting role Oscar - respect and congratulations to all.
Jamie Lee Curtis wins her first Oscar
Green buildings can reduce city temperatures by up to 2°C, study shows
Dr. Travis Bradberry: 8 Great Tricks for Reading People’s Body Language
Say Goodbye to ChatGPT: Here Are New AI Tools That Will Blow Your Mind
A new week started ...
One more comic page today that offers a lot of good content and easy to understand visuals - Wisdom Made Easy. The picture today shows how far we are already into 2023, week 10 of 52. 19% of this year is already gone could be time for a 1st review.
Business wise we delivered a great milestone at the beginning of the year, I did already host three workshops, another reorganization is in progress and I did send an initial heads up for the 3rd D&A Meetup scheduled for 26-Sep-23. The earlier the better, to have everybody aligned and supporting.
In private life we e.g. have a new family member, the daughter of my nephew, some admin tasks have already been taken care of, had a great short holiday and the studies of my daughters are making good progress. Looking forward to the next 10 weeks.
Tomorrow we start with the Sprint-4 Demo and then get ready to finish the current 3-month project period, with closing the open tasks, preparing our innovation & training days and organizing the next planning cycle. As outcome of the last team building workshop we are preparing local come-together opportunities in India, Portugal and Germany. As we cannot be together in the same place this is the only alternative for now.
Asking questions is my strong advice to all Interns during their Onboarding, as on the picture the answers are sometimes a surprise.
EMOTIONS WHEEL FEELINGS WHEEL EMOTION CHART
The Best Examples of What You Can Do With ChatGPT
Have a great start into a productive and interesting week.
Source Youtube: Purl | Pixar SparkShorts
Reuse systems: in search of a vision for tackling plastic pollution
Charted: Global Energy Consumption by Source, and Carbon Emissions (1900-2021)
Algae-powered computing: Scientists create reliable and renewable biological photovoltaic cell
Where does Europe's electricity come from?
Beyond ChatGPT: 14 Mind-blowing AI Tools Everyone Should Be Trying Out Now
The Purl video is not only a good example to support the Women's Day this week, it goes for a lot of diversity topics. Being different is difficult and stressful, but there are many opportunities for change, as you will see. Be strong, authentic and look for support.
The popular surviving bonsai from Hiroshima is priceless, not only because of its age, but also because its branches and trunk were able to survive the brutal devastation caused by the nuclear bomb. It is a small tree, a Japanese white pine, approximately two feet high, with a stout trunk, short strong needles, green and yellow in color, planted in the year 1625.
The age of the tree is really unbelievable and that in a more or less artificial environment. Great work of the gardeners taking care of it.
Dairy vs. plant-based milk: what are the environmental impacts?
Five key findings from the 2022 UN Population Prospects
My next two workshops will be around Personality Tests and to prepare an Elevator Pitch based on a predefined template (WHO, WHY, WHAT, HOW). Knowing their personality types, the participants will be able to work on the template in their preferred style or to go outside of their comfort zone to try something new and show some courage. We will see, who is doing what? Stay tuned for more insights and results.
Have a great weekend.
In my list of helpful comic pages two days ago I did forget to mention The New Happy, see their Be You picture today. They are always offering great analogies between their pictures, mainly made out of dots and squares, and a supporting text. Get their newsletter ...
contrarian: a person who takes a contrary position or attitude
specifically : an investor who buys shares of stock when most others are selling and sells when others are buying
You need courage to do this, but it can be very beneficial in the end. It is the same in a discussion or meeting, when all participants have the same opinion, you can just talk about the weather :-), if not there can be a lot of fun and results in the end.
courage: mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty
Yesterday and Today I have seen several articles about courage and still had the Be You picture in my backlog for future posts. Today I will combine it all:
Leaders, March Towards Courage
How to Get Started with Skills-Based Hiring
HOW TO CLARIFY AND SHARE YOUR ASPIRATIONS FOR THE WAY PEOPLE TREAT EACH OTHER AT WORK
Do you have the courage of your convictions?
It Can Be Lonely to Stand Up for What’s Right
The Ultimate Guide to Workplace Flexibility
Here a quick list of comic pages that I am using regularly to look at:
Comic Agilé by Luxshan Ratnaravi & Mikkel Noe-Nygaard
Give it a try and have some fun ...
"When you talk to people smarter than you, it enhances your intelligence. I do things with people I like who are smart. It's not complicated." -- from How Shaquille O'Neal Made Himself Bigger Than Ever--as a Founder and Investor
These are some of the surprising benefits of a four day working week
Mapped: Asia’s Biggest Sources of Electricity by Country
Space scientist Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock honoured with her own Barbie doll
Fairphone 2 gets its final software update, seven years after original release
Women in business, with Danuta Gray
3 ESSENTIAL CULTURE RULES ALL LEADERS MUST APPLY
pwc - Risk: See it, share it, sort it
When you read the Scrum Guide or any other helpful documentation around the AGILE topic, you will easily get the theory clear, but what does this mean in your daily work?
People take a training to hopefully understand e.g. Scrum and their role in this framework. All bring their personality, attitude, experience and expertise from past projects and assignments. With this backpack of capabilities they start their new agile role. And when they are willing to follow the Cycle of Growth to Unlearn - Relearn - Change (see picture), all should be fine, but this is not the reality.
Different kind of personalities with different previous roles, now in new agile roles are working together as good as possible, but never perfect and by the books or guides out there. Ongoing training, re-training and awareness sessions could help to improve, but these are not the standards. And the involved individuals have to be willing to change from their old roles to new ones, what is not always successful.
And I did not even talk about the line management that decides who is taking which role and what to do in it. As long as we are working in hybrid environments - established organizations in an agile transformation that is not finished yet - roles and responsibilities are not 100% clear and subject to interpretation, what is causing issues. Sometimes more sometimes less.
“…the agile movement in software is part of a larger movement towards more humane and dynamic workplaces in the 21st century.” -- Rowan Bunning from 10 Quotes Related to the Agile Methodology To Get You Inspired
Which countries have the most gender-equal parliaments?
How to Revamp Your Company’s Meeting Culture
13 Things Science Says Will Make You Much Happier
20 Free Newsletters That Will Drastically Improve Your Life
The workshop had been delivered on Tuesday and the summary from all departments last Friday was promising. Now we just have to make an improvement plan and deliver it quickly. Any further change will help.
Another workshop is already planned, I will host the Motivation Driver workshop again for a whole department. To combine some learning and teambuilding.
In the coming week the portfolio management team will decide about priorities and focus topics for the next three month project period that will start after Easter on 11-Apr-23. Still a lot to be prepared, a good story line for the teams about the coming objectives, helping them to finish the current 3 month period and getting ready for the next one. We start tomorrow.
The 10 Must-Read Articles for Talent Professionals This Week (03-Mar-23)
GPT-4 Is Coming – What We Know So Far
Ocean treaty: Historic agreement reached after decade of talks
9 Questions That Should Be in Every Employee Engagement Survey
The promise and challenges of sustainable travel products
International Women's Day 08-Mar-2023
You should never underestimate the power of words and speaking the same language with your customers. Assuming you are offering agile services and your customer is a beginner in this environment?
Then you have two issues:
Strip down your agile language to the customer level and find a good match between the customers's and your vocabulary. Give it a try ...
Grant Snider Comics: Overwhelmed
Gary Straughan video: Can You Really STOP Estimating? + FREE Cheat Sheet
THE POWER OF VALUES-BASED DECISIONS
4 TOOLS TO KEEP MEETINGS ON TRACK
LinkedIn 2023 Most In-Demand Skills: Learn the skills companies need most
When I write a new BLOG post, I copy the old one and adjust the date first, to keep the overall format and page layout in sync. I just realized that my last post had 29-Feb-23 as date, it is now 01-Mar-23 :-) Next check is always the Mobile Phone formatting, text with date goes before the 1st picture!!
I did add a new link on my Interesting Links page - What is Tall Poppy Syndrome? - interesting Infographic and read.
The six Ms of strategy on the picture do fit to other areas as well. For example people applying for a new job in a new company:
Not so far away I would say.
The consolidation of the customer loyalty workshop results today did show a lot of commonalities in the different departments:
Finally yesterday we had the Customer Loyalty workshop that was mandatory for all departments. The public transport strike had minor impact and as I had the data/opinion collection parts prepared for a hybrid setup, we could easily support two team members on the phone. In the end even the people in the room did use the online data collection possibilities, much easier for me to consolidate the results and less paper handling and waste.
We collected, what people SAY, THINK and FEEL about our company. In two rounds we shared our personal opinion and what we hear from friends and social media. A good collection of information and due to different sources from 13 participants, pretty accurate I would say.
Next step will be a consolidation from all department workshops for our CFO. Hopefully the results will be used to initiate a customer centricity initiative and mindset, there is definitely room for improvement. As the idea of my adjusted workshop was to combine the required data collection with a learning experience, the Empathy test was very much appreciated. Some people were surprised about the questions and even more about their result.
In alignment with the Customer Loyalty workshop I started to read a new book that came out the first time in 1993, 30 years ago.
The German title is "Das Einzige, was stört, ist der Kunde: Clienting ersetzt Marketing" An interesting journey back in time, a lot of stuff is pretty new (back in 1993), some stuff is really visionary, and surprise, surprise still valid in 2023. What did we do in the last 30 years, not really focusing on customers I would say. And especially Germany is not famous for customer service and orientation --> The only thing that bothers is the customer ...
In 1993 there was no Google search, Social Media and iPhone yet, crazy times.
Watch The Incredible 70-Year Evolution Of The Cell Phone
From the garage to the Googleplex
The Evolution of Social Media: How Did It Begin, and Where Could It Go Next?
4 WAYS TO PROCRASTINATE SUCCESSFULLY
Taken from ntv article today: "More than half of the data traffic in Germany takes place on websites of five companies. For years, mobile communications companies have been demanding that Internet giants such as Google, Netflix and Meta share the costs - and they're getting a hearing in the political arena.
Mobile providers are calling more forcefully for large online services to pay for the use of their networks. Every day, 55 percent of data traffic is generated by just five companies, said the head of telecoms group Orange, Christel Heydemann. This costs European telecommunications companies around 15 billion euros a year, she said." Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
A really big number and the mobile providers want a fair share of it. Not really a surprise and a smart way to increase revenue. But you better do not underestimate the reaction of the big five companies. They might be faster to find alternatives for their traffic than the service providers get their share of the costs via politics or in court? More to come ...
I have a new sub-page since today, see Interesting Links for details.
It took some time to find the right source of the picture, but in the end I came to - Amazing Sculptures Show People Carving Their Ideal Figures Into Their Own Bodies - and even selected another picture of the ones available. For me it has nothing to do with body shaming or e.g. curvy models versus six packs, it is just a great analogy for the potential that everybody has below the surface, you just have to develop and grow it.
With the right attitude and skills you can do everything, if you have a certificate proofing it or not. I did get some feedback about my 22-Feb-23 post about certificates. I am not at all questioning people having a certificate that finally proves longtime experience or well developed expertise. As I always say "Other people need to see you as their role model, then you deserve this title. You cannot just take it on your own!!" Same with certificates, what you are doing should be fitting with the idea of the certificate and you should be filling the related role. The more the better.
I am getting concerned, when people are not covering the full scope of work and responsibility behind their certificate, or when the certificate does not at all fit to their personality type (find a lot of different personality tests on My new business page). For example not everybody should be or could be a good Agile Coach. With a low Empathy level or more interest in facts & figures than people, you better go for a Mentoring and not a Coaching assignment. My 2 cents ...
Most agile coaches should be called agile mentors, but this is a different story :-)
My planned Customer Loyalty workshop on Tuesday will be influenced by the strike in Duesseldorf, either via public transport restrictions or the airport that is impacted as well. We will see in 2 days.
Some changes were required to be compliant with the SEO guidelines on my BLOG platform. I did update the My new business and Beratung & Coaching pages. New URL, some clean-up and adjustments on both sites. Besides that I had to search for a broken link, it took some time to find it in the 12-Dec-22 post. Now all is fine until further notice.
I am doing my BLOG for fun and interested readers and not for money or top SEO rankings, so I do not have to be perfect. And the hosting platform is it not either, as all posts since 08-Dec-22 are part of one long text now and there are no unique URLs per post anymore. Exactly the explanation that I gave to an interested marketing guy today, who wanted to place some articles or links on my BLOG for small money. We will see, if he is still fine after my explanation and how this opportunity will go on?
Next Tuesday I will have the Customer Loyalty workshop at our location with 16 team members. Should be fine as all is prepared right now. Only issues is another strike of the public transport system in Duesseldorf. The union wants to put a lot of pressure on the next negotiation round with the employers. We will see how many more rounds and strikes are required to come to a final agreement?
Ranked: Biotoxins in Nature, by Lethal Dose
5 SIMPLE WAYS TO PRACTICE BEING PRESENT EVEN BUSY LEADERS CAN TRY
What does it mean for a species to be at risk of extinction?
Global economic inequality: what matters most for your living conditions is not who you are, but where you are
4 WAYS TO DO LESS AND GET MORE DONE TODAY
5 Simple Habits That Will Make You a More Successful Talent Leader
A busy day after one week holiday today. Some activities needed to be initiated for the coming days and people waited for some feedback and reaction from my side. All covered, so I can go on holiday in the future again :-)
Last week we had an internal SAFe training for some of our Product Owners, hosted by an internal trainer. Every participant gets the opportunity to do a certification at the end. You have to pass 80% of the exam questions to get the certificate that is valid for one year and needs to be renewed then.
The process makes sense for our trainers - Certified SAFe® Program Consultants (SPC) - as they need to host a number of trainings during a year to keep their certification. For people taking the training I have a different perspective.
In the worst case you just have to answer 80% of the questions correctly and get the certificate for one year. After one year you renew and get the certificate again and so on. It only proves you could answer the questions when required, but does not say anything about your experience working on the job.
In the best case you can easily answer the questions based on your day-to-day experience working in agile environments and renew the certificate as this is the process defined by Scaled Agile.
The challenge is on the employer side, when they try to select experts based on the certificates they provided and have no real process in place, to verify the expertise that is required behind the agile roles they are searching for. It is easy to write something in a CV, but much more difficult to properly check it by employers. Having people already with the expertise you are looking for might be helpful to check new joiners or let the team decide, we are in an agile world. So proven expertise and experience beats certificates, no surprise.
Mapped: Unemployment Forecasts, by Country in 2023
Here’s Why Forcing Workers Back to the Office Is a Bad Idea
Here's how documenting your eating habits can promote healthy eating
12+ Free Resources to Get Started in People Analytics
The procession in Cologne had the 200th anniversary and JACQUES TILLY could show his 2023 motto wagons again after a two year break, due to COVID-19 and the Ukraine war start last year.
On the picture the Railway Station in Zandvoort, a city at the beach with a lot of history and the Formula 1 circuit as mentioned yesterday.
A combination of different buildings and holiday region styles together in one location, not really my style, but it seems to be really attractive for tourists and visitors of the Formula 1 race, once per year.
Tomorrow we go home, to have one more day off before I go back to work on Wednesday.
Have a great and surprising week.
Ranked: America’s Best Places to Work in 2023
Will ChatGPT Put Data Analysts Out of Work?
As more electric vehicles hit the road, our charging habits must change - here’s why
Everything you need to know about hydrogen in the clean energy transition
Cities aren't designed for women. Here's what's needed next
The picture is called - De Tuin (The Garden), 1893 by JACOBUS VAN LOOY. He is one of several painters on the list of famous people who were born in Haarlem, the city close to our holiday location. More details in the following article, just in case you need more details - 4 Surprising Facts About Haarlem in the Dutch Golden Age.
Today we made a nice walk at the beach and even the sun came out, but it was still windy and not really warm. Nothing to be concerned about with the right clothes and shoes.
Windy, low temperatures and cold water, I could feel it through my
rubber boots, but perfect conditions for Kite Surfers, we have seen a lot of them. Really a high-speed sport and a good fit to the Circuit Zandvoort - HOME OF THE FORMULA 1 HEINEKEN DUTCH GRAND PRIX - that is close by.
The Excel sheet overview is taken from the Website statistics provided by my Blog hosting company today. In total 9,203 visitors since 08-Dec-22, the start date on the new platform. Visitors are coming from 90 different countries, really interesting distribution around the globe.
Which Countries Pollute the Most Ocean Plastic Waste?
Visualizing Mismanaged Plastic Waste by Country
"When we break our routine, we break free from our limitations." - Michael Pedersen
Video: This origami-inspired helmet can fold flat to fit in your handbag