Thank you for your interest in our webinar! A summary of the webinar content is listed below, as well as a link to view the webinar recording and to download the slides. Sign up for our ongoing webinar series here! We would love to ...
Thank you for your interest in our webinar! A summary of the webinar content is listed below, as well as a link to view the webinar recording and to download the slides. Sign up for our ongoing webinar series here! We would love to ...
Trail Ridge Coronavirus (SARS-COV-2) and COVID-19 Response Leading through a pandemic is something that is likely new to all of us. We are all experiencing the stress of the situation both as individuals with our own challenges, and as ...
What does Agility have to do with Work / Life Balance? I found 3 things have helped me – Earlier this year, I attended the SIM Women of Colorado conference, with nearly 400 other female IT leaders. I was honored to ...
Leadership Burn Out – Tale As Old As Time If there’s one problem that is common among all the leaders I have coached and worked with, it’s burn out. There never seem to be enough hours in the day for all the strategy meetings, ...
“Why are development and operations always at odds with each other?”, and other interesting organizational behaviors explored through Pete’s latest keynote delivered to the Agile Prague Conference in September 2019. ...
Is there anything more maligned than the business meeting? We spend a lot time in meetings, and a lot of time complaining about how ineffective they are. Building better meetings is a passion of mine, so I want to share a tool and ...
You aren’t feeling well. In fact you haven’t been feeling well for quite some time. You’ve tried every over-the-counter remedy available – you’re exercising more (sometimes), and eating healthier (mostly). While ...
Remember back in grade school when we learned about the the scientific method? The scientific method is a proven, step-by-step technique for discovery and validation. It uses questions and experiments to help us solve problems. It ...
Pete Behrens facilitates a conversation about the upcoming Trail Ridge Certified Agile Leadership 2 (CAL 2) 2019 Program. Special thanks to three 2018 CAL 2 Graduates for sharing their stories… Karen Kemerling, President & ...
You only have 1 month left to register for our once-a-year CAL 2 Program.This intensive practice-oriented 11-month program kicks off on March 11. Practice@Work We practice each CAL 1 Topic in depth through this 11-month program, from ...
Relaxed Climate? In our popular Certified Agile Leadership (CAL) 1 Workshop, we play a game in which participants identify the values of various culture types. One value that tends to find an interesting home is Relaxed Climate. In the ...
I have been leading a number of agile meetups recently speaking about the topic of agile leadership. Through this journey an important message has begun emerging focusing on three main questions: Why are we talking about Agile at all? ...
Pete Behrens shares stories on the importance of leadership in effective organizational agility.
In October of this year, I presented a Keynote at the Agile Bodensee in Konstance, Germany. Enjoy.
“Lean start-up has changed nothing.” – Steve Blank Don’t take my word for it, take it from the one who founded the Lean Startup movement – Steve Blank. In a recent interview with Kurt Nickisch of the ...
In March of this year, I presented a Keynote at the Agile Leadership Day in Cologne, Germany. And rather than have you sit through a full 45 minutes of that presentation, I have compiled a few highlights from the session to share with ...
I was recently interviewed by RocketNine Solutions about why leaders should attend a Certified Agile Leadership (CAL) Workshop. I have posted a compilation of a few of the most common questions I hear and what you might expect from ...
Suraj Bramania, with AgileMindset.com provides an overview of the Certified Agile Leadership (CAL) Workshop. A quote about the value of the workshop… There are many certification courses out there. One, out of which, I did get to ...
The Agile Manifesto declared that “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams”. With this one sentence, centuries of command and control management mindset is put to the test. Instead of ...
I bet you have been asked to either improve the productivity of your teams or justify your teams performance. How did you respond to that request? Did you hem and haw and talk about how hard they are working? Did you point to their ...
One of our community leaders, John Miller, has introduced agile in schools – increasing collaboration, self-direction and learning through team-based approaches.
Over the past 100 years we have successfully engineered complicated outcomes – we put men on the moon, we successfully execute brain surgery, we construct 100+ story buildings, and we can travel across the globe without losing ...
One of the most challenging concepts in Agile for companies (Product Owners) is the decision on what to focus on for upcoming product deliveries. As I share in my Product Owner (CSPO) workshops, the PO role most difficult (and most ...
I received an email today from a client who was appreciative of the private Agile Leadership workshop we conducted back in June. He included a picture of one of the main hallways in their office, sporting all of the flip charts we ...
I would be remiss to exit this Thanksgiving weekend without one more Thank You! It takes a lot to run a company, even a small one like Trail Ridge. And while I am the face of this organization, and often get the bulk of the praise and ...
Trail Ridge Consulting been in business for over 11 years (since August of 2005) with an unwavering mission – to help leaders improve business results through empowered high-performing teams focused on their customer’s ...
In a recent Freakonomics podcast on “In praise of Incrementalism”, Stephen Dubner showcases how substantial change occurs incrementally over time, rather than big bang revolutions. He illustrates this through civil-rights ...
What do agile leaders do and how does this differ from traditional leadership? In one sense, you might consider agile leadership to be simply “good leadership” or “healthy leadership”. However, agile leadership ...
For the past 5 years, Trail Ridge Consulting has “adopted” Haiti as one of our key global outreach areas – as the country has continued to recover from the earthquake in 2010. Jana Zimmerman, our Outreach Catalyst at ...
Introducing a new Program – Certified Agile Leadership (CAL) by the Scrum Alliance. Pete Behrens, who led the initiative in creating this program, along with others on the program design team, share their insights into the reason ...
My recent talk at Agile Leadership Day in Zurich, Switzerland. Are you interested in scaling or growing agility within your organization? Then stop focusing on the organization and start with yourself!
Pete Behrens from Trail Ridge Consulting is bringing his passion for Agile to leadership. He recognizes that, while the ScrumMaster is responsible for identifying and removing impediments, it’s so often the case that the SM doesn’t ...
While Agile offers myriad benefits to an organization, the fact is: adoption and subsequent success of software development projects across the board could be better long-term. Why, when we have a system that has proven to work for countless organizations in various verticals, do initiatives still fail, or else the whole Agile endeavor peters out after a few months or years?
While there are many reasons why Agile approaches can fail, inadequate Agile leadership can be a large contributing factor. Note that it’s not necessarily inadequate leadership, because you can have the most stellar executive leader, but if she doesn’t know how to lead and support an Agile team, she can put it at great disadvantage.
Organizations spend millions on Agile coaches and consultants, then point the finger when, a few months down the road, the “whole Agile thing” has gone off the rails. Is it really the fault of these Agile professionals?
While there’s a whole slew of barriers to successful Agile adoption, I think most of them boil down to one major one: is the team doing Agile or being Agile?
Seems a subtle difference, but there are miles between the two. I can’t tell you how many organizations I know of (including some I’ve worked with) who, after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to establish Agile processes through training and coaching, have abandoned Agile completely for more familiar territory just a few months or years later.
Here are some of the quintessential differences between doing and being Agile. Maybe defining the two will help other organizations not fall victim to the same fate.
"Life is the Art of Drawing without an Eraser."
I saw this quote one morning as I entered my local gym. There is a guy at my gym that posts inspirational quotes each day; this one struck me. It reminds me of Yoda’s wise words about the commitment life takes to move forward.
“Do or do not...there is no try”
Time does not provide an “undo.” Everything we do is done. It is recorded, in a sense, in time. And while we may “undo” by erasing or going back, that is also done in time.
Yoda’s message to “do or do not” is thinking about life without an eraser. Everything I “DO” is done. Everything I “DO NOT” is not done. There is no in between. If we “TRY” we are actually “DOING” something.
Joshua Kerievsky wrote an intriguing article entitled Modern Agile which is an attempt at an upgrade to what he sees as stale Agile practices. I was intrigued by his article and am writing this response with my perspectives...
I recently received an Agile Project Fit Assessment Scorecard from one of my clients divisions (client to remain nameless).
While I have nothing against evaluation criteria for which one might determine if an Agile approach is appropriate for them, this particular tool is so far removed from common understanding, experience and practice, I feel like I need to share it and help others learn from it as well.
This particular tool, I have to believe, was created from significant Agile project failure based on ill-formed Agile practices. If not, I am even more concerned because that means the education of what Agile is, why it's necessary, and how to properly apply it is completely missing in many organizations.
OK. Enough lead up, let's get to the tool and dive in...
This article describes my own surprising relationship and discovery from reading The Coach's Casebook by Geoff Watts and Kim Morgan. I hope you enjoy the journey as much as I have...
As an Agile coach for the past 10 years, and one that has taken on the responsibility for defining, measuring and certifying other Agile coaches through the Certified Scrum Coach (CSC) Program for the Scrum Alliance, the question of what an Agile coach is and how do they differ from other coaches, consultants, ScrumMasters, and organizational leaders comes up frequently.
While a classic dictionary definition of "coaching" is training someone learning or improving a specific skill, a more modern definition in an organizational perspective from the International Coaching Federation (ICF) is partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. Looking at delta between two definitions, one can see a vast potential and pitfall. A potential in the opportunities abounding Agile coaches in the variety of services and focus they could provide. A pitfall of slippery slope on either side of this divide.
Mary Parker Follett, a late nineteenth and early twentieth century scholar, was a century ahead of her time in terms of organizational understanding, development and leadership. I came upon her work thanks to the insight by my friend and colleague Martin Kearns in reading a summary of her work through the book The Essential Mary Parker Follett by Françoi Héon, etal.
If Mary were in today's leadership discussions, likely she would be a part of the agile community. Speaking on difference, conflict, unity, integration and more, Follett espouses post-heroic and agile leadership principles. One of the key mindset shifts of agile leadership is moving from a competitive thought process to a collaborative one, from "or" thinking to "and" thinking, to enable organizational possibility, creativity and innovation. Her deep dive into some key leadership qualities and characteristics is incredibly powerful, as an example on her focus on unity vs. uniformity...
“Unity, not uniformity, must be our aim. We attain unity only through variety. Differences must be integrated, not annihilated, nor absorbed.” pg. 31
Furthermore, her agile mindfulness is also adept, in this articulation of unity vs. unifying as a distinction of a final state vs. a state of being...
“The most important thing to remember about unity is that there is no such thing. There is only unifying. You cannot get unity and expect it to last a day or five minutes… [This is] neither of subordination nor of domination, but of each man learning to fit his work into that of every other in spirit of co-operation.” pg. 168
Her agile leadership wisdom continues...
I am excited to share with you that we are running another Leading/Coaching Agile Organizations Workshop this year! Thanks to VersionOne for hosting this workshop, we are able to offer a limited capacity class this special, one-time offer.
This workshop is for anyone in an internal or external leadership position guiding growth in organizational agility.
This story was send to me from one of my creative clients. I thought it fun to share...
Our services Integration system team needed to conduct a short Sprint when our flight was cancelled from Columbus Ohio to Albany ...
What if you don’t have executive support for your agile movement? Scrumhub.com posed this question to a number of agile guides, including our own Pete Behrens. See how they address this question… (Source Youtube)
What practices can development teams use with Scrum to be more effective? Scrumhub.com posed this question to a number of agile guides, including our own Pete Behrens. See how they address this question… (Source Youtube)
What is the number one principle of agile? Scrumhub.com posed this question to a number of agile guides, including our own Pete Behrens. See how they address this question… (Source Youtube)
What is the number one question you should ask yourself before venturing on an organizational adoption of Scrum? Scrumhub.com posed this question to a number of agile guides, including our own Pete Behrens. See how they address this ...
Webinar: Agile Leadership for the Enterprise
October 8, 2013
Pete Behrens
This talk was hosted by VersionOne and moderated by David Rubinstein of SD Times Magazine. It focuses on the current state of agility, why many companies are struggling to adopt agile, 3 companies who are thriving on agility, and the agile leadership approach needed to do so.
May 2013 @ Mile High Agile 2013, Denver, CO
Too many organizations are following the Scrum framework AND fail to learn, grow and achieve their desired results. Many continuously thrash by tweaking Scrum or their organization but rarely see significant positive impact or change. Others may achieve pilot success only to stagnate trying to replicate that success at the enterprise level. To achieve and sustain organizational agility, a completely different approach must be taken – it must be LED from the inside-out.
If you are reading this blog, you are likely aware of my focus on organizational culture and agile adoption. Over the past 5 years, I have been leveraging William Schneider's culture model as introduced and researched for the book "The Reengineering Alternative". In 2012, I was introduced to similar cultural model - The Competing Values Framework, and during the last 6 months, I have been in the process of converting all of my cultural assessment, teaching and coaching from William Schneider's culture model to the Competing Values Framework (CVF).
VersionOne has released their most recent state of agile survey. And while there are a number of revealing indicators of the growth and expansion of agility within the enterprise, the one that remains troubling is the difficulty of adoption in many deeply established organizations. Looking at the barriers to adoption, the top items include a lack of ability to change the organizational culture, general resistance to change, trying to fit agile into a non-agile framework and management support. Why is culture so hard?
