Muses

Here’s another technique card from my seminar, “Leading Technical Change”. We first get into midwifing change precisely because we want it to be smoother, easier, and faster. But sometimes, a coach needs not to rush a decision through, but to slow it down. It’s so exciting when our proposed change starts to catch fire, especially when major influencers in our team suddenly “get it”, and want the whole team doing it. “Winning.” And it is winning. But when you start …

Slowing Decisions Down See Full Post

If we’re going to enable and support change, we’re going to fail, more often than we succeed, and we want to bake that idea in, early on, lest we fail both more often, and potentially more disastrously. Here’s some thoughts around this NOT DEPRESSING topic. 🙂 The weirdest thing about all this: it’s actually rather hard to tell when you’ve failed vs succeeded, working as midwife to change. I’ve had what I thought were successes backfire horribly, inadvertently leading teams …

What About Failure? See Full Post

Can we be honest? If we’re going to be successful change midwives, honesty is very important. In this technique card from Leading Technical Change, I talk about some of the ins & outs of this complicated topic. The first point is urgent: Being honest means believing everything you say, not saying everything you believe. Honesty is really important, but people quite often over-share in the name of pursuing honesty. Every healthy person, for instance, has moments of extreme negativity. Our …

Can We Be Honest? See Full Post