Kickoffs are often abused and useless exercises just to tick a box to say you started a project. But a Liftoff brings the team together on Purpose, Alignment, and Context to create a powerful bond between team members from day one.

Have you ever looked at your remote control? Do you know what even half of the buttons do? Tech geeks no need to reply. How many of the buttons do you or the general public use? Where did this go so wrong that the remote control is 80% low value items? What do you do in your team to ensure this doesn't happen?

A study conducted during the pandemic, looking at the experience of remote office workers, has shown a marked increase of 55% in chat and video interactions, with the biggest rise of 23% being outside of conventional office hours. While more flexible remote working can be a great benefit, it seems people are struggling to balance commitments, with many reporting that the working day has stretched to as much as 14 hours in length. It’s perhaps unsurprising to note that stress-related conditions such as burnout are also on the rise.

You cannot ever walk away from yourself. We have the ability to really be present with our self. Mindfulness practice actually changes the structure of your brain in ways that are beneficial to gaining awareness and control over your attention. . And what you attend to dictates your experience of life.

I asked my colleague, Dannie-Lu Carr of Flaming Leadership to put together her 5 key reasons on why journaling should be part of your daily routine. We will examine those reasons in more details in today’s blog.

In the context of workplace culture, people may feel apprehensive about speaking or presenting, pitching new ideas, interacting with colleagues in a new way or challenging situations, or raising objections that go against their peers or leaders. And all of that is normal if it is a mild form of apprehension; something to make someone take pause and think about their actions and words before uttering them. If that apprehension escalates into full blown anxiety then we are in psychologically unsafe waters for the individual and potentially the organization.

Many aspects of how the human brain works are starting to be proven within the neuroscientific community. These systems almost certainly developed eons ago, because what we know of brain physiology and evolutionary capacity for change in general suggests that the human brain is unlikely to have changed much since we first started walking. This simply must be by design.

The idea of rating a team’s “Agile Maturity” has always made me uneasy. An agile maturity rating is intended to quantify a team’s progress along its agile transformation journey. Numbers and verbiage differ everywhere. Maturity ratings typically depend on a subjective assessment of how “agile” the team’s practices, behaviors and mindset are; for example, a team that does not practice automated unit testing could begin at a 0, and when they are proficient at it perhaps that indicates they are now at a 3.

There is always a new beginning, no matter how unlikely it seems at times. It may be hidden in the depths of what has ended – a place you sometimes don’t care to look too deeply into. But it is often found somewhere closer to the middle, passed by hurriedly on your way to where you’ve ended up, looking for a way to begin again.

In our new 6-part series for 2022 we tackle #AgileWaysOfWorking with #OpenSpace, #LiftOff, #Teams, and more. The final episode has the team reflecting on why they were drawn to all things agility in the first place.