Simplifying Leadership

Our job as leaders is to help people excel. In this talk I will explore the simplified essence of leadership in complexity.

The purpose of leadership is to influence individuals’ behaviours, and ultimately attitudes, to reach a particular goal.

Essentially to create the right conditions for self-motivated, goal-oriented behaviour where the goal is key. Without a goal or a destination to reach there can be no leadership. Leadership is also not confined to an individual with a formal position within a hierarchy, leadership can be practiced by anyone! Groups, teams and sometimes even processes can meet the criteria to create an environment that promotes goal-oriented behaviour.

One word that is commonly used to infer such an environment is empowerment, or empowered teams and individuals.

But, if you were to observe an impactful leader in action, what would you see?

I will cover Three Guiding Principles to Live by as a leader and exemplify impactful leadership behaviours.

After all, it is all about behaviour.

Get the elephant off the road!!

This is a talk about flow and predictability.

This talk lays out a concept that highlights the importance of focusing on team flow in organizations to achieve predictable delivery. We will build up our understanding of the concept by using a metaphor of a road together with the common phenomenon of traffic congestion.

Published in my book - Simplifying Complexity - Predictable Delivery in Software Development Organizations: The Road(-map).

How do you go from estimation-driven planning to data-driven forecasting in your software development process? That is not an easy question to give a concrete answer to as it depends heavily on the context and unique characteristics of the organization. To succeed and come up with workable solutions it is important to have a shared understanding of what you are trying to achieve and why. That is where this session comes in. It aims to provide a shared understanding and language about predictability in software development organizations to guide you in your quest to improve predictability in your deliveries.

One of the recurring challenges is finding an answer to the question stemming from the executive management team – “when can this thing be done?” Any answer to the question based on estimates is subject to the planning fallacy, where individuals systematically underestimate the amount of time needed to perform a task. Plans that are then made based on erroneous estimates will create wrong expectations on what is plausible. This will in turn create a destructive loop where teams and individuals are held accountable for the estimates made instead of the actual deliveries with increasing pressure to provide more detailed estimates, which results in less accurate predictions, repeating the loop.

Who is this session for?
It is for the curious software engineer who is frustrated about the pressure to deliver things “on time”.

It is for the Scrum Master or Agile Coach who is trying to bridge the gap between teams and departments.

It is also for the Product Manager who needs the explain to stakeholders what they can expect and when.

Crucially, it is for the modern Engineering Manager, who in the end is accountable for the performance of their department and what gets delivered.

Lastly, it is for the Executive Manager who is under pressure from the Board of Directors to execute the agreed upon strategy, and show results, fast.

Based on the contents of my book -> https://www.amazon.de/dp/B0CHKZ4Z7Y

First recorded version of this talk was held on the 13th of March 2024 at an internal knowledge sharing festival at Netlight Consulting in Munich.

Recording from Øredev Conference 2024 -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cVP3RiEEis&list=PLOUKmSqExtAFpg3krEd6CXr3uIyUgP97b

Preferred duration for the talk: 45-60min

Intended audience: Engineers, Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, Engineering Managers, Product Owners/Managers, C-level executives, all within software development

What if...?

Guiding principles in complexity.

How do we fuel creativity in organizations to, ultimately, increase innovation and improve business outcomes?

Through behaviour guided by the heuristics:
1. Be curious
2. Assume Complexity
3. Stay on Target

Main objective of the session is to challenge the audience to think about what behaviours fuel creativity and innovation. Especially the heuristics, or rules, that we utilize in our brain. Most often the application of these rules happen without us being aware, uncousciously or automatic.

For individuals it is immensely powerful to train yourself to be aware of your heuristics guiding your decision making and behaviour.

For leaders it is even more powerful to deliberatly design the environment for behaviours that are proven to improve creativity and innovation.

This is a new talk, aimed to be an inspirational thought-piece.