Agile On The Mind Podcast

This week’s guest on the Agile On The Mind podcast is my dear friend Yon Borthwick.

Yon is a team coach who has worked with teams and individuals within different coaching modalities including Integral Development Coaching, Internal Family Systems, ORSC (Organisational Relational Systems Coaching) and many others. He is currently working as a senior team coach at the Boston Consulting Group.

As well as his coaching and team leadership interests, Yon has been the ‘Dungeon Master’ for our weekly Dungeons and Dragons (DnD) group which has been meeting (nearly) weekly since the beginning of the pandemic.

If you don’t know what the means, don’t worry. Yon explains what Dungeons and Dragons is, as well as the allure of fantasy role playing games in general. I wanted to invite Yon onto the podcast to discuss the similarities between running a DnD game and being a Scrum Master for a team. Yon has a deep understanding of both team dynamics and the theoretical underpinnings of telling a fun and compelling collaborative story.

This was an incredibly rich discussion about how the skills of collaborative storytelling can help a Scrum Master work with their team.

Some of the main takeaways for me:

* asking the team ‘what kind of story do we want to tell about this work in the future?’

* understanding different team roles and skills

* the joy of failure, learning, and improvising

* after work challenges asking what the ‘loot’, ‘level up’ or even ‘injury’ might be

* how to give your team and team members the setup to tell a great story between them

There’s way more, and I’d love to hear what you enjoyed from it. If you enjoyed this episode you can subscribe to receive a free weekly blog or podcast into your inbox with explorations of agility and cognitive science. If you really really enjoyed it, you can upgrade to a paid membership and support me to continue this work.

I’m going to take a couple of weeks off over the new year, happy holidays and looking forward to hearing from you in 2025

Jenny is an independent trainer and facilitator in product development and innovation techniques and behaviours of high performing teams. She works with teams of all kinds, helping them unlock their individual and collective potential. Jenny is passionate about inclusivity and fascinated by all kinds of brains. She delivers immersive and playful learning experiences and workshops which are designed to help everyone contribute to their fullest and have fun.

Jenny recently completed a post-grad in ‘The Psychology of Kindness and Wellbeing at Work’. She is a massive fan of Lego Serious Play, and into anything to do with positive psychology, flourishing and personality science.

We had a brilliant conversation where we touched on:

* the origins of postive psychology

* emotional intelligence

* strengths based approaches

* communication and social styles

* the big five personality traits

* personality traits and team dynamics

* kindness

* feedback and non violent communication

The link to the telomere study Jenny mentioned is in this article.

More about Marshall Rosenberg’s nonviolent communication

If you enjoyed this, you’ll enjoy more of Agile On The Mind! So do make sure to subscribe to receive weekly posts and podcasts about agility and cognitive science.

In this episode of Agile On The Mind I was delighted to welcome Dr Mazviita Chirimuuta to the podcast. Mazviita is a senior lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of award winning The Brain Abstracted (available for free at that link).

I heard Mazviita being interviewed on the Brain Inspired podcast and invited her to join me in conversation about the philosophy of science, the simplification strategies that scientists use in their work and how this can apply to people working with teams.

As agilists we often think about our work as if it’s science - running experiments with teams and trying to measure to determine reality. So in my classic mode of taking things way too seriously, I was thrilled and honoured to welcome on a Philosopher of Science to discuss this properly. I’ve written about some of Mazviita’s work before on this substack so I was extra excited to have her on the podcast.

In this episode Mazviita brought the philosophy, and I brought the team practitioner perspective. It was a blast. We covered some fascinating topics, including:

* What does cognitive science rely so much on the study of vision? 

* What is colour? 

* How is the study of philosophy useful for scientists?

* Simplification strategies in science 

* Simplification 1 - mathematisation

* Is a team more like a biological system or a physical system?

* Simplification 2 - analogies

* Mind as computer, and cognition as computation 

* Teams and analogies 

* Simplification 3 - Reduction

* Parts and wholes, the reductionism of Pavlov

* Kant and starting from the basics of knowledge

* Haptic Realism - what do we bring to our observations of reality

If you enjoyed this conversation, make sure you subscribe to Agile On The Mind to get all future episodes and blog posts straight into your inbox. See you next time.

This week I was delighted to welcome my first honest-to-God Cognitive Scientist onto the programme - Professor Fred Cummins.

Fred is an associate professor at the school of computer science and informatics at University College Dublin  where he co-directs the postgraduate cognitive science programme. I encountered Fred through his excellent introduction to cognitive science series on Youtube. As you’ll see in the episode he’s a vivid and enthusiastic communicator of cognitive science. 

Fred conducts interdisciplinary research into joint speaking which is where two or more people say the same thing at the same time, as found in practices of protest and prayer. Joint speech raises theoretical issues that go to the heart of human experience which we go into in the episode. Fred is also drawn to the study of ritual.

I’m not going to lie I was very much in annoying student mode throughout this episode, and whilst I tried to bring the conversation back to teams, there were extended periods where I was just thrilled to be having a conversation about Cognitive Science with a real-life cognitive scientist. Fred insights, questions, metaphors and observations are mind bending and deeply human and it was a great privilege to share this conversation with him. I present this episode of Agile On The Mind with Professor Fred Cummins.

Among the topics we covered were:

An introduction to cognitive science

Definitions of intelligence

Intuitions

Knowing and doing

‘Neuro’

Is your brain a computer?

Embodied and ecological approaches to vision

Coordination vs control

Joint Speech

The power of metaphor and symbolism

I hope you enjoy this episode even a fraction as much as I did, I would love to hear your feedback about this post (and this substack), so either leave it a comment or share some feedback with me at your leisure. See you next time

Dr Caitlin Walker has over 30 years of facilitating diverse groups to work effectively together. She's an expert in clean language interviewing and the developer of Systemic Modelling, an approach for creating intelligent self-organising teams. She's author of two books, From Contempt to Curiosity, creating the conditions for groups to collaborate and So, you want to be DramaFree.

Caitlin’s Clean Language approach is a very practical and learnable way to help a system understand itself, whether it’s the system of one person or a team. This resonates deeply with the Cognitive Science ideas we’ve been exploring in Agile On The Mind, and so I had a great time chatting with Caitlin about her work.

If you like this, subscribe to Agile On The Mind for more blogs and podcasts about building Intelligent Teams inspired by agility and Cognitive Science.

A smattering of highlights from the episode:

* Caitlin’s work using Clean Language with children at risk

* Practicing systemic modelling with spelling

* The power of Clean Questions

* Clean Language in teams

* 5 steps to Drama Free

* 3 Steps to Drama Free!

* Adjacency and the importance of measuring

* Dangers of teaching skills

* Practicing in groups

* Getting started with Clean Language

* When Daniel is working at his best it’s like what

You can find more about Clean Language at cleanlearning.co.uk

This week’s guest is Michael Lloyd. Michael is a scrum master and agile coach who has been helping teams deliver value for over a decade. Michael is the Founder and Head of Global Agility at Honest Agile and the creator of Dysfunction Mapping. 

I’ve followed Michael’s posts on LinkedIn for a few years and I’ve admired his authentic thoughtful approach to working with teams and organisation as he has risen to prominence in the world of agility.

We met at a conference a few months ago and decided to publish a conversation together for Agile On The Mind. We decided to just see where we ended up and as you’ll see in the episode we landed in some pretty interesting and whacky places, including from the initial introduction. I had a blast recording this with Michael and I hope you enjoy listening to it.

If you enjoy this podcast you’ll probably enjoy the Agile On The Mind substack, subscribe here to get a weekly blog or podcast about building Intelligent Teams inspired by agility and cognitive science.

We sprawled across quite a few topics in our conversation together including:

* The power of irrational tools

* Using Tarot with your teams

* Can we change mindsets or only change the environment?

* Dysfunction mapping

* Planning a trip to Scotland

* Putting stickers on laptops is like building a termite mounds (the word I struggled to find in the conversation was ‘Stigmergy’)

* The ambiguity and clarity of visualisations (approximately 50% of the brain is taken up by the visual cortex)

* How to incorporate more visual facilitation in your day to day work

* In person versus remote collaboration, the value of in person pandemonium

* Introverts and extroverts collaborating online (warning: controversial opinion)

* The power of Liberating structures, 1,2,4-all

* The facilitator’s role in creating structure for groups

* Dunbar’s number

* Precocial vs altricial species - more info here

* Applying an evolutionary biology lens to our organisations

* Selective pressures changing our organisations

* Agility in government versus business organisations

* making changes in complex adaptive systems

* Push vs Pull systems in the military

* Is leadership the brains of the organisation?

As you can see there were few topics we stayed away from, and I hope you’ll enjoy the adventurous spirit we took into the conversation, full well knowing that these were largely speculative conversations

I’d love to hear your feedback on the episode, so please comment on this post, fill in this feedback form or find me on LinkedIn. I’d love to hear from you.

This week’s guest is Professor Dave Snowden.

Dave is the Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of The Cynefin Co. and Director of the Cynefin Centre for Applied Complexity. His international work covers government and industry, looking at complex strategic, organisational, and decision-making issues. He has pioneered a science-based approach, drawing on anthropology, the cognitive sciences, and complex adaptive systems theory. 

Agile on the Mind is about exploring how agility and cognitive science can help us build intelligent teams, and there are few people better placed than Dave Snowden to unpick these topics with. Dave’s approaches have been incredibly influential on me personally and it was a real thrill to have him on the podcast.

My aim in having Dave on the podcast was to create space to dig into his interests, perspectives, and - often strong - opinions. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

If this kind of content tickles your pickle, subscribe here to receive a free weekly email with a podcast or blog post about Intelligent Teams.

Here is a rough list of the topics we covered together:

* What is Cognitive Science and what does it have to do with complexity?

* Affordances, assemblages and attractors

* Why Daoism is attractive to complexity theorists

* How humans are good at handling complexity (The Frozen 2 Strategy)

* 4E cognitive science

* Extended Mind, hallucinations and Andy Clark’s work (we called it ‘The Prediction Machine’ but it’s actually called The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality )

* Keeping a direction of travel in an organisation - alignment is more important than goals

* Does changing yourself actually change your village and the world?

* Why your teams are actually groups of roles, not individuals.

* Harnessing Panopticon effects

* Gaussian vs Pareto distributions - why nurses have to break the rules to keep patients safe

* Estaurine mapping and creating chefs not recipe followers

* What agile gets wrong about empiricism

* Inductive, deductive and abductive reasoning, and why abductive reasoning is fundamental to human cognition

* There are no cognitive biases, just heuristics

* The powers of rituals and habits

* Rituals and religion

One small thing - I had a bit of a rough time editing this episode. I didn’t manage the sound properly, and as a result you may hear some clicks and skips in this episode which I struggled to edit out. I’ll try to do better with my audio next time. Sorry about that.

If you feel strongly about this issue, I invite you to upgrade your subscription to paid so I can afford to get some professionals into my production process.

Otherwise, I’d love to hear your feedback on Agile On The Mind, and ideas for future episodes and guests, so please be in touch or fill in this form to share your views.

I’ll be on the conference circuit this summer, so please grab yourself a ticket (with one of my discount promo codes to see me talking about this stuff in the flesh.

* Agile2024 European Experience July 24-26th

* Lean Agile Scotland 25-27th September (10DanielS) 

* Agile Cambridge 2nd October (10Daniel)

Tobias Mayer is an iconoclast. I’ve long seen him as a kind of prophetic figure in the fray of conversation about how to be human at work, how to build high performing teams, and how to create effective human centred organisations. Tobias is a Scrum trainer with thousands of students having passed through his classes.

Tobias is also a practicing Christian, and we have connected in the past about ways to bring conversation about religion and faith into the workplace. Whilst this week’s episode isn’t technically a conversation about cognitive science, it is a conversation about human meaning making, and what the world of work has to learn from the world of religion.

We covered topics such as:

* What organisations can learn from religion about how to be more human

* The power of story and metaphor

* How to help your team members show up with their whole selves

* Haiku writing for software developers

* Why Product Owners should write bad user stories

* whether Jesus was a zombie or a vampire

* Change versus coercion in organisational transformation

* Iterative revolutions

* Spreading ideas within organisations in a hybrid world

You can find Tobias’ work on scrum.academy and tobiasmayer.uk.

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the Agile On The Mind Substack to receive a free weekly blog or podcast about building Intelligent Teams with the aid of Cognitive Science.

I’m at the beginning of my journey on this work, so please fill in this feedback form with your thoughts on this episode (or any of my other posts), it really helps me make the best content for you - my beloved an reclusive audience.

This week’s guest is Adam Boxer. Adam is an old friend, and I’ve been privileged to see his rocket-like career trajectory from humble London chemistry teacher to entrepreneurial multimodel powerhouse.

Adam is a science teacher, EdTech start-up founder and educational consultant. He is an internationally recognised expert in practical pedagogy and has written several books about teaching. Adam is a co-host of the They Behave For Me podcast, and the Education Director of Carousel Learning, an innovative online learning platform that harnesses evidence from the cognitive sciences to boost student outcomes. 

Learning is a concept that comes up all the time in our agile product teams, so I wanted to have this conversation with Adam about learning from a point of view informed by education and cognitive science research. I found our exchange fascinating as always and this conversation introduced a bunch of interesting topics for further exploration.

In particular I enjoyed the section towards the end of the episode about cognitive load and cognitive overload, so please do stick around for that.

In our conversation we explored some of these questions:

* What is learning?

* Is there a difference between learning facts and skills?

* Can you teach creativity?

* Do transferable skills exists?

* What are some common myths about learning?

* What is the replication crisis in Psychology?

* How do humans choose which information to base their opinions on?

* What is a paradigm shift?

* What is cognitive load and how can you reduce cognitive overload?

* Why is multitasking impossible?

* How does learning in groups work?

Here’s the excellent list of variables Adam mentioned you could use to help you modulate cognitive load:

* expertise and knowledge (including the expertise reversal effect)

* number of things you ask someone to do

* distractions such as jokes and redundancy

* presenting things in multiple vs one modality (eg verbally and visually)

* lowering the abstraction (giving concrete examples and analogies)

* giving external tools and supports

Links and references

Why don’t students like school

Cognitive Load Theory

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‘‘Great writing is about noticing. It’s about really picking up the details and the nuance. That’s where the stories are.’’

Today’s episode is sponsored by Embodied Agility. Embodied Agility is the vehicle through which you can work with me in your team. I run training, I coach people and I help teams collaborate better and build better products. To find out more, visit embodiedagility.co.uk and book a free session with me.

If you’re enjoying this podcast, please consider becoming a paid supporter of my work. This week I got my first paid subscriber and now I feel a million dollars, for the low price of less than a million dollars. If you want to encourage my work please hit that subscribe button and pick the paid option.

If there’s one other thing you can do to help this substack, it’s completing this feedback form after listening to the episode. It helps me get better.

This week’s guest is Laura Stroud. Laura is an author, a ghostwriter, and a doctoral student at the University of Derby. She runs the Derbyshire Writing School, and is passionate about opening up the world of creative writing for beginners. Through her courses, retreats and workshops, she makes writing feel joyful. Laura is also an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and has lectured in Creative Writing at the University of Derby.

I loved this episode, it was my first discussion with someone who doesn’t come from the ‘agile world’ and Laura is a great advocate for creative writing. At the beginning of our conversation we had a couple of false starts in which Laura tried to find the right way of talking about her early entry into creative writing. I left it in, because it felt really real, and it shows how it sometimes takes multiple drafts and attempts before we get the final result we want.

In today’s episode we discussed:

* The messy ways in which we introduce ourselves and redraft our thoughts

* Laura’s journey into creative writing

* What creative writing is and why your teams should try it

* How creative writing can help you become a better listener

* Hosting psychologically safe participatory workshops

* Creative writing and Cognitive Science

* Short creative writing techniques you can use in your team

* Storymapping and the hero’s story for your customer

* Personas and user stories

* The value of the big picture

* Creative writing ideas for an away-day

Links

* Derbyshire Writing School - derbyshirewritingschool.com

* Begin – the podcast from Derbyshire Writing School - derbyshirewritingschool.com/podcast

* Some of Laura’s books – www.amazon.co.uk/stores/Laura-Stroud/author/B08HPM6ZB4

* Expression of interest form for Laura’s doctoral project – https://forms.gle/gpeomQj7e4WQ2LnUA

* Matthew Dicks’ website and a great storytelling tool https://matthewdicks.com/homework-for-life/

* Matthew Dicks books https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/Matthew-Dicks/author/B002P92M64

This week’s episode is sponsored by… me! In the guise of my consultancy Embodied Agility. Embodied Agility helps your teams collaborate better by providing training, coaching and mentoring for your leaders and teams. Wherever your organisation is in it’s lifecycle from startup to supergiant, better collaboration helps you build better products, quicker, cheaper and easier and Embodied Agility is here to help. To book a free 1 hour coaching and exploration session with me go to embodiedagility.co.uk

Today’s guest is Tiani Jones. Tiani has spent over 20 years in Engineering and Technology. She has a degree in Electrical Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines, she’s worked with teams from diverse domains including mobile applications, IT consulting, flight simulation, aerospace, software localization, and consumer electronics.

 Her special interests  at the moment are Cynefin and Complexity, Theory of Constraints flow metrics. When not reading white papers on exogenous and endogenous uncertainties, Tiani enjoys weightlifting, languages, fashion, and art and it was a delight to have her on the podcast. You can find more about Tiani at properscience.co

In the podcast we covered many many topics! But some highlights for me were:

* The difference between teams working in software and hardware manufacturing

* Managing socio-technical systems

* Different definitions of complexity

* Working alone versus working collaboratively

* black box thinking

* Is chess a game of complexity?

* Tools for helping teams - Wardley Mapping and Current and Future Reality trees

* Getting into your first agile job

SHOW NOTES

Social Practice Theory

Westrum’s Typology

Detmer’s Logical thinking process

Flow Engineering

Qcon London

In this week’s episode of the Agile On The Mind Podcast I talk to Vitaly Sharovatov, developer advocate and mentor at Qase. Vitaly and I explore philosophy, religion, approaches to management and - of course - cognitive science.

Vitaly can be found on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/vsharovatov/ where he writes about pedagogy, software, science, philosophy and management.

If you liked this you might well enjoy my substack where you can get a weekly email with my thoughts and conversations about how to build intelligent teams by combining the worlds of agility and cognitive science.

This is my first foray into an interview format, I’d love to hear what you think about it or take ideas for future topics or guests. Please get in touch on [email protected]

This week’s episode is sponsored by -erm- me! and Embodied Agility. Embodied Agility is a consultancy that can help your teams thrive, no matter their size, domain, or dilemma. To book in a free one hour coaching and exploration session with Daniel, visit embodiedagility.co.uk and see how Embodied Agility can help you, your team, and your organisation flourish.

Links Vitaly mentioned in our conversation

Daniel Pink, Drive: https://www.amazon.fr/Drive-Surprising-Truth-About-Motivates/dp/1594484805

- Bertrand Russel, the history of western philosophy: https://www.amazon.com/History-Western-Philosophy-Bertrand-Russell/dp/0671201581

- W. Edwards Deming, Leadership Principles from the father of quality: https://www.amazon.com/Essential-Deming-Leadership-Principles-Quality/dp/0071790225/

- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: https://www.amazon.com/Leviathan-Thomas-Hobbes-ebook/dp/B07SQ4T11M

- John Locke, Second treatise of government: https://www.amazon.com/Second-Treatise-Government-John-Locke-ebook/dp/B004UJCSBG

Today’s episode is an audio of yesterday’s post Tuning The Lute. We explore opponent processing - how it works and what it could mean for a team.

If you enjoy the episode, please do give it a like on Substack and subscribe for future posts and episodes.

If this is up your street, you might like a couple of the talks I’m giving next week about the 4 Ps of Knowledge

* Agile Northants Meetup Tuesday 27th Feb 6.15 GMT

* Agile Mind Meetup Thursday 29th Feb 7.30 GMT

I’m also running a class about using Team Lifecycles in planning your retrospectives on March 5th so would love to see you there are well.

Until next time, stay cognitive friends.

If you’re reading this Substack it’s probably because you’re interested in building more effective teams. In this podcast I’ll introduce (reintroduce?) the premise of my work here, which is thinking beyond Complexity and into Intelligence as a way of helping our teams sensemake in the world.

If you’ve been keeping up to date this won’t be anything new, but if you want to think about how to build better teams whilst on the go, give this a listen. Even better, give it a like and I’ll know that I should make another one.

And as ever, subscribe to learn more about how to build Organisational and Team Intelligence