Agile Planning

This page is home to a collection of my writing around the subject of agile planning, agile working and agile enterprise. If you’d like to understand more on the fundamentals of agile thinking, take a look at the definition of Agile Software Development, and The Agile Manifesto. And for more on how I believe agile principles can be applied to modern business and the business of communications, read these posts:

1. Agile Planning (Redux) – A talk and presentation summarising the key principles, and a good place to start
2. Agile Advertising – the post that began it all. Stop campaigning, start committing
3. Agile Planning – taking the thinking further, and setting out a philosophy for a new way of working
4. Agile Marketing – a definition that builds on the principles of The Agile Manifesto
5. Design Thinking, Agile Enterprise – divergent, not convergent thinking within business
6. Porous Enterprise – it’s no longer sufficient to focus on protecting existing knowledge stocks because it’s increasingly it’s about knowledge flow and your assets being more and more about your relationships.
7. Podcast on Agility – a conversation with Johnnie Moore and Robert Paterson on the subject
8. We Need To Rethink How We View Creativity – we put boundaries around creativity, and it needs to stop
9. Agile Budgeting – its no good adopting nimble processes if the way in which you budget for them is still locked in the old linear, industrial, one-way thinking.
10. Unplanning – why it’s time to move on from the outdated ‘waterfall’ planning process that plays out in most organisations
11. The Unbundling Of Advertising – on building relationships and speed bumps
12. The Quiet Revolution – talent complacency in the new world
13. Caught Up In The System – organisations become systems
14. Democratising Industry – how one company set out to be truly agile, and are re-inventing an industry while they’re at it
15. Where Good Ideas Come From – agile enterprises create spaces for ideas to mingle
16. The Rise Of Talent Networks – innovating corporate structures to be more nimble
17. Ghetto testing – how building a platform to enable test-and-learn approaches can lead to dramatic success
18. Emergence – on how complex patterns and systems can arise from relatively simple interactions
19. Technology As A Barrier To Change – New technology is usually viewed as both a driver and an enabler of change. But sometimes the reverse is true.
20. Design With Vision, Optimise With Feedback – when to test, and when not to test
21. Making Stuff Hackable – designing for hackability
22. Predicting The Unpredictable – on the untapped value that sits in corporate and public data streams
23. When I Grow Up – the importance of agile company culture in attracting the best talent and winning
24. The Shamrock Organisation (Redux) – on new and flexible organisational structures
25. Planning For Streams – free-flowing and responsive content, and services and applications that are both scalable and portable
26. What’s So Wrong With Hierarchy? – Overburdensome hierarchy creates it’s own overburdensome process. And it’s paralysing
27. Stubborn On Vision, Flexible On Detail – Jeff Bezos on the balance between iteration and intuition
28. Predicting the Present – competitive advantage will increasingly come from not only being able to make an informed prognosis of the future, but an informed prediction of the present. Big data approaches and tools
29. ‘Two-Pizza’ Teams – how Amazon is able to structure it’s business to ensure agility but also a high degree of cutomer-centicity.
30. The Three Pillars of Content Curation (Redux) on how new forms of content curation are changing the way in which we discover and consume content
31. Slow, Fast and Spiky Communications – new patterns of communication and how building long-term value sits with short-term peaks of activity
32. What If An Agency Had An API? – the API as a metaphor for a new way of working
33. Revisiting T-Shaped people – why there’s reason to believe that T-Shaped talent will be critical to the future of marketing
34. Playing The Long Game – on the unique view that Amazon takes of it’s business
35. Massive-Scale Online Collaboration – new models and economics uniquely enabled by the internet
36. Media = Maths + Magic – on the future of media planning and buying, and the tricky balance between automation and creativity
37. The 70, 20, 10 Model – a model for learning and development, innovation, and now for marketing
38. Content Curation, Stock and Flow – on the new dynamic for content
39. Ideas From Anywhere – creative collaboration and culture in an age of change
40. Distributed and Destination Thinking – adopting a different mindset
41. The Rise of Product Management – a key role in developing agile structures
42. “100 Geniuses Connected By A Travel Agent” – some great fundamentals of agile cultures and structures from an unexpected source
43. The 70,20,10 Content Planning Model – a simple content planning model based on solid publishing principles
44. Concurrent Production – on ‘product discovery teams’, concurrent development, and how agencies work
45. The Real Marketing Lesson We’ve All Just Learned – Obama’s campaign is the perfect marriage between big data and storytelling
46. Where Traditional Design Meets Startups – on subcompact publishing, design thinking and working on a start-up
47. Communications Planning in 2013 – what’s changing, and what’s growing in importance in planning
48. Digital Content Trends in 2013 –  what’s changing, and what’s growing in importance in content
49. The Strategy Is Delivery – the work of the Govt Digital Service, bringing agility to government
50. Growth Hacking – the marriage of product development and marketing
51. Agility and Innovation – research, report and a talk on the convergence of these two critical topics
52. Redesigning Government – more on the work of GDS, bringing agility to public services and government
53. When Companies Become Boring – over-optimisation at the expense of human leaps of creativity or intuition
54. Mapping Strategy, Structure and Process to Motivation – how agile cultures are about people and purpose, not just technology and process
55. Technology, Risk and Culture – on the pitfalls of a culture that doesn’t allow for bad news, or for test and learn flexibility
56. The Legacy Systems Issue – on the biggest barrier to digital progress and agility within organisations
57. Should we Abolish Patents – a radical idea, but something needs to change
58. The New Publishing Skunkworks – good example of publishing agility
59. Systems Trump Goals – If a goal is a target that you set to acheive at some point in the future, a system is a change in behaviour, a way of continually looking for better options or creating the right habits to build toward success. 
60. Learning From Engineers – Twitter’s engineering structure has some good learnings for companies that want to be more agile
61. What Makes a ‘Super-Successful’ Company? – some good thoughts from Sam Altman of Loopt
62. Holacracy at Undercurrent – an interview with Clay Parker Jones at Undercurrent talking about their implementation of Holacracy
63. Scaling Agile at Spotify – Squads, Tribes, Chapters and Guilds, and a very agile organisational structure
64. Google Firestarters: The Strategy is Delivery – an event focused on the Govt Digital Service as an exemplar of agility
65. How Google Hire – on recruiting for a learning culture
66. Agile is not a process, it Defines a Culture – taking agile beyond a collection of working processes
67. Agility and Organisational Change – collecting some thoughts together for a talk for Google
68. Prototyping is a Process, Not a Thing – on the perils of trying to fit too many learning goals into a prototype
69. What Makes Large Companies Fail? – Arrogance, pursuing growth at all costs, innovation inertia it seems.
70. Everybody has a Plan, Until They Get Punched in the Face – why planning should be adaptive, and on rewarding behaviours (inputs) rather than outcomes
71. Culture at Buffer – transparency breeds trust, and breaks down silos
72. Don’t F**k Up The Culture – AirBnB and the importance of culture in removing the need for too much process
73. First Principles Thinking – going back to basics
74. The 70, 20, 10 Approach to Innovation – embedding innovation
75. Triumverate Teams – more on multidisciplinary teams
76. Spotify Engineering Culture – a good explanatory film
77. Agile Culture at Pinterest – a useful framework for maintaining organisational and individual agility
78. Agile Strategy – Rita Gunther McGrath on the big shift in business competitive advantage
79. Solving the Big Problems – more on long-term thinking
80. The Growth Share Matrix Revisited – Boston Consulting revising one of the tenets of business school teaching
81. People and Space – interesting thinking around rates of change
82. Marginal Thinking – because ‘the safest road to hell is the gradual one’
83. Planting Saplings – the perils of being slow to innovate
84. Emergent and Deliberate Strategy – because there is a difference
85. Purpose, Vision and Innovation – and the realtionship thereof
86. Usability Trumps Persuasion – nicely put
87. On Organisational Capabilities – a useful way of framing capability
88. Discovery Driven Planning – from Rita Gunter McGrath
89. Email Transparency – another practice driving greater efficiency and agility
90. Buzzfeed and the Full Stack Startup – how ‘full stack’ startups are disrupting entire industries
91. Never Outsource the Future – on the tricky balance between insourcing and outsourcing
92. Working at Dropbox – a great way to express ‘digitally-native’ culture
93. How Google Work – lots of relevant themes in this presentation from Eric Scmidt
94. Zero to One – reflections on Peter Thiels book on startups and more besides
95. Peter Thiel on Company Culture – more from Zero to One, this time on organisational culture
96. Speed + Focus = momentum – and momentum is motivational gold
97. Systematic Survival Bias – why we are biased towards learning from successes, rather than from failures
98. Strategies of Trajectory – moving from strategies shaped by terrain, to strategies shaped by trajectory
99. On Design, Strategy and Planning – and the relationship thereof
100. Protecting Against Obsolete Beliefs – because it’s hard to notice when your assumptions need changing
101. Flexible Technology Stacks – it’s about the balance bewteen control and empowerment
102. The Digital Board – agile decision making
103. Why Some Teams are Smarter Than Others – and it’s not what you think
104. The Difference Between Management and Leadership – because there is one
105. Why Small Teams Work – small, nimble, multidisciplinary
106. Two Great Quotes on Strategy – on the fundamentals
107. Distributed and Destination Thinking (Redux) – revisiting one of my stalwart concepts
108. The Full Stack Employee – staff with powerful combinations of skills
109. The Creative Company – doesn’t every company need to be creative in this way?
110. Podcast on Transformation – Interview with Minter Dial
111. The Importance Of Reflection – oft overlooked
112. Bake a bigger pie – a great analogy
113. Stubborn on vision, flexible on details – balancing iteration and long-term vision
114. A Five Stage Model for Digital Maturity – based on the competence model
115. The Three Types of Problem in the World – Simple, complicated and complex, and why the difference is important
116. Ritual and Changing Behaviour – the use of ritual in helping behaviour change
117. Pirate Metrics – measuring early stage success beyond revenue
118. What Network Science Says About Career Success – on being outwardly facing and the power of being a network broker
119. Is the Life Expectancy of Companies Really Shrinking? – a nuanced view on company longevity
120. Co-location and Concurrent Working in Agencies – agile working in agencies
121. Organising to Learn – on developing a learning culture
122. Our Massive Employee Engagement Problem – reason enough to change the way we work
123. The 666 Roadmap – agile planning framework
124. Martec’s Law – technology changes exponentially, organisations change logarithmically
125. From Descriptive to Predictive Analytics – on getting value from data
126. On Fluid Resourcing – on flexibility and flow within structures and resourcing
127. Frequency as a Lever for Change – using rhythm to disrupt inertia 
128. Organisational Flow, Speed, Momentum – defining organisational agility
129. Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast – how Lean can drive transformation
130. The Five Whys – useful framework for getting to the real problem to solve
131. Burberry Show How You Embrace Disruption – great case study in being bold with change
132. Purpose and Profit – the link thereof, and why measures should be linked to purpose as defined from a customer standpoint
133. What’s The Difference Between a Company’s Purpose, Vision, Mission, and Values? Because there is one y’know
134. Productive Informality – the behaviours and culture that correlate with team success 
135. The Wrong Side of Urgency – fast without focus is foolish
136. On High Performance Teams – the surprising truth on what empowers teams to be their best
137. Stopping Meeting Creep – because meeting creep hampers agility
138. Learning to Unlearn – the secret of change is to focus all your energy not on fighting the old but on building the new
139. The Streetlight Effect And The Tyranny of Best Practice – we are in danger of over-simplifying and becoming like the drunk searching for his keys in the streetlight
140. The Best Place in the World to Fail – an important business lesson, and a great turn of phrase from Jeff Bezos
141. Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners – the brilliant people needed to make innovation happen
142. Building the Culture to Move Fast – on true collaboration
143. Drink Before You’re Thirsty, Eat Before You’re Hungry – S-curves and innovation
144. The Agile Team Onion – on managing core teams and dependencies
145. The LIfecycle of a Technology – digging into S-curves
146. Strategy and Tactic Trees – connecting strategy to execution
147. Redefining Leadership in the Digital Age – perhaps it’s time for a rethink
148. Agile Strategy Mapping – a useful tool for setting out success factors and dependencies
149. Gall’s Law – Complex systems that work evolve from simple systems that work
150. What is Digital? – on defining digital, and recognising that it means more than technology

I also wrote a piece for The Marketing Society on the subject. If you’re interested, I’ve also put a similar page together for my best posts around the subject of innovation.