In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence

You may recognise that quote from The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong, which I’ve just started reading thanks to Alexander and James, organizers of the Agile Leadership Book Club meetup.

The Peter Principle suggests the most skilled people get promoted - a factory floor mechanic into a supervisor role, then into management if they perform well there too. This continues until they’re no longer a top performer. On the surface it sounds reasonable. But the first chapter closes with:

The fact that there’s a low probability that an AI will be able to do your job doesn’t change the fact that there’s a high probability that an AI salesman will convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can’t do your job. Summer reading and I love this quote from Cory Doctorow’s book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. ...

This week I’ve started with a few of the Claude courses that are freely available on their site, including Claude Code 1011. Now using it to rework the theme for this site I’m really impressed. Throughout my career I have been pulled towards backend development as I believed we are closer to absolutes of right and wrong solutions. When working with frontends, everyone has their own personal opinion on look and feel, the wrong shade of blue or the border should be two pixels not one! ...

We are pretty good at following agile practices at a team level. But Organizations remain poor at delivering value to customers! In order to help understand and think about this, Klaus Leopold created the Flight Levels model. We think about how work is delivered from three different altitudes: FL1 - Operational - where the work gets done. FL2 - Coordination - working together, managing dependencies and handoffs FL3 - Strategic Portfolio - organizational direction My biggest takeaway from this Introduction to Flight Levels from Flight Levels Academy is that we need to visualise the situation at all three of the Flight Levels, not just FL1. ...

Last week at the Online Scrum Master Summit, a question came up on the Definition of Done (DoD). Can the devs or QA have a different DoD to the PO? The Definition of Done has been part of the Scrum Guide for many years. With the 2020 Scrum Guide the DoD became the commitment to the Increment. Until Product Backlog Items meet the DoD they are not part of the increment and therefore it’s not possible to ship or even review them. ...

Return-to-Office is a topic that has been dividing opinions for years. So I was excited when it came up on the The Curiosity Shop With Brené Brown and Adam Grant1. Brené Brown2 and Adam Grant’s3 conversation covers: organisational psychology, creativity, culture, and mission, the idea of “creative collisions”, and what is really driving leadership decisions on RtO. I can highly recommend the episode. For a more indepth look at the podcast, I have notes here ...

I took the leap and joined my first IndieWeb Homebrew event1 last night. A welcoming group of people, and really well moderated by James2. (I need to figure out how I mention people properly here) IndieWeb’s draw for me is the promise of POSSE3 - Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. You are not writing for LinkedIn, facebook, medium, X, etc., you are writing for your own site. Then your writing is also published via these other services, which link back as the original source. The important part being that you always own your work, and when services like google+ (yeah, I’m that old) shut down, you are not scrambling to export your data. ...

I’ve done this many times. But this time I mean it. Really! Over the years I’ve tried blogging on many platforms. Early on I even built my own scripts to convert text into HTML which I pushed to an apache server. I’ve tried Apache Roller and Blogger, and about nine years ago I dipped my toes into IndieWeb, setting up a WithKnown site. Most recently I’ve been posting internally at work using GitLab and Jekyll, This is that, but made public. ...

A cold and gray day in Zurich with @PragDave and friends at #AUZH25. Another great Agile Unconference organized by the amazing #AUZH team. Dave Thomas opened the day with a reminder that we should “break things, but not hurt anybody”, which really resonated with me as we continue to experiment and improve the way we work. The breakout sessions were full of great conversations, on topics like team empowerment. How many people really want to take ownership, versus just taking a paycheck? And how do we keep organizations from drifting back toward heavy processes? ...

A phenomenal day. Microsoft’s AI tour, learning about cutting edge technology and copilot agents. Balanced by an evening with Nora Bateson learning about human connection in a Warm Data lab.