InfoQ Homepage Mindset Content on InfoQ
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How a Sustainable Mindset in Software Engineering Can Increase Team Performance and Prevent Burnout
A sustainable mindset in software engineering matters because software is still primarily built by humans, and we must prioritize their well-being, Marion Løken said at NDC Oslo. Integrating the team more deeply into discovery work, discussing feedback collectively, and fostering a culture of psychological safety helped to engage her team and mitigate burnout.
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Navigating Open Source Integration through a DevOps Lens
Taking a DevOps perspective on open source can help to incorporate an OSS project into your environment. DevOps engineers are comfortable with using third-party integrations, and they align with the open source mindset of breaking down barriers between different groups and promoting teamwork.
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Debugging Difficult Conversations as a Pathway to Happy and Productive Teams
Any time we talk to someone or to a group when there are high stakes and/or high emotions, difficult conversations can happen. If we ignore difficult conversations they typically don’t resolve themselves, in fact, they often get worse. Handling difficult conversations involves thinking about the logistics, having the proper mindset, and preparing yourselves.
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The Myth of Product Mindset: It's What You Do, Not How You Think
Companies nowadays are looking for ways to cultivate a product mindset. While the idea of cultivating a “product mindset” allows us to focus primarily on ourselves, actually transforming our organizations often means changing our behavior to focus on our customers and how we work together to serve them.
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Site Reliability Engineers and the Specialist Mindset
A site reliability engineer (SRE) can be a generalist or specialist. Recently, the team at Blameless elaborated on the advantages of a specialized SRE team. The specialist nature of the SRE role can be highlighted from the recruitment process. Depending on the individual skillset, organizations can engage an SRE in a number of specialist roles.
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How Organisational Culture and Psychological Safety Fosters Our Creativity
Organisations need to create the right conditions and culture for creativity to flourish so as to stay relevant, compete and thrive for the future. An addiction to burnout and fixation on productivity can stifle creativity. What’s needed is psychological safety, inclusion, experimentation, growth mindsets and allowing thinking time.
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Becoming Outcome Focused: Q&A with Jeff Patton
We need to become focused on outcomes and adapt our way of thinking and our processes to continuously release small changes to our products and services, argued Jeff Patton in the closing keynote at the Agile Greece Summit 2019.
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Leadership in an Agile Environment
We would like agile leaders to stop being in the fire fighting mode. They should be there to help and empower, instead of taking over, argued Leonoor Koomen at Experience Agile 2019. She suggested replacing traffic light reporting with Obeya and showed leaders how they can focus on the deltas instead of covering and wanting to know everything.
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How to Become Customer-Focused with Autonomous Teams
Traditional organizations are often suffering from ineffective ways of working and structures not allowing the people to collaborate in a structured way. Organizations need to find ways to enable brain power in cross-functional and autonomous teams that are able to deliver products and services with expected business impact faster, said Mia Kolmodin, founder of Dandy People.
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Refactoring Organizations to Reduce Organizational Debt
Organizations can accumulate organizational debt when adopting new ways of working. An agile mindset can be a driving force to remove organizational impediments and promote continuous improvement, said Jess Long, enterprise Agile coach at LeanDog. At the ACE Conference 2019, she presented how we can reduce organizational debt by refactoring organizations.
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Agile in Higher Education: Experiences from The Open University
Universities need to embrace an agile and product mindset, as they are grappling with hypothesis-driven development of new kinds of products and services of which they understand very little, for users whose behaviours and needs they little understand, said Matthew Moran. He presented applying the agile mindset, principles and practices for online course development at Aginext 2019.
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Wave 2 Agile: Living the Agile Mindset
Living the agile mindset means actually doing it, not just talking about it. Living agile is only accessible to those who say yes to personal growth in a big way. If you want different behaviours in your organization, change your own behaviour. This is what Michael K Sahota is calling "Wave 2 of Agile", and invites everyone to join.
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Making Games for High Performing Teams
The gamestorming model describes a process to create games. It provides concepts like game space, boundaries, rules, artifacts and goals, for creating compelling learning experiences in an organizational setting. Such games can be used by teams to experiment, focus on outcomes, and try out disruptive patterns.
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Incorporating Improv into Agile with Games
The rules of Improv provide a short-hand to enhance active listening, collaboration, and mutual reinforcement skills, all of which are integral to Agility. You can incorporate Improv activities and games to reinforce Agile mindset. The game debrief is where the value of the game becomes sustainable, as it explicitly ties emotions and aha-moments from the game experience to working scenarios.
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How to Deal with Cognitive Biases That Hinder Collaboration
People are hardwired to instantly decide who we trust, but also to work collaboratively in small groups. Cognitive biases can get in the way of collaboration, but when you understand how these biases work and what agile practices can do to help, you are more likely to build better interpersonal relationships and create successful products.