High Velocity Innovation

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Healthy Product Teams Are Productive Product Teams

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“Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.” – Agile Principle #8

Software teams that develop products in a waterfall style can turn into “death marches” at the end — and hardware teams that operate under the same flawed model end up in “production hell.”

This means that the accumulation of missed requirements and design flaws have turned into a cascade of late-found defects that have overwhelmed the team. They are behind schedule — often months or even years late. The pressure to deliver is overwhelming — and it breaks people, even if they don’t talk about it openly.

Start Here: Rapid Learning Cycles 101

Five Benefits of Virtual Rapid Learning Cycles

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I’ll never forget the week of March 9, 2020. For us, that was the week that everything changed. In that week, we cancelled all of our face-to-face workshops for 2020. I also agreed to facilitate my own first virtual Kickoff Event.

The workshops are central to our ability to build enough working knowledge about Rapid Learning Cycles that a team can be successful with them immediately. Moving them online was not going to be easy since we needed to ensure that we could achieve the same results with a virtual experience.

We immediately used the Virtual Kickoff Events as experiments to figure out whether or not that would be possible, and how.

Decision-Making in a Pandemic: Lessons from Rapid Learning Cycles

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In early March of 2020, I had to send out final notices postponing all the Rapid Learning Cycles Program Manager workshops we had on the calendar for spring — a scary thing, since this is our primary source of revenue.

This was definitely a Key Decision for us — high impact and high unknown, with many Knowledge Gaps, some of which could never be closed because they are unknowable.

Yet we were at the Last Responsible Moment to make this decision, as it was time to start producing materials, booking travel and making commitments to venues.

Many people within my community were being forced to make decisions like this in their professional and personal lives to deal with the many disruptions caused by the pandemic. Fortunately, many of them have had practice with managing uncertainty through the Rapid Learning Cycles framework (RLCs).

Agile for Physical Products

What Is Your Primary Measure
of Progress?

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“Working software is the primary measure of progress.” – Agile Principle #7

This is the principle from the Agile Manifesto that trips up hardware developers the most. Of course, hardware developers are not delivering working software — so what is the closest equivalent? And why does it matter?

Even in the COVID Era, You Need Conversation

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The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation. – Agile Principle #6 If this maxim was not already almost dead, 2020 would have killed it anyway. If you’re like me, you’ve spent many an hour on Zoom or your company’s equivalent, and much time in […]

Featured Posts

Kairos Power is Accelerating Innovation with Rapid
Learning Cycles

Rapid Learning Cycles helps innovators change the world — faster.

For the team at Kairos Power, Rapid Learning Cycles is accelerating the iterative development of advanced nuclear technology.

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Five Requirements for Effective Decisions:
What You Need to Make a Key Decision That Sticks

Airline pilots visually inspect every plane before every commercial flight. Over the course of their careers, pilots will go through this ritual thousands of times, despite armies of airplane maintenance crews and ground support staff. Ultimately, they own the decision to fly the plane. When they sit in the cockpit, they need to know that the plane is ready to fly.

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Announcing: The Accelerate Net Zero Podcast

Accelerate Net Zero explores how we can accelerate the development and implementation of the technologies we need to address climate change and limit global warming. The podcast launches on November 2. Learn more and subscribe for an early visitor bonus here: Accelerate Net Zero

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Your Innovation Teams Need You
Five Ways Executive Sponsors Foster Innovations in Corporate Environments

Florence, Italy is known throughout the world for the quality of its art, architecture and craftsmanship. Florentines owe much of their present glory to the powerful merchant families that emerged in the 13th and 14th centuries. Those families sponsored artists, funded building projects and created a market for beautifully-crafted luxury goods that made Florence a cultural powerhouse during the Renaissance. 

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Rapid Learning Cycle Events Don’t Move:
Three Ways the Rapid Learning Cycles Framework Reinforces Project Timeline

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted every team that I work with, in some way. My own staff left the office one Friday afternoon with laptops in mid-March, and I haven’t seen them in person since that day. The temptation in times like these is to put things on hold, to delay, to push things later in order to give the team time to adjust to the new realities.

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