Personal retrospectives can help you improve your life. This approach, similar to team retrospectives, encourages self-reflection. By assessing different areas of your life and identifying areas for protection and improvement, you can focus on a few small, actionable steps to achieve your goals and improve your overall well-being.

Vague terms like "agility" and "value" lead to misunderstandings in product development. By breaking them down into measurable "supporting attributes," teams can create clearer goals and run experiments to achieve them. The three-step approach described here helps product development move beyond buzzwords and toward real progress.

Accountability. It's a word that can strike fear into the hearts of many. But it's not about blame or shame. It's about owning your commitments, delivering on your promises, and creating a culture of trust and transparency.

Risk management is often focused on preventing negative outcomes, but it's equally important to embrace positive risks. By encouraging experimentation and rewarding innovation, leaders can foster a culture that drives growth and breakthrough solutions.

As a leader, navigating the pitfalls of overconfidence and fear is crucial for effective leadership. By cultivating confident humility you can avoid the dangers of these ditches and inspire your team to achieve their full potential.

Leaders and teams often face challenges that seem insurmountable, leading to inaction. This blog introduces a practical framework to navigate complex situations by focusing on what you can control, influence, and accept. By understanding these areas, leaders can break through barriers and drive meaningful change.

Feeling overwhelmed as a Scrum Master? Don't try to do everything at once! This post offers a simple, iterative approach to focus your efforts on the most impactful areas, helping your team achieve greater results.

Create a testable hypothesis using this simple template; it helps you analyze the change, articulate it clearly, and guide those you’re leading toward the desired outcome

Have you considered inspecting the Sprint Review itself? I introduced a retrospective of our Sprint Review at a client, and it was a game-changer!

Teams, like individuals, have internal narratives that impact their success. Leaders can become mindful observers, using questions and curiosity to help their teams shift negative self-talk into empowering beliefs that drive better results.

Leaders often refrain from delegating due to perceived risks, such as the fear of negative consequences for customers or the company. There is a more nuanced and risk-aware approach using the "Delegation Tree." Effective delegation is a skill that requires continuous refinement and collaboration with peers for mutual support and growth.

Discover how effective leaders can nurture team autonomy and decision-making capabilities by transitioning from control to collaboration through a structured mentoring process. Learn the key steps to empower your team and foster a transparent system for delegation.

When our brains feel a threat, we shut down. This is often called neurobiological flooding. When flooding happens, creativity and rational thought are extremely limited. For most of our work, that is extremely damaging

Communicating effectively with Product Owners starts with understanding their accountability and focusing on key elements such as benefit, investment, and time frame.

In this video, Mark how healthy rework can maximize learning and, ultimately, effective value for your customers. We'll explore two principles of healthy rework and two principles of unhealthy rework you can use to lean into learning!

In this video, Mark addresses the purpose of Sprint Goals and then explores the message that they are sending when it's hard to define a single Sprint Goal. This can help you ask better questions and steer your team toward higher value.

This is the third and final video in the series about responsibility. Here, Professional Scrum Trainer Mark Wavle talks through the powerful model, Circles and Soup.

In this second video in the series about responsibility, Professional Scrum Trainer Mark Wavle explores the leader's role in unwrecking responsibility issues.

Extremes of responsibility are wreckers of teams and leaders. In this Unstuck Leadership Moment, Mark explores two unhelpful and unhealthy responsibility stances.

In this Unstuck Leadership Moment, PST Mark Wavle explores the power of building a sense of ownership with the people we lead.

In this Unstuck Leadership Moment, PST Mark Wavle explores one of the challenges that many servant leaders face.

In this Unstuck Leadership Moment, PST Mark Wavle explores the question, "How do I help an unmotivated team?"

In this Unstuck Leadership Moment, PST Mark Wavle explores the question, "How do I know if my measures are the best ones?"

When we are confident that we know everything, certain that our perspective is correct and our plan is good, we miss things. Sometimes these things are critical.

When I’m describing the Key Value Areas (KVAs) of Evidence-Based Management, I find Time to Market is often misunderstood to mean “just go faster.” We need to scrub off the scent of “we know what we need to do, we just need to do it faster.” In complexity, goals and execution have a lot of unknowns, and things emerge as we do the work. So, we will be unsuccessful if we choose to follow a plan, even if we do it faster.

I want to address those of you who don't really want the feedback. I mean, as important as feedback is, and as many times as you've heard that the central point of a Sprint Review is feedback…you're tired of it. It's pesky. And it just gets in the way of you doing what you know is right anyway.

After experiencing my fair share of frustrating Sprint Review moments, I want to share some tips to improve the feedback you receive.