Intelligent Organisations

An Agile Team as Viable System
The basic structure of an Agile Team Every Scrum Master, Agile Coach or how ever you call the role of an “Agilist” knows the situation: There is a new team or even a team of teams which wants to learn the new way of working. Usually, there is some sort of a kickoff – the…
May 24, 2020
On Bullshit – updated english version
On Bullshit Bullshit (BS) is often interpreted as nonsensical facts. The use of empty words is a common characteristic of BS. The term is generally used as a placeholder for contexts like humbug, knickknack, frippery or mumbo jumbo. BS always has something arbitrary and is characterized by vagueness. It pretends to be profoundly knowledgeable to…
May 3, 2020
Julia and Mandelbrot for Free
Fractint Nostalgia As part of my adaptation process in these times I share my favorite images of fractals – which were rendered in the last weeks (total computing time ca. 150hs on a i7 Mac Book Pro (2015)). Maybe you enjoy looking at them, or you want to use them as a background, for business…
April 30, 2020
Why quotations matter
Citing other people is not lazy, if … Usually it does not take a long time to find out that I am a big fan of quotations. Depending on the context I drop one quote after the other. This seems to be sometimes disturbing to my social environment, since it can lead to the conclusion…
April 26, 2020
MS Planner for Remote Collaboration
Creative usage of MS Planner During the last two weeks of remote work I learned two further ways on how to work with MS Planner (which is part of the Office365 package). Again I want to show a creative use case of how to use tools which are usually available in many companies. While more…
March 30, 2020
Creative Remote Collaboration with PowerPoint
Creative usage of Office365 In times which are dominated by COVID-19 I wanted to share how to use Office365 (or Goole, if you have it) for remote workshops. I want to propose tools which are easily available and easy to share. Therefore, these two come to mind. Of course there is much more out there,…
March 15, 2020
Viable Leadership
The Viable System Model and Leadership This post contains an excerpt of the book „Responsible leadership in a complex world“ (Zitat, so far only available in German) which is a co-production of Peter Gomez, Timo Meynhardt and me. Our work used the Viable System Model to offer a framework for Reflective Practitioners (according to the…
December 28, 2019
Setting a goal with a range
Key Results and the Estimation of Metrics Nowadays it is almost standard to use OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) in Agile Organizations. It is claimed that this goal-setting-philosophy enables a true delivery/product organization, since the “simple” application of agile working practices like Scrum or Kanban is not enough to align huge working systems towards a…
November 25, 2019
Free Release – Viable System Model Canvas
The VSM in a nutshell It’s a very special day for me! Why? Because I am very excited to release the … Viable System Model Canvas. It all began about 24 months ago when I started this project (or product?). This outcome (or output?) is my recent development to get a step closer to make…
November 6, 2019
Best Practise vs. Good Practice vs. Emergent Practice
Experience and Science The discussion about the different possibilities to fail when applying “simple solutions” to “complex problems” is everything but new. Especially the understandable but (often) useless desire for best practice has been intensively discussed. With this post I would like to explore the term best practice a little bit further in order to offer…
October 6, 2019