Jim Highsmith

You Can’t Plan Away Uncertainty

Jim — Mon, 27 May 2013 21:33:23 +0000

I’ve recently moved from Venice, Florida back to the West—to Lafayette, Colorado near Boulder to be specific. As I launch my cycling activity here I was reminded of an article I wrote several years ago on Hudson Bay Starts. Riding in the Boulder/Lafayette area has infinite possibilities—hundreds of miles of off-road bike trails and a [...]

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Organizing for Innovation

Jim — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 16:01:59 +0000

One of the constant questions I get goes something like, “Should we create a separate agile group, team, department, product team, or plan our agile transformation within our current organization?” This question arises for agile transformations, but also for innovation in general. Many people approach these questions as problems to be solved once and for [...]

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Determining Business Value

Jim — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 19:52:38 +0000

The topic of business value is a complex one and it’s easy to get mired in the morass of calculating ROI or in trying to define what intangibles are relevant to your organization. What I will attempt to do in this blog is provide a model for looking at business value focusing on the portfolio [...]

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How Agile Do You Need to Be?

Jim — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 17:10:38 +0000

In The Upside of Turbulence Donald Sull makes an insightful statement, “companies do not pass through life cycles, opportunities do.” Turbulence causes opportunities and companies learn to take advantage of them, or they wither. Managing this flow of opportunities, which are increasingly disruptive, requires organizations to think seriously about their agility; as Sull defines it [...]

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Effective Collaboration: Discussion, Decision Making, Commitment

Jim — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 21:44:19 +0000

The Agile community promotes the value of collaboration in teams, although promotes may too weak a verb for our fascination with collaboration. And while collaboration can have many benefits, in practice we often act as if collaboration was mostly about talking to each other. It’s really far more than talking and I think there are [...]

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Constraints Drive Innovation

Jim — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 13:53:19 +0000

On a recent vacation I visited the Mingei International Museum in San Diego. During a tour by the museum director we were looking at a mid-1930′s Santo Domingo Pueblo (New Mexico) necklace. “Interesting about this necklace,” the director said, “are the ‘nots’– not coral, not obsidian (but old melted phonograph records for the black element). [...]

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Embracing Paradox

Jim — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 13:07:06 +0000

“All of us like to think that human affairs are essentially rational. … The wealth of experience that fails to support this notion never seems to faze us. … That human affairs usually work not rationally but paradoxically.” “… because of the sense of omnipotence that plagues American management, the belief that no event or [...]

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What is Agility?

Jim — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 16:06:11 +0000

There is no Agility for Dummies. Agility isn’t a silver bullet. You don’t achieve it in five easy steps. So what is it? For myself, I’ve characterized agility in two statements: Agility is the ability to both create and respond to change in order to profit in a turbulent business environment. Agility is the ability [...]

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Pictures from recent travels

Jim — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 17:07:03 +0000

Pictures from recent travel vacation spots, the Grand Canyon (AZ), and the top of Deer Valley ski area (Utah).

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Agile Bureaucracy: When Practices become Principles

Jim — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 12:50:50 +0000

In Good to Great Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, Jim Collins writes that great organizations work to both preserve their core values and principles and then stimulate progress by adapting as needed over time (this book, written in 2001, still ranks in the top 200 books on Amazon). As with many [...]

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