Author: Neal
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How to Build Team Collaboration When Working with External Contractors
From the Hotline: “I work in a company where there are a lot of external contractors. There are very strict rules. Internal employees cannot dictate which meetings they should attend. If they come … great! But they might now. The external contractors are from different companies, and they consider each other as competition.“ I’ve been…
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What’s the difference between a kickoff and a Liftoff?
Question from the hotline: A room, a deck, people gazing into their laptops, with a few polite nods when looking up at the slides, and then the hour’s up, everyone disappears into the next meeting. It’s not uncommon! We’ve seen $1m projects kicked off like this in an hour. A Team Liftoff takes a different…
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How To Answer the Question: So What Will You Do In The First Two Weeks?
This was a tough question I was once asked in an interview. He wanted to know what was I going to do upon starting this new engagement. So I gave an answer of all the things I would do in the first two weeks. I’d understand the context, get a feel for the environment, conduct…
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Escape Velocity and Coherence
“If you want to go to the moon, you’ve got to be able to not only have the escape velocity to get there, you also need an airtight container so that you don’t asphyxiate on the way there.” Nice quote from polymath Andres Gomez Emilson in reference to trying to find a solution to universal…
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Fractional Leader Tools: Liftoff Toolkit
How a Liftoff helps Fractional Leaders turn around teams and businesses The problem fractional leaders face Fractional leaders are brought in because things are stuck but they’re expected to fix that from inside the system that created the problem. Common realities: Turnaround strategies Regardless of industry, maturity, or size, effective turnarounds share the same core elements: Crucially, all…
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The Rationale behind the Liftoff Workshop
Why are we offering a Liftoff Workshop / Masterclass? The main reason is because a Liftoff is a one-off, high-stakes event.Most other facilitated activities in the knowledge domain can be improved over time, incrementally. But less so for a Liftoff. Why is it high stakes?From my own experience, although most aspects of Liftoff are straightforward,…
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Why we’re excited about the Liftoff Workshop
The Liftoff workshop, scheduled for November 20th, marks a return to a beloved practice for Diana, who is excited to revisit liftoffs and team chartering, which were both foundational for her career in the Agile community. Neal shares his enthusiasm for the enduring impact of liftoffs, viewing them as a crucial, high-stakes event that benefits…
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Nothing Less then Belief
In the old myth, Daedalus warned his son: Do not fly too high, or the sun will melt your wings. Do not fly too low, or the sea’s moisture will weigh you down. Travel between the extremes. Successful teams also need to travel between the extremes, with complete certainty at one end of the spectrum and highly unlikely at the…
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Shared Dreams, Teams and Desirable Realities
“Humans think in stories”, Yuval Noah Harari. The story is probably one of the earliest and most powerful mental models. A mental model is exactly that: a model of the world — a compressed prediction that the brain uses to navigate the everyday unknowns and uncertainties of life. In Sapiens, historian Yuval Noah Harari describes humanity’s…
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Team building skills as future-proofing
Daniel Priestley makes the insightful point: Success for our children will look like this: Team Liftoffs will support with points 3, 4 & 5 and ideally, make the chances of point 6 more likely to happen. We believe that starting teams is a timeless skill that will always be needed. Even in the face of…