Some weeks ago, I spent a full day in a workshop where I was forced to define SMART objectives for a big program. Now, being a survivor of the aforementioned practice, I can affirm that SMART objectives are a dumb way to work. Before you leap to correct me, let me explain my point of […]
Rewards may destroy improvement efforts in our companies
In the book, Punished Rewards, Alfie Kohn states, “Rewards do not require any attention to the reasons that the trouble developed in the first place.” He explains how rewards ignore the root cause of the problems. In general, we believe rewards will get others to do what we want. As parents, if our child is […]
Goals and Objectives attached to monetary rewards destroy your MVP!!!
People that follow my work know how passionate I am about topics such as performance appraisals, along with the myriad goals and objectives attached to the performance of a person. If you want to review my previous work just click here. This blog post will be fully dedicated to how goals and objectives attached to […]
Rewards are a great way to Punish people
Alfie Kohn, in his book Punished by Rewards, explains to us that rewards and punishments are two sides of the same coin; they are not opposites at all, and in fact have a strong kinship between them. Another author—Kurt Lewin—in his book “A dynamic Theory of Personality“, goes even further. He says that rewards and […]
Nightmare - Central teams consisting of coaches
Some weeks ago I engaged in a nice conversation with Stephen Parry and Tonianne DeMaria Barry about coaches and how they could harm the organization. They came up with an interesting perspective. In their opinion, central teams consisting of coaches are quite harmful for the organization. Stephen defends they (coaches) will perpetuate themselves making everyone […]
Drop Targets, Institute Measures Derived from Work!!!
Lately, I have been writing lot about goals and targets. Today, I want to start this blog with John Seddon’s sentence :The whole notion of targets is flawed. Their use in a hierarchical system engages people’s ingenuity in managing the numbers instead of improving their methods. Daniel Pink in his book: “Drive” goes even further, […]
Get Rid of Measures!
Hi guys, Now that I was able to get your attention I must say I believe in measures, do not worry :) I think they are useful but not the way they are used in most of the companies. Typical measures are used to command and control, we must shift this towards an approach where […]
Why do we screw up so often?
Hi guys, this post will have more philosophical content. Lately, I have observed what is going around me and tried to understand why do we screw up so much in our life. I am sure people do not like to screw up yet they keep doing it on daily basis. Why do we do it?
I believe the answer is super simple: we simply DO NOT LEARN from our mistakes!!!
Success Criteria for Retrospective Topics
Hi guys, this blog will be short and simple :). My last posts were about the reason why we should chose a single topic to take out of a retrospective and why we should do a proper root cause analysis for a selected topic. In this blog, I will introduce something new that I believe […]
Why do we lose time with root causes analysis in Retrospectives?
Hi guys, in my previous post I explained why we should chose only one issue to improve in our retrospectives. This time I want to discuss what to do with that “single issue”. One of the big reasons why I am writing this blog is because I believe I failed as a coach during last […]