Agile and the DISC Model Combined

 The DISC (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance) behaviour model has been around for a long time but I am thinking of combining it with creating teams in Agile to get a better mix of people at the start of a project. Often they are thrown together and there can be clashes and dysfunctional behaviour but this might help us to avoid some obvious mistakes e.g. too many leaders or no leaders and over time to develop a feel for what the best mixture of personality styles for a particular team is.

There are limitations to this approach but if it improves new teams by a slight amount I think it is worth it.

I would provide my own DISC report to the team so they had an idea of strengths, weaknesses etc and they could do the same thing. Otherwise we spend months working it out. It might be an additional expense at the start of a project but the benefit might outweigh the cost by a magnitude. 

My other idea is to have people do this as part of the appraisal process, if they want to, to support any career changes or ideas they want to present to their boss.

Book Review: The Myth of Experence and 'Range'

 I've put a review on Goodreads but in short, this is well written and not like a lot of the MBA Casebook approaches we see in the Business section today. There is another book called 'Range' that is a good companion piece to this.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3632747716

Business Writing: The Hedgehog and The Fox

One of the articles that I wrote for Top Consultant is linked below. Project Management keeps moving and sometimes the behaviours need to catch up with the technology and sometimes we are waiting for the technology to become easier to support the way we want to work.

There is a balance to be struck between a specialist and a good consultant and this is discussed in the article below. I have no choice but to like being a fox and there are days when I can only admire the dedication that it takes to become a hedgehog.

http://images2.top-consultant.com/chopped/images/99943.pdf

Regards

Lewis Carroll Goes to Vietnam!

Event: The Influence of Lewis Carroll on Management Thinking

24 November, Faculty of Education, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University- Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

A talk by Stephen Folan on the influences on Lewis Carroll that formed his world-view, the influence of the ‘Alice’ books on people today and how we can see examples of behaviour from these stories in modern corporate life today.