Resources Library

This page is an open bookshelf or file cabinet that I refer to myself and am glad to share with you. It offers material I’ve created over many years, with links to important works by friends and colleagues.

Those links include eight books to which I was a contributing writer, editor, reviewer and/or content consultant. Please buy my friends’ books! …and contact me with any questions about using and sharing my materials. Thank you!

Inviting Agility is the New Way of Working

What I call Inviting Agility marries learning from Open Space and Agile Methods, informed by the all of the other practices and perspectives pulled together on this page.

Open Space Gets People Moving

What is Open Space?

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Open Space Practice: Inviting Leadership

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  • Inviting Agile Requirements [pdf] – using open space with complex stakeholder groups to create better, faster, SMARTer working context for agile teams, or any other strategic/tactical roadmapping situation.
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The Spirit of Opening Space

  • Open Space Technology: A User’s NON-Guide – the inner game of opening and holding space, from two months of extraordinary conversation, with 37 active participants and hundreds of others listening in, on the OSLIST global email list (2002). Michael Herman and Chris Corrigan (editors)
  • Living Peace: the open space of our lives [pdf] – collection by OST facilitators from around the world, Raffi Aftandelian (editor), Michael Herman (contributor) (2008).
  • Grandma’s Lullaby [pdf] – a short personal story about opening space at the end of life, with lessons for leaders, facilitators, coaches and anyone touched by Alzheimers (1998)

Kanban Makes Work Visible and Optimizes Flow

Scrum Makes Delivering Value Iterative and Dependable

Enterprise Scrum Visualizes and Agilizes at Scale

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  • TOOLBOX: Canvas Templates – two basic canvas formats, to strategize, plan and execute any kind of work, at any scale, with a number of adaptations for getting started.
  • TOOLBOX: Overlapping Cadences – David Sacks’ (PayPal, Yammer) “Cadences” framework is the “timing” that’s implied in Mike Beedle’s Enterprise Scrum canvases.
  • TOOLBOX: User Story Mapping – Jeff Patton’s practice for making product development and customer experience visible. see also StoryMap and UserStory quick reference guides.
  • TOOLBOX: Draw Toast – Tom Wujec’s quick team exercise as introduction to visualizing work, see also Story Mapping below.

Participative Design Reshapes Organization Structure for Learning

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  • TOOLBOX: What Can Agile Learn from Participative Design? – short slide deck intro to Participative Design, Emery and Trist’s pioneering work on setting up self-managing teams, with roots in the Socio-Technical Systems movement after WWII. I used this approach to set-up self-managed teams in 1995, years before the Agile Manifesto made self-organization “a thing” in software. Includes Six Criteria and Skills Matrix evaluation tools.

More on Mindset, Strategy, Practices

Here are some excellent books where I’ve served as contributor, editor, reviewer and/or content consultant (images). Links to these, other books, notes, and more (below images).

  • OpenSpaceGoesMainstream – Daniel Mezick made early connections between Agile and Open Space, highlighting my Inviting Organization work, though his chronology misses the earliest Open Space Agile events I facilitated in 2002 and 2008. I was one of Daniel’s first OS teachers. He was one of my first Agile teachers. A good trade!
  • Inviting Leadership, Mezick/Sheffield – [book]
  • Open Space Agility, Mezick and friends – [book]
  • What is Business Agility?, Denning – on the preeminence of customers, small teams and networks
  • BOSSA Nova for Company-wide Agility, Eckstein/Buck – [book]  [video]
  • Business Model Generation (Canvas), Osterwalder/Pigneur – [book download] [video] [step-by-step]
  • Lean Start-up, Reis – [book] [notes] but see also [SLC]
  • Zone to Win, Moore – [book] [notes]
  • This is Lean, Modig/Ahlstrom [book] [notes]
  • The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, Goldratt – [book] [notes]
  • Radical Management, Denning – [book] [notes]
  • Agile Project Management for Dummies, Layton/Ostermiller – [book]
  • Successful Distributed Teams, Rothman/Kilby – advanced agile practice for working remotely [book]
  • The OpenXP Solution, Walsh [dissertation/book]
  • Design Thinking – rapid, customer-centric, prototype learning – [Stanford/Resources]
  • Beyond Budgeting – financial flexibility for driving business adaptation – [principles]
  • Asset-Based Community Development, McKnight/Kretzman – [book] [training notes]
  • Goal-Free Living, Shapiro – [book]

Inviting Facilitation

If a living system [organism, organization or ecosystem] is unhealthy, the way to make it more healthy is to reconnect it with more of itself. –Francisco Varela