Mike Bowler
I'm an experienced coach and trainer who helps teams, and their management, improve the way they deliver value. What makes my approach different is in the range of skills that I bring to your organization:
- Human behaviour, psychology, and applied neuroscience, to improve how people work, both individually and in groups. This includes a focus on growing psychological safety.
- Workflow design and implementation, to improve how the work flows through the system and how value is created. A focus on metrics, more data-informed decision making, and probabilistic forecasting to more accurately answer the question “when will we be done?”
- Product skills to ensure we're building the right thing, when the customer needs it.
- Technical skills to ensure that we're building that product right, improving how the value is actually implemented and maintained. Development, architecture, DevOps.
- Coaching skills to help us, help others. Utilizing unconscious behaviour to get the best out of everyone.
- 25 years of experience with Agile methods to put it all together. Kanban, Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP)
I'm based in Canada and have traveled around the world, providing training classes, coaching and facilitation services to my clients. Today, preference is being given to coaching that can be done remotely and I work in your timezone, wherever you are located.
Topics I frequently speak on
Anxiety & Psychological Safety
- Exploring the Anti-Anxiety Toolkit. A collection of tips from neuroscience and psychology for releasing anxiety, along with an older recording of me giving the session
- Polyvagal Theory: Understanding safety An introduction to Polyvagal Theory, which I reference in the session.
- My presentation on the Neuroscience of Psychological Safety
- The SAFETY model in more depth
- An interview with Mike on ensemble (mob programming). In the second part, we get into the SAFETY model and how that relates to the ensemble.
- Google’s Project Aristotle where they identified psychological safety as being the single biggest contributing factor towards team effectiveness.
- Polyvagal Theory: Understanding safety An introduction to Polyvagal Theory, which I reference in the session.
- What really happens in our brains when our survival mechanism is triggered. Explained with a real bear encounter.
Autonomy
- Understanding why giving our people autonomy is so important.
Clean language
A language pattern for deeper conversations
- Introduction to clean language. Also the handout that I use when teaching this.
- The power of words, a different look at how words direct attention.
How we think - Systems 1 & 2
- Article describing systems 1 and 2. Also the questionnaire titled “Are you a fast decision maker?” that I use to introduce the topic.
Kanban
- Kanban is simple but not always obvious.
- The Kanban Guide and my visual one-pager of the same, that I think is an easier starting point.
- What happens when the team says “We tried kanban and it didn’t work”?
- How do we improve the standup?
Learning
- Dopamine and Learning
- Learning with LEGO
- Understanding cognitive Load
- Generating aha moments; understanding the default mode network.
Metrics, including probabilistic forecasting
- Data quality
- Forecasting projects with reference class forecasting
- Getting good metrics out of Jira with JiraMetrics
- Not that I recommend calling the Jira API’s yourself, here are notes I made about those API’s
Motivation
- The Self-Determination Theory motivation model
- What if my people are “not motivated to do anything”? A look at lack of motivation.
- What if “my people aren’t participating”? A look at why people may not be stepping up.
Retrospectives
- My video course Retrospective Magic
- Moose on the Table : Retro using LEGO Serious Play®.
- Six Thinking Hats : Retro using DeBono’s Six Thinking Hats approach
Slicing work
Technical practices
- Ensemble work, also called mob programming or software teaming. Probably the single most effective tool in my toolbelt.
- Test Driven Development (TDD)Although people often think that TDD is a testing activity, it’s really about design.TDD examples in Java, Go, Ruby, and Elixir.
- Technical debt and productivity
- Teaching technical practices in LEGO
- The business case for the technical practices.
Other places I write content
- Unconscious Agile: The intersection of unconscious behaviour and agile. Covers neuroscience, psychology, hypnosis and many other things.
- Agile Technical Excellence: A variety of technical topics from TDD to ensemble programming and more.
- Improving Flow: Primarily kanban focused content although it touches on anything you need in your process.
- Mike's Hard Metrics: A single place to find my posts on metrics.
Book recommendations
I'm often asked for recommendations so I maintain two lists.
- One on unconscious behaviour including neuroscience, psychology, hypnosis and other things.
- One on general agile topics.
When not doing any of that, I can often be found hiking in the mountains, with a camera.