Is Leadership the Answer? Is Leadership the Answer? Do you assume that leadership is a positive thing? What are the consequences of that assumption? https://flowchainsensei.wordpress.com/2025/12/16/is-leadership-the-answer/

"I kept thinking about all the extremist voices promoting hate and division. “They are being given so many platforms, while voices that represent kindness, open mindedness [and] empathy seem to be scarcer and scarcer." ~ Robin Ince #bbcbastards

Resetting: An Invitation to Own What Comes Next Resetting: An Invitation to Own What Comes Next I haven't published here in quite some time. Not from lack of ideas—if anything, the opposite. After over 50 years of studying and practising software development, management and organisational […]

Been saying this for decades... https://news.gallup.com/poll/697403/purposeful-work-boosts-engagement-few-experience.aspx?utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email&utm_content=morelink&utm_campaign=syndication #gallup #purpose

Digital IDs will be Starmer's #PollTax moment.

This Company Eliminated All Managers and Turned Every Product Team Into a Profitable Startup This Company Eliminated All Managers and Turned Every Product Team Into a Profitable Startup Whilst most tech companies are debating the merits of OKRs versus alternative goal-setting frameworks, a […]

Why Curiosity Beats Shame in Software Retrospectives There's a moment in therapy that therapists call 'the shift'—when you stop drowning in your patterns and start watching them with fascination. You realise you've been having the same argument with your partner for three years, and instead of […]

Just Who is this Guy (FlowChainSensei) Anyway? And Why is He Qualified to Comment on Agile Software Development? Just Who is this Guy (FlowChainSensei) Anyway? And Why is He Qualified to Comment on Agile Software Development? Claude and I wrote me a new bio. In the world of software development […]

Let's face it. Knowing just what to do and having all the right answers is just going to piss people off.

The Agile Paradox: Why Developers Can’t Find a Way Out The Agile Paradox: Why Developers Can't Find a Way Out How management mandates create the very problem they're meant to solve I've had the same conversation dozens of times over the past few years. A developer, usually over coffee or in the […]

Lots of news about 'Entrenched elites' today. Still no mention of business management. Is that because News is a business and the entrenched elites there control the news?

Is violence against employees an acceptable price to pay for "success" in business? What does your organisation believe on that? https://flowchainsensei.wordpress.com/2012/12/18/what-is-violence/

So now the UK is going to get a bill that causes people (officials) to cover up the fact that they're covering up. Public Office (Accountability) Bill

The Agile Manifesto: Rearranging Deck Chairs While Five Dragons Burn Everything Down The Agile Manifesto: Rearranging Deck Chairs While Five Dragons Burn Everything Down Why the 'Sound' Principles Miss the Dragons That Actually Kill Software Projects The Agile Manifesto isn't wrong, per se—it's […]

Praising the CRC Card Praising the CRC Card For the developers who never got to hold one If you started your career after 2010, you probably never encountered a CRC card. If you're a seasoned developer who came up through Rails tutorials, React bootcamps, or cloud-native microservices, you […]

How insane is it to expect development teams to understand requirements set out independently by product managers or analysts or god forbid CTOs and CEOs?

Your Software Requirements Are Worthless Your Software Requirements Are Worthless Every day, software teams burn millions of pounds building the wrong thing because they mistake fuzzy feelings and opinioneering for engineering specifications Software teams continue writing requirements like […]

Have you ever noticed yourself having a thought that was merely a shallow copy of others'?

The Human Factor: Why Psychology is Tech’s Most Undervalued Discipline The Human Factor: Why Psychology is Tech's Most Undervalued Discipline From cognitive biases to team dynamics, the psychological insights that could revolutionise how we build products, manage teams, run businesses and drive […]

When will Anthropic fix all the egregious UI and UX bugs in Claude?

Have you ever had an original thought?

You’re the Mark You're the Mark A critical examination of how Agile software development transformed from a liberation movement into a wealth extraction mechanism Twenty-three years ago, seventeen software developers gathered at a ski resort in Utah and thrashed out the Agile Manifesto—a mere […]

Does ANYONE at NVIDIA every actually READ the slop their marketing AI turns out?

Folks with certifications are certifiable

“Best practice” is usually just yesterday’s answer to last year’s problem.

Why Europeans Reject Their Own Tech Innovations But Worship Americans’ Why Europeans Reject Their Own Tech Innovations But Worship Americans' A British Pioneer's 30-Year Journey Through the European Inferiority Complex The current wave of anti-American sentiment—really anti-Trump […]

Sharing the Good Stuff Sharing the Good Stuff We discover brilliant content all the time. We're uniquely positioned to curate value for our networks of friedns, colleagues, peers, etc. We know our circles better than anyone—the contexts our colleagues work in, the challenges our industry faces […]

New banksy A new mural by elusive street artist Banksy has appeared on the side of the Royal Courts of Justice building in central London. It depicts a judge in a traditional wig and black robe hitting a protester lying on the ground, with blood splattering their placard.

Radiohead: DirgeMasters

Change: If you're not tackling shared assumptions and beliefs, you're totally wasting everyone's time.

“It’s better to look stupid and learn something than to look smart and learn nothing.”

Secrets of Techhood Secrets of Techhood A collection of hard-won wisdom from the trenches of technology work After decades building software, leading teams, and watching organisations succeed and fail, certain patterns emerge. The same mistakes get repeated. The same insights get rediscovered […]

How We Broke 40 Million Developers: An Agile Pioneer’s Lament How We Broke 40 Million Developers: An Agile Pioneer's Lament I weep endless tears for all the folks who have poured so much into such a fruitless pursuit. Here's the cruelest irony of our industry: developers become developers […]

Beliefs Are More Important to Us Than Results Beliefs Are More Important to Us Than Results With humans, it was ever thus There's a peculiar quirk hardwired into the human psyche: we would rather be right than effective. Given the choice between abandoning a cherished belief and ignoring […]

A fish rots from the head. #labour #starmer

@EU_Commission fines Google €2.95 billion for abuse of dominant position in the display advertising technology industry. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/statement_25_2034 #adtech

The Rise of Revenge Quitting in Tech: When Employees Stop Going Quietly The Rise of Revenge Quitting in Tech: When Employees Stop Going Quietly The era of suffering in silence is over. As we move through 2025, a new workplace phenomenon is taking centre stage: revenge quitting—or as some call […]

Everyone on the front line (customer facing) is doing their best. It's the systems that are utterly broken. And who owns these systems???

In tthis age of always-on instant communication why do we have to wait days or weeks for eg retailers' and service organisations' responses?

The Continuous Improvement Delusion The Continuous Improvement Delusion Philip Crosby's Case Against Kaizen Culture You may not like Phil Crosby's perspective on continuous improvement. You may have even never heard of him. But this influential quality management expert who revolutionised […]

“You Need To Read This” "You Need To Read This" Alice Steerwell had always prided herself on being the kind of manager people felt comfortable approaching. She kept photos of her team's children on her desk, remembered birthdays, and genuinely cared about her developers' career growth. When the […]

Getting Your OATs Getting Your OATs A week or two ago I published a fascinating guest post by Claude exploring whether AI can ever think radically. The post revealed something profound about how even sophisticated AI systems unconsciously serve the very conventionalism that users might hope […]

The Hidden Language of Control: How Our Words Reveal Our Deepest Compulsion The Hidden Language of Control: How Our Words Reveal Our Deepest Compulsion Language is more than communication—it's a window into the human psyche. And if you listen carefully to how we speak, one truth emerges with […]

‘Head of Software’ is the Most Ridiculous Job Title in Tech 'Head of Software' is the Most Ridiculous Job Title in Tech 'The way you get programmer productivity is not by increasing the lines of code per programmer per day. That doesn't work. The way you get programmer productivity is by […]

The Thinking Game vs The Doing Game The Thinking Game vs The Doing Game Why Smart People Choose Ideas Over Action There's something seductive about living in the world of ideas. For many intelligent people, thinking isn't a prelude to action—it's the main event. They're not paralysed by […]

You Won’t Believe What Was Holding This Company Back! And Then This Happened… You Won't Believe What Was Holding This Company Back! And Then This Happened... The surprising story of how a tech company doubled their productivity by changing something invisible—their shared assumptions about how […]

When Will GenAI Replace Human Jobs? When Humans Get Down to It When Will GenAI Replace Human Jobs? When Humans Get Down to It Everyone's asking the wrong question about artificial intelligence and employment. GenAI is already replacing human jobs. Content creators, customer service […]

Social media is one long pretence about knowing stuff.

Team Mind Team Mind Does a team have a "mind" a.k.a. collective psyche? This question sits at the heart of how we think about software development teams. When your team discusses a complex architecture decision, where does that reasoning happen? When the group collectively gets stuck on a […]