Irrationality, visualisation, evolutionary biology and more with Michael Lloyd

This week’s guest is Michael Lloyd. Michael is a scrum master and agile coach who has been helping teams deliver value for over a decade. Michael is the Founder and Head of Global Agility at Honest Agile and the creator of Dysfunction Mapping. 

I’ve followed Michael’s posts on LinkedIn for a few years and I’ve admired his authentic thoughtful approach to working with teams and organisation as he has risen to prominence in the world of agility.

We met at a conference a few months ago and decided to publish a conversation together for Agile On The Mind. We decided to just see where we ended up and as you’ll see in the episode we landed in some pretty interesting and whacky places, including from the initial introduction. I had a blast recording this with Michael and I hope you enjoy listening to it.

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We sprawled across quite a few topics in our conversation together including:

• The power of irrational tools

• Using Tarot with your teams

• Can we change mindsets or only change the environment?

• Dysfunction mapping

• Planning a trip to Scotland

• Putting stickers on laptops is like building a termite mounds (the word I struggled to find in the conversation was ‘Stigmergy’)

• The ambiguity and clarity of visualisations (approximately 50% of the brain is taken up by the visual cortex)

• How to incorporate more visual facilitation in your day to day work

• In person versus remote collaboration, the value of in person pandemonium

• Introverts and extroverts collaborating online (warning: controversial opinion)

• The power of Liberating structures, 1,2,4-all

• The facilitator’s role in creating structure for groups

• Dunbar’s number

• Precocial vs altricial species - more info here

• Applying an evolutionary biology lens to our organisations

• Selective pressures changing our organisations

• Agility in government versus business organisations

• making changes in complex adaptive systems

• Push vs Pull systems in the military

• Is leadership the brains of the organisation?

As you can see there were few topics we stayed away from, and I hope you’ll enjoy the adventurous spirit we took into the conversation, full well knowing that these were largely speculative conversations

I’d love to hear your feedback on the episode, so please comment on this post, fill in this feedback form or find me on LinkedIn. I’d love to hear from you.