Review Blue Striped Frog – The agile community – Magazine (2nd edition)

I just had a sneak preview of the second edition of the Blue Striped Frog magazine. Several articles clustered around the themes: the age of agility, best practices, organizational agility and articles.

My compliments to the editor team. They can be proud of the result. This second magazine offers interesting stories, new insights and real life cases at UWV, NN, Praktijkschool Oost ter Hout, BAM, New10 and ABN Amro and last but not least a new agile framework.

The article – Leaders Beware: Four Megatrends Shaping the Age of Agility – by Ron Meyer and Ronald Meijers, provides elaborations on the following four megatrends: the pressure towards more organizational agility, organizational diversity, the rise of employee empowerment and career diversity. To cope with these trends you require flexible, adaptive and responsive leaders. In line with the article you get and interview with Ron Meyer, one of the authors, talking about the VUCA world and the comparison between an intersection with traffic lights and a roundabout without traffic lights.

The interview with Fred Hoekstra, director of the department Social Medical Affairs at UWV gives some insights in the agile journey of UWV. They established four important pillars “happy employee”, “satisfied execution”, “cooperation” and “hygiene in place”. For them, agile working is a daily quest for how they learn and develop without having major incidents causing a social disturbance. The interview ends with some critical success factors.

The Organizational Agility Heartbeat (TOAH) by Vincent Snijder, Henk Venema and Arthur Waterham describes a lightweight framework for organizational agility. The main characteristic of this framework is the quarterly rhythm in which organizations update their strategy, adjust their course based on this, and translate it into predictable execution. Within The TOAH the rhythmic interaction of three parallel tracks creates organizational agility: strategic planning, prepare for execution and execution. I will add The Organizational Agility Heartbeat (TOAH) framework to my Bird’s eye view on the agile forest as number 92! (https://toahframework.com).

In Organizational Agility at New10 and ABN Amro, Joost Brouwer is interviewed about the agile journey within the New10 startup and what ABN Amro can learn from the New10 lessons and vice versa.

In – Use discomfort to learn forward in a continuous dialogue – Jindra Kessener shares her experiences how we manage to handle the discomfort that is necessary to challenge our results, ideas and premises, without our defense mechanism taking over our capacity to think and observe clearly. She gives some insights on how knowledge about our autonomous nervous system could be used in Agile practice.

Culture makes or breaks your agile transition is an article of myself. In this article I explain what I mean with culture, I make some references to books and articles explaining culture and I make a link to my Bird’s eye view on the agile forest and elaborate on the, what I call, culture-targeted frameworks or ways of working.

Purpose driven people is the title of the last article and the title of the book Alize Hofmeester wrote. In this article she elaborates why the journey to agility is about people and purpose and why she wrote a book to make that clear. 

To emphasize that the Blue Striped Frog is not only a magazine but also a community we get an impression of the first four Blue Striped Frog Tastings: Leading with Obeya by Tim Wiegel (soon I publish a review of the book Leading with Obeya on this blog), Programs in an agile organization, curse or blessing by Henk Venema, Culture makes or breaks your agile transition (from myself) and Purpose Driven People – Creating business agility and sustainable growth by Alize Hofmeester. To become part of the Blue Striped Frog community you can join the community on LinkedIn to be inspired, to learn and to share: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8762445/

A top 10 with agile related songs and a few agile myths and tips finalizes the magazine.

Conclusion: A must read. And, if you haven’t subscribed yet be fast and you will receive this one and all the upcoming issues of the Blue Striped Frog Magazine for free (physical and/or digital edition). You can subscribe at https://www.bluestripedfrog.com