Setting the stage I am leading a project to review my company’s business strategy. I want to identify projects for next year’s business plan and to create a strong link between the strategy and our projects. This will help in storytelling with the people delivering these projects and to the executives governing the strategy. This exercise has put the gap between information and knowledge management tools I use in private and available at work in the spotlight. There are four capabilities I miss most at work: backlinks, block references, tags, and a query language to work with the information.

This post summarizes my learnings from the Roam Agile project. I present the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) version of the Agile Development Template. Here you will find the link to the Roam EDN archive containing the template, instructions for how you can get started, YouTube videos showcasing the solution, and a link to the graph I used for my project with my backlog, user stories, sprints, daily standups, customer feedback, etc.

I spent the last week working on a Roam template for Agile Product Management. My goal is to create a step by step how-to guide and a full-featured template database, that a product development team can pick up to kick-start their process using Roam. I assume that Roam will be the only task and user story management tool used by this team, and I am developing a fully self-sustained solution built 100% around Roam's capabilities.

In this post I will present my final solution for getting the Bible imported into Roam Research . I have finally found a way to drastically decrease the size of the imported Roam graph, but still have a reasonable solution for accessing multiple translations and cross references. I will share my thoughts on performance and potential next steps for making the Bible work even better in Roam. If you are interested in the topic, I have two other posts on the subject. Links are at the end. You can download the Roam .EDN archive for the Bible from here: ASV.edn For a real time demonstration of the full import process within 3 minutes check out this video . WARNING: by restoring the ASV.edn into your graph, all other data in your graph will be lost! The source code for the converter is here:  Roam.json Bible importer with BUTTON for verse numbers v1.ipynb Use this if the primary translation you'd like to use in Roam is ...

How much time, money, energy, etc. do you waste by solving the wrong problems ? What if you could get better at solving the right problems ? What's your Problem by Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg is one of the best books I have read on the subject of solving problems. He asserts, that it is critical that we pay attention to how we frame problems. If we misframe problems, we may be at risk of coming up with a solution to the wrong problem (i.e. a wrong solution) and wasting tremendous amount of time, money and energy or even worst, creating additional problems that may be even tougher to solve later on. The way you frame a problem determines which solutions you come up with.  By shifting the way you see the problem - that is, by reframing it - you can sometimes find radically better solutions. A personal example  I remember when our son started kind...

What tools do you use to create quick sketches of ideas? How do you co-create with others in a visually engaging way? How do you balance traditional text based expression with visual thinking?  I have a whiteboard in my office. I can feel the energy level of any meeting increase when someone stands up, takes the pen, and starts explaining his/her idea at the whiteboard. Collaborating around a whiteboard always unleashes creativity. Home office, virtual working and social distancing have made this experience somewhat more challenging to achieve. The other problem with the whiteboard in my office is it has to be cleaned. Yes, I take pictures before wiping it, however the next time we want to continue the same discussion, our drawing is gone. I would need a larger office and more whiteboards to keep track of all the different discussions that happen around my board. I love visual thinking tools and have always been a mind map junky. Over the years I have used Freem...

We fail more often because we solve the wrong problem than because we get the wrong solution to the right problem. Russel L. Ackoff In case you were wondering, those are ducks on the table. The facilitator gave us six pieces of LEGOs and asked us to create ducks. You may think this is a well-defined problem. I find it amazing though, how each of us in a group of ten came up with a completely original design. Our unique perspective and our experiences and skills hugely influence our solutions to problems. How we perceive a situation will heavily influence the issues we identify and the solutions we find. If you put one person into a situation, they get stuck. When you put another into the same situation, they solve it in an instant or solve it in a way that you would have never expected. You can frame problems differently leading to unique solutions. Outside school there are rarely problems with an ultimate right solution. To go a step further, there are ra...

You can increase your problem-solving skills by honing your question-asking ability. Michael J. Gelb We live in the world our questions create. David Cooperrider To a man with only a hammer... To a man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. This is especially true for the way we ask questions. I believe in the power of asking questions. However, often I find myself jumping to solution mode too quickly, before properly defining the problem and understanding the real issue that needs to be solved. I am blinded by my experience, my training and my expertise.  Don't misunderstand me! There is nothing wrong with having experience and expertise. On the contrary! But you need to know when to use it: once the issue has been properly framed by having asked the right questions.  What makes asking questions very tricky is how based on your personality and experience you are predisposed to asking certain questions, while almost always missin...

Do you feel like you are juggling too many balls in the air? Are you on target with your goals? How do you prioritize?  Prioritizing is hard. I sometimes find myself with far too many goals competing for my attention. Some of these are professional targets such as completing certain projects, finishing a report on a topic, progressing in my career, developing myself and getting ready for the next opportunity. Then I also have personal goals like working down my reading backlog, organizing a special holiday, achieving sports targets that require serious preparation, goals related to my hobbies or things that I need to get done at home such as fixing something in the house or finding a craftsman who will. I find this simple exercise very helpful. It helps me rank my priorities and to develop strategies to best achieve success. To get the most out of this article, I recommend you follow along. Grab 8 post-its and an empty sheet ...

Succeeding as a Management Consultant by Kris Safarova Rating: 8/10 The book takes the reader through a Strategy and Operations Management consulting case study explaining key steps of the engagement and the tools used at each step. The narrative follows the format of a story about an assignment at Goldy, a large mining corporation in Brazil. The story introduces key concepts such as building a financial model, developing a storyboard, building an issue tree, managing stakeholders, defining the workstream charter, etc. This summary will cover the core steps of a consulting engagement and the key tools discussed in the book, but will omit the many additional best practices, template examples, and other advices also covered. These include discussion of consulting ethics, stakeholder management, communicating change, and service strategy just to name a few.  Memorable quotes  Unless you have left money on the table without h...