Brian Bostwick

Ever wonder what might be accomplished with greater psychological safety in an organization? Want evidence that it really *can* lead to wacky good success? Wish you had 5 (or maybe 6?) tips for leadership patterns that helped grow a business to beyond $1B / qtr? Read on, you're in luck. Organizations introduce Agile believing it will lead in part to greater responsiveness and resiliency.  And it can - I've been there. One thing that makes a big difference is to treat people like human *beings* rather than human *doings*. I'm looking forward to sharing insights from the distributed yet cross functional and scaled teams I worked with who were responsible for the tactical delivery of this high mix, high volume, tight margin, tight timeline, hardware + software product line. And, we did it with weekly iterations of our plans. Join in this **Thursday evening / USA** - **Friday morning / Asia** and walk away with a feeling for what’s possible when not just development, but a whole organization surfs the flow of “being” Agile. Thanks to Alexander (Sasha) and the Agile Practitioner's Meetup for hosting this talk. It's before bedtime on the East Coast, mid Day in Australia and New Zealand, first thing in China, Hong Kong and Japan, and a tad early in India. Use the link in the comments to open a timezone converter in a new tab.

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Next Wednesday (May 8) here in Portland, you can join me, Jerry Gaube, John Boone, Jennifer Waldrip, Madeline Kenney, and many others for the Women in Analytics (WIA) 2nd annual DataConnect West which will be a one day jam packed event focused on #AI. Hope to see you there! Some topics that might inspire you to join: ⭐ Beyond the Hype: Achieving Meaningful Business Impact with Generative AI and LLMs ⭐ ⭐ Empowering Women in AI: The Necessity of Technical Expertise + Industry Translation ⭐ ⭐ AI Transforming Shopping Experiences: Personalization and User Journey ⭐

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Why not you? TEKConnectGov welcomes Heber Springs as a customer. Your city could be next! Do things differently by partnering with TEKConnectGov and save your city money, increase efficiencies, minimize paperwork, and create a business friendly environment for your citizens. #LocalGovernment #Municipalities #Citysoftware

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How do you know that you're hearing everyone in your community? You can: 1) Not think/worry about it (really bad idea), 2) Make a lot of assumptions (also pretty bad idea), or 3) You can be like the City of Tucson and use GIS data to build a strategy based in science that includes all of the diverse voices in your area. Listen to Laura Sharp, Ph.D. talk about this topic on the 2nd episode of the "Engagement Matters" podcast. Esri #ArcGIS #ArcGISHub https://lnkd.in/gkrYyRyt

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Earlybird tickets just sold out for my EventStorming Facilitation virtual workshop this October 8-10. EventStorming is a great way to collaboratively model both as-is and to-be business processes. This hands-on virtual workshop will teach you to facilitate EventStorming successfully in your own org. It's 3 x 3 hour sessions (at PDT/MDT/CDT/EDT-friendly times!). Also, want to train 3 or more people? Use discount code "Group" to save $100 USD per ticket. Feedback from past virtual workshop attendees: * "Useful and insightful" * "Simple and fast method of process modeling" * "This is really helping me think about how teams can go about understanding their domain and what solutions they are providing." * "I love the insights I got from discussions with the group and am excited to take this back to my team and try some ideas out." * "I gained much clarity on some fuzzy topics, and reinforced some ideas/knowledge I already had about EventStorming. Most importantly I learned how EventStorming can be taught/delivered in an approachable/iterative way." * "Excellent, great investment in learning, hands on learning by doing" Learn more at https://lnkd.in/gdfuZJZ5

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What I didn't discuss in this article is how leading through agreement impacted me on a personal level. There was a point that I felt the weight of management was an amorphous and heavy blob of "shoulds." "I don't know if that project is on-track -- I should poke around and find out. I don't want her to feel like I'm micromanaging, I should give her some space. He shouldn't have pushed that change without testing it in staging. I should communicate wins to my manager more often. I don't know if I was clear enough, I should schedule another meeting to make sure. She should be more proactive about communicating with stakeholders. I should write a doc for that thing. I should coach him on how to be a better mentor to others on the team..." The never-ending list of things I and those around me "should" do was constantly growing. I consistently felt guilt and frustration with myself and with others around these expectations. Bringing the language of agreement in my relationships (with my reports, peers, and my own manager) allowed me to distill the heavy haze of expectations into a clear and contained set of agreements. And it was intoxicating! I felt so powerful in my ability to create, so clear on what others really needed from me, and so LIGHT. I suddenly had space in my brain that allowed me to be more present within my working relationships, more clear with my direction, more creative with my ability to problem solve, and even more empathetic in my approach to leadership. Agreements have truly been transformative for me and I cannot recommend the original audio by Steve Chandler enough (linked in article). Enjoy! https://lnkd.in/eGNav4wa

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I don't post often but wanted to publicly say something. I really appreciate vendors that prioritize integrations with other vendors and provide "out of the box" standard connections. When vendors create partnerships, it creates a sensible ecosystem that works well together. Each product has it's strengths and weak points, and there is a world in which there is a win/win of integrated systems meeting different needs. When i review vendors, one of my top considerations is whether I'm going to have data silos or if i can make a system work in overall context at the organization. In summary, those vendors that do top-notch integration work make it possible for great things to happen in government. Thank you! (Obligatory note that my opinions are my own and not neccessarily representative of the organization i work for.)

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What is this and what does it do? 🤔 . If you know, you know. This is a hard one. 😱 . Bonus points if you spot what I did for this install. 🙌🏼 #TheWhiteGloveMacGyver #infrastructure #technology #informationtechnology

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I have been asked to present one of my Power Automate flows that I am building at Blackbaud's bbdevdays. This will be my first time presenting any type of coding. One of the challenges facing development offices is processing "inkind" gifts. "Inkind" gifts are basically gifts of "stuff." This includes anything from highly valuable art work to donations of canned goods to a food bank. These gifts often have to evaluated and verified by outside departments before going to gift processing. Ronald McDonald House Charities New York Metro (RMHCNYM) was looking to move away from paper forms and manual data entry. So I created a Microsoft Office Form to collect the information. The form allows for uploading a picture of the dontation. The Power Automate Flow starts an approval process that pushes the information from the form, including the picture, to the relevant department for verification. When verified, a second approval process is sent to the accounting department, including the picture, to ensure the gift qualifies according to all applicable laws and policies. When approved, the donor is automatically emailed an acknowledgment letter. If at any point the approval is regected the person regecting the donation adds the reason in the comments section of the approal and the donor is automatically emailed a rejection letter with the reason. All the of the approvals results, comments and who approved or rejected are added to the form results in the assoicated Excel sheet and the gift process. I've only been using Power Automate for a few months and this was the first one I built fully on my own so I am pretty proud of it. There are still a few tweaks that I am hoping the group will be able to provide some advice but all-in-all I think it is pretty good. Caveat for my earlier statement about building on my own, throughout the past few months I have recieved incredible advice from Austen Brown and Alex Wong and others in the Blackbaud Power Automate Community.

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Local governments face complex challenges when planning new community facilities, such as ensuring alignment with resident needs and demonstrating clear ROI. Poor planning could mean underutilized amenities and financial inefficiencies. Using reservation system data for strategic planning is essential. Local leaders should focus on assessing needs, developing business cases, and making informed recommendations. Apply best practices for enhancing community development with data-driven insights. CivicPlus #CommunityEngagement #ResidentServices #ParksAndRecreation #WeLoveOurParks https://lnkd.in/ef27ECFt

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"Larry has the mind of an engineer, the curiosity of a thousand cats, and the humility to keep learning—which is the chief characteristic of the true changemaker." I think that sums it up perfectly. TIME named Larry Ellison one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2024. As CTO, he rebuilt Oracle with #cloud at the core and embedded #AI into everything we do. The results for our customers are spectacular. https://lnkd.in/gi9XvZ_u #TIME100

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Last week LitheSpeed and 🔑 Sanjiv Augustine 🎯 pulled together the Global Agility + Innovation conference. It was a great program with a diversity of writers, researchers, and storytellers sharing perspectives on how we might expect the art and science of program management to change and accelerate with the use of AI. If you didn't make it this year, it's definitely something I'd put on the calendar for next year. It was really a privilege to hear Nevine White speak about a topic that's near and dear to my heart - agile resourcing. She told a story about how a previous employer completely banished budgets while maintaining high levels of growth, fiscal discipline, and something like $1.6Bn in revenue. She told a story about how financial experts, integrated into frontline teams were able to support a basic guidance of "Do better than last quarter" Finance and agility aren't usually two words you hear together. The reality is that when we talk about "shifting left" there's no further left than planning and resourcing. It is the most abstract concept of time and labor. Want to go fast and have great results at the same time? Get rid of your budgets. Integrate financial discussions into the daily business. Get your financial experts out to the field and integrated into the teams where those plans are turned into action. Agility in finance is definitely the next plateau. So glad there are leaders who have been building lessons along the way for us to learn from.

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Leaders, how do you push yourselves and your teams past plateau? You may rhetorically respond, “Our current plateau is a higher elevation than any other our team or our organization has achieved. We’re good here. Congratulations. You’ve just sealed the needed momentum for your team’s decline in delivery and performance. Remember, career is an epic not a sprint (nod to those Agilists out there). Here are a couple of principals to help you transform your current plateau into a launchpad: Allow pace to adjust with pressure: the demand of your environment may require you to speed up or to slow down operations. That’s ok so long as you keep making progress. Keep focus on finishing: there will always be another project or initiative. Don’t let that dissuade you from finishing what is at hand. Finishing is requisite for success. “Almost finished” may be as hindering as never starting. Respirate: take a moment to exhale and to inhale regularly. Coach your team to do the same; not only with physical breathing, but more importantly with creative thought and process evaluation. Taking one deep breath will not carry you very far. Likewise one bright idea will not carry your enterprise forever. Think again, and again, and again until you get better. Then think again. What have you done to help your enterprise stay motivated to recover from plateau?

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Concert selfie from today’s Bridge Live in Salt Lake City! Wondering what Bridge Live is? It's a Bridge hosted single-day event that we take on the road. The first was in the UK and the next is in Austin. Wondering what Bridge is? It's simply the best toolset for managers to engage their employees by helping the learn what's expected of them (the first element of employee engagement), develop them (the 6th element of employee engagement), and help them drive performance in ways the employees want to be guided (link in the comments). It was the best day with the best people! @get-bridge #leadership #managment #employeedevelopment

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