12 next books for your reading list? About complexity, coaching, teams, leadership and modern agility

Contents

1 TL;DR
2 Some book details
3 More books and learning resources

Lets update the reading list. This time with great books about complexity, teams, coaching and leadership.

TL;DR

Complexity

Organize for complexity by Niels Pflaeging (german version is Organisation für Komplexität)
Komplexithoden (Complexitools – Tools to be used in complex environments) by Niels Pflaeging (DE)
Navigieren in Zeiten des Umbruchs (navigate in times of upheaval) by Fredmund Malik (DE)
Führen mit flexiblen Zielen (Leading with flexible targets) by Niels Pflaeging (DE)

Teams

Leadership

Mit neuer Autorität in Führung (leading with new authority) by Baumann-Habersack (DE)
Out of office by Dr. Elke Frank and Dr. Thorsten Huebschen (DE)
The mythical man month by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

Coaching

Agile improvements

No Estimates: How to measure project progress without estimating by Vasco Duarte

Some book details

More on the complexity books

I got to know about the new book Komplexithoden by my colleague Stefan Nowaczynski and immediately was inspired to read it. Simply explained tools … COMPLEXITOOLS… to be used in complex environments and important term definitions to standardize our language when speaking about complexity.

3 posts about complexitools followed (and I hope EN readers can at least get an impression about complexitools):

Part I – terms + complexitools for performance

Part II – complexitools for agility

Part III – complexitools for learning

Being inspired I immediately read Organize for complexity, fast to read and completes the input from complexitools. Not yet enough I continued with Leading with flexible targets – and to be honest – this was the the missing pice for further understanding the topics that got opened via the previous books. A lot of details about practices in modern companies how to work in complex environments and counterexamples for practices not to continue.

Unfortunately the book is not yet available in EN, so I recommend to visit Niels Pflaeging‘s rich resources section to discover his great presentations. I guess some posts about it will follow soon to – so stay tuned 😉

Now it was time to discover Fredmund Malik‘s Navigieren in Zeiten des Umbruchs (navigate in times of upheaval). It strengthened my picture and believe in the necessity to learn more about complexity and to embed that knowledge in my daily work.

And what about the team books?

If you think about ways to reorganize your team setup – I can highly recommend to read Creating great teams – how self selection lets people excel. The book is a really practical guide for creating a really working self selection event, where people discover their team constellation they would like to work in. I wish I would have read it some years ago 😉

If you would like to dive deeper into the topic teams – and what to consider when working with teams, please read Team Genius: The new science of High-Performing organizations. Science applied to building great teams and important facts for moving them to become high performance teams.

I wrote the post about magical team size numbers (see picture) based on that reading experience.

Next level leadership

If you are interested in modern ways of leadership I highly recommend to read Mit neuer Autorität in Führung (leading with new authority). Really important input on practices to abandon and what new ways to use to lead people. I hope many people in current management positions will read it and start following that human centered practices, as it will make our workplaces a much better one. Some posts detailing it will follow soon (so EN readers can participate too).

Currently I’m reading Out of office – describing modern ways of working environments. So far really nicely explained and inspiring.

Not more to write about The mythical man month – still a must read to change your perspective about software development.

Coaching … next steps

For beginners with coaching, please read The five minute coach. You’ll get an amazing set of powerful questions to use in coaching sessions and your daily work. The questions are based on clean language and are really tuned to enable the coachee to discover her own solution. The description is based on many example scenarios, detailed Q&A sections and important background why to use the framework the way it is described.

Working with a solution focussed approach is often the much better choice than digging deep into the problem domain. To apply it for coaching, reading Solution focussed coaching for agile teams (Agile Team lösungsfokussiert coachen) is a way to progress. Great extensions of non violent communication, working with goals and how to coach teams with powerful forward thinking methods.

Please read the ENDPUNKT – solution focussed goal criteria as a first post about solution focussed goal definitions.