"Trusting people to choose who to work with and what to work on creates not only great teams but also great organisations. I have run self-selections since 2013 and have some stories to tell." In her keynote at Agile Tour Montreal Sandy Mamoli explores the idea of self-selection. Can it improve prod...

Feedback is a funny thing. We crave it, get disgruntled if we don’t get it, and often get upset when we do get it. As someone who requests feedback on a relatively frequent basis, I have been on a journey from being a terrible receiver of feedback, to a much less terrible one. It’s something I am al...

I’ve seen more than 100 people leaving their companies and teams in the last 5 years. Sometimes they go to chase exciting challenges, get promoted or they're just looking for something new. Unfortunately when someone leaves the knowledge that they've created and gained leaves the organisation as we...

I’ve been meeting new people lately, work-related. And one of my pet peeves has resurfaced with a vengeance… people who don’t listen. Not just not listening, but basically just waiting for their opportunity to jump into the conversation and talk about their angle on whatever I just raised, as if the...

Do you ever get to the end of a day, week, or month and wonder where all that time went? What did you do? What did you achieve? Why do you feel so exhausted and yet your to-do list looks just as long, if not longer? Research has shown that people regularly take on more work than they are capable of....

I have been working for many years now. Around 20. And I have always wanted a manager who really cared about my learning as much as I did. For most of this time, I was just provided with courses and/or books that I wanted.. Now as a coach I hear regularly from managers that they want workers that ar...

Design Sprints are a great way for a team to solve a big problem and test a solution with real users in a structured way. Some of the activities, language and concepts can be new to people, so I created this ‘Design Sprint Dinner’ exercise, as a fun way to introduce people to some of the concepts of...

What is JAFAC? Born out of a desire to attend a conference full of speakers we really would like to hear from, the Nomad8 team decided to create the event we craved. JAFAC is a relatively small but carefully crafted conference that brings together ten speakers, 120 people, and creates plenty of (Ope...

At Agile 2019 I ran a workshop on the importance of taking the time to prepare for a workshop by using the Facilitation Canvas and following the think-write-pair-share approach....

At Agile 2019 I shared 7 lessons I have learned during an Olympic career that have helped me be successful in business and life. In the world of professional sports innovation, resilience and rapid learning are everything! In this very personal talk I share key learnings from my professional and Ol...

This is the story of introducing Holacracy at Snapper, a New Zealand tech company, whose CTO gave Sandy a one-line instruction: “I’d like you to make it happen.” Watch it here....

In this talk at the Business Agility Conference in Vienna Sandy Mamoli explores the idea of self-selection. Can it improve productivity and create happier teams? Sandy talks about her personal experience after more than five years of running Self-Selection teams in small and large organisations all...

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. In this episode Sandy Mamoli talks to Simon Pound about her book Creating Great Teams - How Self-Selection Lets People Excel and an Olympic career that has taught her how to thrive in business....

When you picture a truly amazing team in your head, what does it look like? Now consider your teammates. Do they have the same picture? Really - all of them? The things people have experienced and read massively shape what ‘great’ looks like for them. The differences can lead to frustrations or peo...

“There is a difference between interest and commitment. When you're interested in something, you do it only when it's convenient. When you're committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results.” Ken Blanchard It happens often - something new comes up and it sounds exciting and we totally w...

Holacracy has great mechanisms to deal with governance and tactical issues. But what about the human side? What about relationships? What about our personal interactions in the workplace? Many have criticised Holacracy for not being complete, for being a system that only deals with the work and not...