Trick-or-treaters Leave Their Halloween Candy For Child Battling Leukemia

A search for hope at the end of this very anxious week led me to this humble bundle. Zoe, 3, is the proud product of TJ and Courtney Thomas of Atlanta, Georgia.

Back in February, Zoe was diagnosed with leukemia. And because her immune system is now compromised, she couldn't go trick-or-treating on Halloween with all the other kids. In fact, her parents even had to put up a sign to keep other kids away. The sign read: "Sorry, no candy. Child with cancer. See you next year!"

"The whole purpose was just so that we wouldn't have to keep telling kids 'sorry' and have disappointed kids," Zoe's mother Courtney Thomas said. "Never expected anything like this."

How to connect with AgileDad:

- [website] https://www.agiledad.com/

- [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/

- [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/

- [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

The Phantom Sprint — Invisible Work That Steals Velocity

Your sprint looks healthy — until a phantom dependency eats your finish line. Here’s how to find the invisible work before the demo.

Detection & prevention tactics

• Dependency board: visible KANBAN lane for external asks with owners and ETA.

• Capacity buffer: protect 10–20% of sprint for unplanned but likely work.

• Pre-planning checkpoint: 5-min readout with ops/support to surface recurring interrupts.

• Risk register: short public list of items that can block sprint goals.

The Haunted Backlog — When Old Stories Won’t Die

• Triage: Mark backlog items > 90 days old as “graveyard candidates.”

• Reframe: Turn vague epics into a one-sentence outcome + metric. If you can’t, bury it.

• Timebox an experiment: If still valuable, create a 1-week spike with a clear success metric.

• Assign ownership: No owner = forever ghost. Give it to someone accountable for outcome vs. activity.

• Retire ritual: Monthly “retire or revive” cadence — items not revived are archived with a short rationale.

  How to connect with AgileDad:

  - [website] https://www.agiledad.com/

  - [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/

  - [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/

  - [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

A Chad Gymnast Scores Top Marks For Determination

The wall behind her is pockmarked and worn. She’s barefoot against a hard, cracked floor. And yet Achta Derib’s pose in this photograph by Antonio López Díaz, a finalist in the professional sports category at the Sony world photography awards, suggests reserves of determination that will carry her across continents to perform at the highest levels of her sport.

How to connect with AgileDad:

- [website] https://www.agiledad.com/

- [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/

- [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/

- [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

Stop Worshipping Product Roadmaps

A few years ago, I sat through a two-hour planning session where we debated every line of a shiny new roadmap. By the end, we had a color-coded masterpiece: features neatly slotted by quarter, dependencies tracked, and timelines locked...

How to connect with AgileDad:

- [website] https://www.agiledad.com/

- [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/

- [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/

- [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

The Only Three Things You Must Do To Improve Agility - Mike Cohn

Distilled to its essence, it’s quite simple to be a Scrum Master, agile coach, or anyone seeking to improve team or organizational agility. There are only three things you need to do and Saint Francis laid them out succinctly over 800 years ago:

To improve agility, we have to start with what’s necessary. Change practices that go against agile principles. If programmers and testers aren’t part of a single multidisciplinary team, that needs to change.
If the team doesn’t see the benefits of iterative and incremental work, you need to talk to them about that.
Similarly, if management is imposing deadlines without regard to the team’s opinion, you’ll need to help them see the light.

Having made changes necessary to enable agility, look next at what’s possible. There will be many more options to choose from now, such as:

• Shortening iterations
• Improving teamwork
• Reducing handoffs by overlapping work
• Introducing new practices such as story mapping or job stories

“Start by doing what’s necessary, then what’s possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”
Doing What’s NecessaryThen Do What’s Possible
Don’t try to improve too many things at once and choose wisely. Initially there will be opportunities for small changes to create outsize improvements.
Finally, Do the Impossible
At this point, it’s time to do the impossible . . . except that now very little is impossible.
Having iteratively and incrementally improved, most teams feel powerful enough to take on challenges and changes that would have seemed impossible before.
What still seem impossible are changes outside the team. Managers may still impose deadlines. Stakeholders may foist too-frequent changes because they’ve heard agile teams “embrace change.”
Fixing these outside-the-team behaviors isn’t impossible, but it is harder and often takes time. Fortunately a team that has done the necessary and then the possible will be ready to do the impossible.

How to connect with AgileDad:

- [website] https://www.agiledad.com/

- [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/

- [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/

- [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

Scrum Theatre and the Agile Illusion

Imagine your team having a perfect stand-up. Everyone’s smiling, and it seems like everything is going smoothly. Everyone says that they do not have any blockers for today and that all’s well. Each person on the team is relaxed, and your Scrum Master is grinning from ear to ear.

How to connect with AgileDad:

- [website] https://www.agiledad.com/

- [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/

- [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/

- [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

The Janitor at NASA

In the early 1960s, during the height of the space race, President John F. Kennedy toured NASA headquarters. The country was locked in fierce competition with the Soviet Union to put the first man on the moon, and the stakes couldn’t have been higher.

As JFK walked through the facility, he paused when he noticed a janitor sweeping the hallway late in the evening. Curious, the President stepped over and asked, “Why are you working so late? What are you doing here?”

Without hesitation, the janitor looked up and said, “Mr. President, I’m helping put a man on the moon.”

How to connect with AgileDad:

- [website] https://www.agiledad.com/

- [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/

- [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/

- [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/