If your calendar is full of “quick requests” and constant context switching, you’re not alone.
In this episode, Peter Green and Richard Lawrence explore why saying no at work is so hard—and how to do it well.

They share five practical, research-backed ways to protect focus and maintain trust:

1. Purpose – Use a clear team purpose as your filter for incoming requests.

2. Goals – Anchor decisions to aligned commitments, not personal priorities.

3. Flow – Protect attention and energy to finish meaningful work.

4. Decision Rights – Clarify who decides what, so refusals aren’t personal.

5. Stewardship – Reframe “no” as an act of service to your commitments.

Along the way, they reference organizational psychology research on attention residue, goal-setting, role clarity, and empowered refusal—and share practical ways to translate those findings into daily team habits.

Listen to learn how to stop reacting, focus on what matters, and say no gracefully.

Full transcript and links:
https://www.humanizingwork.com/research-backed-ways-to-say-no-without-being-a-jerk/

We just passed 200 episodes of The Humanizing Work Show!

To celebrate, we’re bringing back one of our most practical episodes—Two Key Moves for Better Sprint Retrospectives.

If your retros have become stale, repetitive, or ineffective, this conversation will help you turn them into one of the most valuable meetings you run.

Richard Lawrence and Peter Green share two facilitation practices that transform retros from a “check-the-box” routine into a continuous learning engine:

• Using the Focused Conversation (ORID) structure to move from scattered opinions to shared insight

• Treating each sprint as an experiment so improvement feels safe, steady, and sustainable

You’ll learn why “Stop/Start/Continue” hits a ceiling, how to collect shared data that fuels meaningful reflection, and why the phrase “let’s just try it for one sprint” can change everything.

Part of our 200-Episode Celebration—revisiting foundational ideas that make work more fit for humans, and humans more capable of doing great work.

Agile expert Richard Lawrence breaks down the differences between Scrum and Kanban, two of the most widely used approaches for managing work. He explains how each method works, where each one excels, and how you can decide which is best for your team or project.

You’ll learn the core distinction between Scrum’s time boxes and Kanban’s work-in-progress (WIP) limits, when to use Scrum, when to use Kanban, and why the answer is sometimes “both.”

Richard shares practical ways to combine elements of Scrum and Kanban to solve real-world problems, along with the most common pitfalls teams encounter when switching between these approaches—and how to avoid them.

Whether you’re new to agile methods or looking to refine your team’s process, this episode will give you a clear, practical framework for making better decisions about how you work.

Show notes, links, and transcript: https://www.humanizingwork.com/scrum-vs-kanban-getting-the-most-of-both-episode

When leaders ask for more data, dashboards, and reports, it’s often a signal of low trust. The trouble is, giving them more data doesn’t build it. So what do you do instead?

In this episode of the Humanizing Work Show, we unpack why reporting fails to create trust and what actually does. You’ll hear Rachel Botsman’s four traits of trust, how to connect with stakeholder needs, and three steps you can use to escape the status report trap.

Show notes, links, and transcript: https://www.humanizingwork.com/metrics-trust-and-escaping-the-status-report-trap/

Leaders may know the value of early learning, but teams may have built up resistance tackling the hardest, most uncertain work first. Instead, they chase quick wins that feel safe but create nasty surprises later. In this episode of the Humanizing Work Show, Richard Lawrence and Peter Green share how CAPED helps leaders make it safe for teams to go complexity first.

You’ll hear why quick wins are such an alluring trap, what causes team hesitation, and how leaders can use culture signals and skill-building to change the pattern. From Microsoft’s Tay chatbot story to practical tools like complexity mapping, feature mining, and reference class forecasting, this episode shows how to turn complexity first into the obvious, motivating choice.

Show notes, links, and transcript for this episode: https://www.humanizingwork.com/quick-wins-trap-core-complexity/

Most presentations to leaders don’t lead to decisions. They’re overloaded with slides, but they don’t result in action or support.

In this episode of the Humanizing Work Show, Peter and Richard share a proven formula for presenting to leadership that gets results. Learn how to:

• Do the right pre-work so your proposal aligns with what leaders care about

• Craft a clear, practical request

• Use the “Therefore / But” pattern to tell a persuasive story

• Follow through so decisions actually stick

Show notes and transcript: https://www.humanizingwork.com/how-to-present-to-leaders-and-get-results/

Vibe coding prototypes can feel magical. With just a few prompts, an AI builds a working app you can click around and test. But when something looks real, it’s easy to fall into common product traps.

In this episode of the Humanizing Work Show, Peter shares his positive experience vibe coding a drag-and-drop helper app for a NY Times word game, while Richard highlights the hidden risks. Together they explore how confirmation bias, anchoring, sunk cost fallacy, precision/accuracy bias, and optimism bias sneak in when prototypes start looking like products.

The big lesson: don’t use vibe coding to prove your idea — use it to learn.

If you want help learning how to validate ideas systematically — with or without AI — join us in an upcoming CSPO or A-CSPO workshop at Humanizing Work.

Show notes, links, and transcript: https://www.humanizingwork.com/vibe-coding-prototypes-advice/

Share your challenges or episode ideas: mailbag@humanizingwork.com

Connect with us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/humanizingwork

Story points are everywhere in agile teams, but too often they’re misunderstood and frustrating. In this episode, we explain how story points really work as a form of Reference Class Forecasting and show you how to use them the right way.

You’ll learn:

• Why story points often fail teams

• The simple move that makes them accurate and useful

• How to handle common questions about estimation

Whether you’re a product owner, scrum master, or team lead, this episode will help you move past the frustration and get real value from story points.

Show notes, links, and transcript for this episode: https://www.humanizingwork.com/how-to-fix-story-point-estimation/