About



Welcome to mansell.nl

I help organisations ranging from institutions to enterprises to start-ups take 'transformation' from being just a word in their strategy to sustainably changing their culture. I really love sailing, my career started as a yacht skipper and I have trained and been on some great sailing teams. I live in Amsterdam, the Netherlands with my wife and two children. 

My first life as an expat-kid and then a nomad have made me deeply intrigued by teams and communities. I believe strongly in emergent leadership, commitment to each other and learning together as the keys to performing.  Users of products and services shouldn't be consumers, we should make things together, cooperatively and as a commons.

I help organisations to change, sometimes just their digital tooling but more often their attitudes and behaviour - where especially Scrum, Human Centric Design and Open Source are my tools of choice.  I have the advantage that I can take the perspective of a manager but also that of a mariner, a start-up founder, a developer, a corporate consultant and an activist.


This website is my online CV.


Popular posts from this blog

Drie Agile-transformatielessen van een Agile Coach

Image
  This was a blog post on one of the sites of Highberg , in Dutch.  The blog is about:  1) Agile is not a goal 2) Change should be continuous, not following a plan 3) Change should not be top-down or bottom-up but collaborative Drie Agile-transformatielessen van een Agile Coach In de wereld van Agile ontwikkeling deelt onze Agile Coach, Dennis Mansell, de drie meest waardevolle lessen die hij heeft geleerd. Ontdek de essentiële inzichten voor een succesvolle Agile transformatie. Hoe ben je in de wereld van Transformaties terecht gekomen? Bijna tien jaar geleden ging ik over van een leven als zeiler en ondernemer naar fulltime Agile coach en/of programma manager. Ik kende Scrum inmiddels redelijk goed uit de softwareontwikkeling en had wat Design Thinking ervaring. Dit was een zeer zeldzame combinatie, want veel bedrijven wilden toen "Agile" werken. Intussen heb ik organisaties gezien van startups tot eeuwen-oude familiebedrijven, online gemeenschappen tot overheidsinstant...
Read more

Agile after Corona

Image
The Company to Consumer model under threat teambrunel.com Originally I became interested in agile software development when I started to discover a pattern between great teamwork in yacht racing and teams that produced software.  Some of the greatest software teams that I worked with were people working together on open source projects. Thousands of people worked together in self-organizing teams throughout their technology stack, much as if they had belonged to a single organization.  Could that model work in more organizations? There was an essential thing missing though - most of these teams were making things that were useful to themselves but not necessarily to a user who would be willing to pay.  Motivation was often very idealistic: working on free (as in liberty) software usually entailed working for free (as in beer).  Some projects became wildly successful, imagine a world without Linux , Wikipedia or Bitcoin .  But do you remember Joomla , M...
Read more