About

Welcome to mansell.nl

I am Dennis Mansell, I help organisations ranging from enterprises to start-ups take 'Agility' from being just a word in their strategy and turn it into their dna. I really love sailing, my career started as a yacht skipper. I live in Amsterdam, the Netherlands with my wife and son.

I have always been obsessed about getting people to work together. I believe strongly in distributed leadership and commitment to performance as the keys to getting the most out of people. I lead from the back - if everyone in the team knows more about what they do than I do then I am in the right spot.

I know a little bit about a lot of things but those things definitely include what is going on in the digital world. Agile Scrum is something that I strongly believe in with the advantage that I can take the enterprise perspective but also that of start-ups and Open Source communities.

This website is my online CV.



Dennis Mansell
+31 6 28 838 432

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Why Scrum? Why Agile? My Sailing Friends

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Deep Democracy meets Scrum

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About a year ago, I went to a training given by Sandra Bouckaert and Lydie van de Laar on the basics of Deep Democracy .  My wife was 35 weeks pregnant and I was working on a project with worryingly limited financing so I was not exactly in the perfect 'zen' mindset for a day of mind-battering brainstorming.  I expected to leave the day dazed and confused, yet found myself in the car buoyed up and even excited about what I had just experienced. Deep Democracy is a method developed in South Africa at the end of the apartheid regime and specializes in getting minority views heard.  It is concurrently a team-building tool and an ideation tool. 
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