The art of simplicity

In my post yesterday about shifting from "why" to "what" questions, I explored how this simple change can transform leadership conversations. Today, I want to focus on one specific question that came up in a related Coaching for Leaders podcast episode with Elizabeth Lotardo: What have you already tried? What makes this question so powerful? When someone comes to you with a problem and you ask, "What have you already tried?" you're sending several key messages simultaneously: You expect initiative. You're not surprised that they've already taken action—you assume it. This presumption of capability builds confidence. Experimentation is valued. By asking what they've tried , not what they've done , you're acknowledging that not everything works on the first attempt. And that's okay. Their attempts matter. Even if their experiments didn't solve the problem, the learning from those attempts is valuable informa...

Leadership isn't about having all the answers—it's about asking the right questions. I was reminded about this while listening to Shannon Minifie, CEO of Box of Crayons, on the Coaching for Leaders podcast ( Episode 760 ), where she explored how the quality of our questions shapes the quality of our leadership. The problem with "Why" As leaders, we're trained to dig deep, to understand root causes. "Why did this happen?" "Why didn't you finish that project?" These questions feel investigative and thorough. But here's what Minifie points out: "why" questions often put people on the defensive. When someone hears "Why did you do that?" their brain doesn't hear curiosity—it hears judgment. They start building walls instead of opening doors. The conversation shifts from exploration to explanation, from possibility to justification. The "What" alternative This connects directly to Michael Bungay Sta...

Azure DevOps (Server) had Mermaid support for a long time. Unfortunately that support was limited to the Wiki functionality. This means that if you had markdown files somewhere else in your repo; for example as part of your readme.md file or an architecture decision record(ADR), any mermaid diagram inside these files was not rendered. Some extensions exists in the Visual Studio marketplace that tried to solve this,  but when using these extensions I noticed that none of these extensions were bug free and all had limitations or caused problems with other features inside Azure DevOps. With the December 2025 release of Azure DevOps, you no longer need a 3th party solution as this feature is finally available. Create a mermaid diagram in any .md file: And the preview tab will now nicely render your diagram: Nice! More information Markdown Syntax for Files, Widgets, Wikis - Azure DevOps | Microsoft Learn Azure DevOps Server Release Notes - Azure DevOps Server & T...

Last week I shared my understanding of how capacity works in Microsoft Fabric. I just hit publish when I got a message that I exceeded my Fabric capacity (again). Time to open the Fabrics Metrics dashboard I introduced in my last post about Fabric and see who is the culprit: I opened the Compute tab and hovered over the top item in the list.  Turns out that Copilot is eating up a lot of my capacity. Whoops! I decided to disable copilot for this data warehouse. Therefore, I opened up a query in the data warehouse and clicked on the Copilot completions item at the bottom of the screen: This opens the configuration settings for my data warehouse where I can disable the completions:   If you want to disable Copilot completely, you can do that at the tenant level :   Remark: If you are still confused on how Fabric capacity exactly works, I found this great post by Tom Keim where he compares CU usage to watts: Just like electricity, where we’re billed by k...

Azure DevOps offers a repository health feature, which allows to monitor multiple metrics that contribute to the health of your Git repositories. If you are using Azure DevOps services, you maybe already know this feature. But with the latest release of Azure DevOps server (December 2025) , it finally arrived on-premise as well. Reasons enough to have a deeper look at it and write this post. Let’s dive in! Why is this feature relevant for my team? Think of your Git repository like a living organism. As it grows with more commits, blobs, branches, and objects, it can become sluggish and unwieldy. Large repositories increase the load on Azure DevOps infrastructure, affecting performance and user experience. Without proper maintenance, your team could face slower clone times, degraded git operations, and even service disruptions. The repository health feature now provides visibility into key health metrics and offers actionable recommendations before problems escalate. Getting t...

Being new to Microsoft Fabric, one of the topics that I found challenging, is how Fabric capacity and especially the throttling works. And what is a better way to structure my understanding than writing a blog post. Let’s give it a try! Remark : If I made some mistakes, please feel free to let me know so I can update this article. What is Microsoft Fabric Capacity? Microsoft Fabric capacity is the compute and storage resources you purchase to run Fabric workloads. Unlike traditional per-service pricing models, Fabric uses a unified capacity model where you purchase Capacity Units (CUs) that power all Fabric experiences including Data Engineering, Data Warehouse, Data Science, Real-Time Analytics, Power BI, and Data Factory. When you purchase a Fabric capacity, you're essentially reserving a pool of compute resources that can be shared across different workloads and users within your organization. This capacity is measured in Capacity Units, which represent the computational...