When teams and managers forget about the values and sentiments driving the agile movement, practices become convenient fig leaves to cover up the “inanities of corporate life.” I've observed four such fig leaves most often.

Not all asynchronous collaboration is productive. There are four ways I see teams get “async” wrong.

All’s not well in remote work paradise. For many employees a remote work arrangement is a Faustian bargain. They have to endure the dark side of remote work.

The agile movement was about freeing developers from the baggage of Dilbertesque corporations. But in the 2020s, “doing agile” often comes at the cost of agility. Teams and companies sacrifice common-sense at the altar of a hustle culture, that looks agile, but is far from the spirit of the movement.

Copy-pasting office-centric practices rarely works for remote and distributed teams. Three such practices suck, when you attempt them remotely.

We must soon retire the word “hybrid”. It does less to clarify work patterns and more to confuse people.

Well intentioned, busy people want to be collaborative. But they often end up as bottlenecks. I argue that busy people must change their model of collaboration.

Wait, what? Write in slides? Well, yes. And I’m sure you’ve seen this yourself. Heck, I’ve done it myself as well. Guilty as charged!

If you’ve normalised this approach to writing and sharing information, then I’m here to tell you that you should write differently. That’s what this post is about.

Unpredictable days are shapeless days. This represents the classic maker-manager paradox. Makers need contiguous blocks of time to achieve meaningful outcomes. A calendar driven schedule is amongst the worst blows to a maker’s productivity. We can’t be proud of this way of working.

I notice that some teams, organisations and products are attempting to recreate an office in the cloud. This is a counterproductive trend. In this post I explain why being async-first is a better idea.