In a recent social media discussion, someone stated that the founder of Kanban would not consider it “agile.” I don’t doubt that, and I know some Agilists say Kanban was/is only Lean and not agile. My belief that Kanban is an agile method is based on the way it is taught for use in offices …
Category: Concepts
Familiar Lessons from an Earlier Agile Forum
More than a dozen managers get together to discuss what isn’t working in their industry, especially given rapid market and technology changes they all face, and come out with a set of principles around responding quickly to those changes. No, I’m not talking about the Agile Manifesto of 2001. This was the “Agile Manufacturing Enterprise …
Stay in Your Comfort Zone
Motivational speakers do nothing for me—and most people, for very long. I have met people who say one of these well-intended folks changed their lives, but the research on learning suggests those are rare. More typically, the impact is to make people feel good for a short period, and at best create a very short-term …
Drop the Carrot and Stick: The Science of Motivation
In 1999, before I danced away the millennium on New Year’s Eve to Prince while ignoring fears about the Y2K Bug, a major study began changing the way researchers viewed worker motivation. Lead author Edward Deci was the first to propose in 1971 that workers might have internal motivations that had nothing to do with …
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The Radical Agilist Blog
“The Radical Agilist Blog” reports scientific evidence related to teamwork, leadership, agility, and business governance in a way managers can apply every day. It fights the “Management Knowledge/Practice Gap” between what scholars know about the workplace and what too many managers still do. This blog has roots in an e-mailed newsletter in 2000, TeamResearch News, …
Social Power: Root Cause of Injustice on the Streets and in the Office
Although I already planned on linking my earlier posts on social power to bias in the workplace, events in the streets reinforce the need. I believe the belated global discussion around racism overlooks an underlying factor that must be addressed if we are ever going to gain the moral, social, and financial benefits of truly …
A Pandemic of Micromanagement Fails Ethical, Pragmatic Tests
Silly me. I thought a silver lining in the Covid Crisis would be that managers would learn most workers do not need constant oversight to do good work, and will be productive from home even with its distractions. Because they couldn’t monitor worker activity closely, some managers would be forced to empower their teams to …
A Martial Artist and Agile Coach Explains Shu-Ha-Ri
When I walked into the studio of Master Y.K. Kim in 1981, I was lost. Not in the physical sense; I was there on purpose, drawn by his Yellow Pages ad. I was lost in the spiritual sense. My identity was gone. As I looked around his low-rent dojang in Orlando, I spotted on a …
Social Power Affects Leaders, Suggesting Compassion
During dinner a while back with an excellent leader in a large company (when eating out was still allowed), I gave him a challenge. We were talking about social power’s unconscious impacts on people. Before stepping away to release some whiskey, I asked him to think about the common behaviors of bad managers he’d had. …
Scrum vs. Kanban: The Evidence for Project Work
In my previous post, I discussed the origins of Kanban to ensure we understood the needs it was designed to fill, and to emphasize some points often ignored by modern implementors. In this post, I will dive directly into the “Scrum versus Kanban” debate by summarizing my search for objective evidence. I looked for any …
The Origin of Kanbans (Yes, Plural)
One of the ongoing debates in the Agile blogosphere boils up to, “Scrum vs. Kanban.” I have seen endless discourses, based mostly on the proponents’ personal experiences, as to which is the better way to run a project. As an evidence-based manager, I wanted to know if there were any objective data one way or …
Mind the Elephant: How Automatic Judgements Impact Org Change
When you and I hear something we don’t want to believe, here’s what happens in our brains, according to my thesis research on persuasion[1]: The emotional centers of our brain are triggered, and we get an unpleasant physical response such as tightness in the chest. Our brain starts searching for reasons to dismiss the offending …
Why I’m Dropping the Term “Scrum Master”
It was a dark moment, that day I realized many Agile advocates do not, in fact, “get it” regarding “self-organizing teams.” One indicator is the term used for people who facilitate Scrum ceremonies. For that reason I had already been thinking about changing the name, and then I started attending diversity and inclusion events. These …
Harpo the Ferret on Personality and Safety
In one of my best-read posts, I told the tale of Harpo the Ferret’s tail. A tussle over his diagnosis illustrated how experts and nonexperts can learn from evidence. If you didn’t read it, this your spoiler alert. If you did, you can skip the next paragraph. My ferret Harpo developed an odd bulb of …
Really, I Wasn’t Mansplaining—I Say that to Everyone!
At a startup competition I attended, I had an experience that reminded me how well-meaning people can end up in conflict because they are trapped in their personal histories. I will share this story despite being embarrassed about it, in hopes you will remember to consider the other person’s possible motives and patterns when a …
Here’s Proof Managers Need to Give Up Power
It’s easy for top executives to dismiss us “power to the people” consultants. They think us too “soft” to make the hard decisions needed for business success. People need to be directed and controlled, or they’ll just spend their days shopping online and checking social media, right? Leave aside that no one who knows me—a …
Should Only 20% of Projects be Waterfall?
Two seemingly unrelated topics crossed paths while I was researching this post. A common theme in my writings is the questionable nature of statistics bandied about the Internet and presentations. Within the past few months, I heard again the myth that “90% of all communication is nonverbal,” which was thoroughly debunked in the 1980s—by the …
Extreme Effectiveness: Does Your Firm Match the Model?
Do you work for an extremely effective organization? No offense, but I doubt it, after writing a paper on the concept. Let’s try a “thought experiment,” though. I will share a high-level summary of the characteristics of an effective organization according to science, footnoted with my sources so you can double-check me. Then I’ll take …
How a Culture Change Guru Blew a Culture Change
Zappos, the online shoe and fashion retailer, is well known for its unusual organizational culture centered on exceptional customer service and worker freedom. “Our philosophy has been that most of the money we might ordinarily have spent on advertising should be invested in customer service, so that our customers will do the marketing for us …
Harpo the Ferret on Experts vs. Evidence
We had a health scare in the Morgan household recently. During an annual checkup, Harpo was found to have an enlarged lymph node in his torso. Harpo is a ferret, named like his brothers for members of the Marx Brothers comedy team of the 1930s, because ferrets are the funniest animals I’ve lived with. In …
Find Good Management Evidence on Your Own
Free Sources of Management Studies Those who have read my earlier posts on evidence-based management have learned about “The Management Knowledge/Practice Gap”; discovered one reason for it is that “Good Evidence is Hard to Find”; and become skeptical readers about science because “Studies Say, Question Articles about Studies.” Now comes your chance to close the …
Good Evidence is Hard to Find
A Short History of Scientific Evidence for Managers In my first post on evidence-based management, I explored the gap between what researchers know managers should do to improve organizational performance, and what managers do. Before telling you how to close that gap for yourself, in this post I want to make clear you aren’t responsible …
Melt Down the Iron Triangle
Success rates for projects as judged by the “Triple Constraint” of scope/quality, budget, and cost, are miserably low. Less than half of any type of project succeeds on just two of those metrics, according to decades of surveys including the most recent from the Project Management Institute (PMI).[1] So many of the factors in success …
Seeing Past “Willful Blindness”
I often tell the story of a project manager at Microsoft who wasn’t very good at it. Among other reasons, he didn’t use project management software to control the work, despite Microsoft Project being the industry leader. Once he and my office-mate drove separately to an offsite meeting. She got there first despite having left …