The folk at 37 Signals (if you’re a PM, you might know them for Basecamp) have a new office. It looks, on a shaky handheld video, like a nice space.

They’re doing with the new space what everyone should start doing: making exterior walls and windows open for working spaces, not conference rooms or offices. It’s nice to see companies make that transition. I remember working at a small company back in 2000ish that was so very proud of the fact that everyone had an office. It was ok – the best part of it was sharing an office, actually, with a peer who was also a close friend and collaborator. Good for us, not so good for interacting easily with our teams.

Around that same time, large companies had mostly shifted to exterior-wall offices with sprawling, top-lit cube farms from there to central bathrooms and stairs. That might be the most depressing office configuration anyone has ever constructed. It’s slightly improved by replacing the cubes with open-plan offices, and improved another small step by replacing the conference rooms with team spaces (basically, large spaces with high cube walls or some other designation of team boundaries).

Most of those places maintained the hierarchy of People in Offices, still along the exterior walls & windows – and you can tell a lot about an organization by its office configuration. I’m working in a building right now where office size is clearly tied to a person’s rank, and if you don’t rank highly enough, you get a cube with no natural light.

Back to the 37 Signals office! Props to them for ditching offices entirely, though that’s not entirely new. Giving people near-infinite possible configurations of space, allowing teams to form and disperse, is even better for people who need to work together. I’d like to see more of how their teams use the space – do they reconfigure? Are there temporary “walls”? Can tables and power supplies be moved easily? All those things reduce barriers to collaboration.

They also appear to have taken one of the open-space-office problems very seriously: the need for occasional privacy. Some of their spaces appear to be both soundproof (is it pervy of me to want to feel up their soundproof walls?) and seeing-in-proof. I like that – it’s one of the frustrating things about asking teams to radically co-locate; you do lose privacy, and many office arrangements aren’t designed to give you an alternative.

So! All told, a good space & a good example, if not an earth-shattering reimagination of space and time.

A few months ago, Gallup published a survey that shows us disengagement at work makes people depressed and sick. But what is this engagement thing, and why does its lack make us feel so lousy?

I’m suspicious of talk about “engagement”. It seems, more than anything, to get used to shift the focus of organizational problems for the organization to the individual.

As economic worries continue to frustrate both companies and the people who form them, of course people check out of work. They’re worried themselves, and it seems most have seen some form of economic cutback at work: layoffs, pay and benefit reductions, the generally worried and belt-tightening tone of most media coverage of work. It’s difficult to pay attention to much of anything when you’re operating with mild to moderate anxiety all the time. I’m finding this a lot as a consultant and change agent. Much of what we have to do is help people feel safe enough to even have a capacity for change. It’s not that they’re really resistant; their hope muscles are just tired.

This may not even be a problem each organization can solve – I wonder if it’s becoming another part of our culture? If so, it may be years before people really start to recover and feel safe enough to engage and create again.

Dan Pink had an article published a few weeks ago about Netflix and their vacation practices. The gist of the article is that there is a “take what you need, no one’s tracking it” approach to time off at Netflix. Same with expenses. Same, for that matter, with any kind of time-tracking whatsoever. Given how many companies seem to believe that detailed accounting for hours worked and dollars spent, this set of practices is refreshing (or as Pink says, “delightfully adult”). As people adopt agile, lean & other ideas that encourage team self-organization and an emphasis on value, we continue to rely on industrial-age budget controls based on the idea that an employer – or for those of us in consulting, a buyer – buys a certain amount of your time.

Self-determination around simple notions like how when and how much to work or spend seems right in line with the value-creation principles of agile teams and with contemporary workplace ideas like ROWE. It fits right in with a shift towards companies buying results or value from people. If only we’d all start thinking that way! Fallout from economic pressures in the US and associated “belt-tightening” rhetoric seem to have gotten many layoff survivors the mistaken notion that a person’s value is measured by how overworked she can be. If you appear to work 80 hours a week, the idea seems to go, clearly you’re a great bargain for someone who wanted to buy 40! Nevermind how badly the quality of your work degrades after hour 41, or how disconnected you are from the goals or value others hope to get out of your work… just having a job is primary.

I’d love to see that change. It would save those 80-hour bargains and get all of us more focused on doing something meaningful. Wonder if others will start formally following Netflix’s lead?

Semantic sidenote… The Telegraph headline notion that Netflix “lets” staff take whatever time they want is a bit odd and out of step with the notion of people self-regulating when it comes to time use: I guess most of us do assume that we’re granted time off or allowed to take vacation.

I put a link aside for myself yesterday & then decided to do a quick roundup of some really simple entry points into agile for software development.

1. This quickstart guide. Trust some Ruby devs to boil it down. Not everything they say will apply to everyone, but their injunction to become the customer is a great lesson, one that may be missing in many agile practices. Having the actual customer there is still vital; reenacting the age-old tensions between customer and engineer isn’t.

2. Agile in a Flash. It’s flash cards with simple summaries of agile practices and concepts. I think this site is actually a bit more sophisticated and aimed at experienced practitioners (references to shu/ha/ri, for instance, might be lost on noob agilists). It’s a great practice guide for people who are already doing some aspects of agile, and at least an aspirational reference for those who’ve done the classroom & conference style of agile and are trying to incorporate these ideas into actual work.

My intuition (fed with years of management science & motivational theory) says that adapting the conventional annual review notion as Atlassian recently announced they’re doing) won’t make a significant difference in employee morale or motivation. It’s still good to see someone noting that their GE-inspired system of “pay for performance” is utterly demotivating and more-or-less a waste of time.

Instead of an inspiring discussion about how to enhance people’s performance, the reviews caused disruptions, anxiety and de-motivated team members and managers. Also, even though our model was extremely lean and simple, the time investment was significant.

They’re not completely overhauling their system, just reducing compensation-to-review-score dependence and attempting to create a more continuous feedback cycle. But they’re doing it consciously and publicly. That’s encouraging – and I hope a great example for others.

Here’s a video that very prettily relates the Fibonacci sequence to nature and the golden mean.

This is part of why I love estimating with these numbers rather than any old whole numbers. It’s not just that we simplify argument & agreement, but there is something nifty and natural and just plain elegant about using this sequence.

It’s lovely to have something in our processes that is both useful and beautiful.

Esther Derby posted this lovely Mary Parker Follett quote earlier, and I share it because it elegantly describes what I think about leadership.

We talk a fair amount about “servant leadership” to project and functional managers making the transition into agile roles. But this isn’t really a new or different kind of leadership, just a new way of interpreting where the leader’s power comes from. Leaders – even ones radically changing the world or heading troops into battle – derive their power from people’s willingness to follow them. [This doesn't remove the usefulness of things like management or positional authority. If you've ever gotten lost with a group of friends, you've experienced how easy it is to just follow someone because they're in front of you.]

Leaders don’t need an immense, soaring vision. I’d argue that too detailed a soaring vision can actually get in the way of leadership’s main task: this co-active power of finding the best, most awesome things in a person or team. Leadership, too, need not reside only in the people with positional authority. It’s better when every member of a team can call forth their own, others’ and the group’s best potential.

Encouraging that leadership among team members, by the way, is a big part of the raison-d’etre for the coach, PM, Scrum Master, etc. – anyone who takes on the role of holding up the mirror to the team. The first (and frankly, constant – I have to redo this for myself often) step is recognizing that your own personal leadership comes largely from being a decent person who keeps growing.

The second step is to read Esther’s blog. *

* I kid, and yet I don’t. Part of being a decent, inspiring person is being inspired and growing yourself.

I finished my first coaching project today, and am leaving the lovely little city of Boston tonight. It’s exciting to imagine what will happen next, both for the teams I leave and for me. It’s a little sad, too: I’ve spent time with some pretty fantastic people, both the tiny ThoughtWorks team (in other words, Patrick Turley, with a little Ron and Greg for seasoning) and the gang from the client side. They’re swell, even when they’re a pain in the ass, and I’ll miss them.

People who rescue wild animals probably feel a bit like this. You like them, but ultimately the point is to send them back out on their own. The whole effort is impermanent by design. I’d like to install little tags on all these folk (painlessly, of course, and with their consent) so I can check in on everyone. Flying ok? Still favoring that frail left wing? Check it out! They met mates and are laying new generations of birdlets! [Er... maybe I'm taking the metaphor a bit far.]

Unlike wild animals, though, the best outcome from consulting and training is that we grow our future peers. I hope to see these client folk – especially the PM’s, if y’all are reading – at conferences and such in the future. Or writing books; whatever, I just want them to succeed and give back later.

I started at ThoughtWorks a couple of weeks ago. Once upon a time, I would have been in India for immersion now – but that’s changed. I have mixed feelings about this – on the one hand, getting right into work is exciting for me and more profitable for all, but on the other, I don’t get the deeper experience and bonds of learning side-by-side with a ton of other Thoughtworkers. I did have a couple of lovely people in my orientation group, but it didn’t feel as absorbed in the culture as I would like.

That, by the way, is clearly going to be the most difficult part of itinerant consulting: making and keeping connections with the people I don’t work with every day. There are a ton of brilliant people at TW, a couple of them working with me now, and that’s part of the appeal of this company: getting to absorb some of these brilliant, different perspectives. I’ll be working on that, looking for people and projects that can help feed that sense of tribe.

The travel isn’t hard. Well, the travel might be hard, if I weren’t someone who really enjoys new places. And airports. I’m working in Boston for the next several weeks, and it’s a good city full of good people, far as I can tell. I’m home this weekend in Richmond feeling a bit homesick for Boston (Richmond can’t handle snow and is getting a lot; Boston is highly competent at snow). The travel’s fun: new food, new vistas, new people, tiny towels. I like it all.

Working on a project also feels like jumping into the other awesome thing about working with ThoughtWorks: changing the world. We’re totally doing it.

How much do people, on average, think about their communication style? Over time, I’ve interacted with a lot of different personality and style assessments, and it’s fairly common for the people I know to have some assessment result they use to describe themselves – whether that’s MBTI, Personalysis, DiSc, or whatever they’ve experienced. Horoscopes, even (though those have nothing to do with your actual responses to questions or situations, they can color your understanding of self, right?).
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