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Harvard Business Review says "Let your Workers Rebel"! https://hbr.org/cover-story/2016/10/let-your-workers-rebel Excerpt: Few leaders actively  encourage deviant behavior in their employees ; most go to great lengths to get rid of it. Yet nonconformity promotes innovation, improves performance, and can enhance a person’s standing more than conformity can. For example,  research  I conducted with Silvia Bellezza, of Columbia, and Anat Keinan, of Harvard, showed that observers judge a keynote speaker who wears red sneakers, a CEO who makes the rounds of Wall Street in a hoodie and jeans, and a presenter who creates her own PowerPoint template rather than using her company’s as having higher status than counterparts who conform to business norms.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/office-politics-make-best-people-quit-oleg-vishnepolsky/ Sure signs that you work in a healthy environment free from toxic politics. 1) Leadership is open, fair, authentic, honest, friendly and supportive. 2) Failures and mistakes are treated as lessons. Finger-pointing is frowned upon. 3) Employees are trusted and empowered. 4) People are promoted and rewarded on the basis of their accomplishments, not political favors. 5) Leadership takes real risks for employees, stands up for them, gets them what they need, is there for them when they run into problems. 6) Best ideas win. 7) Employees come first.

Believe it or not, 'bad Agile' is so prevalent that the US Department of Defense has created a guide to help spot it. https://media.defense.gov/2018/Oct/09/2002049591/-1/-1/0/DIB_DETECTING_AGILE_BS_2018.10.05.PDF Excerpt: Agile is a buzzword of software development, and so all DoD software development projects are, almost by default, now declared to be “agile.” The purpose of this document is to provide guidance to DoD program executives and acquisition professionals on how to detect software projects that are really using agile development versus those that are simply waterfall or spiral development in agile clothing (“agile-scrum-fall”).  Thank you to Joshua Kerievsky for pointing this out! https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6494647379457900544/

Agile Principle #6 is about face to face communication being the most effective, here is some data/research on that topic... WABER: We have by far the largest data set on workplace interaction in the world. And what do the data say about face-to-face communication? WABER: In all of our research, that has consistently been the most predictive factor of almost any organizational outcome you can think of : performance, job satisfaction, retention, you name it. People did evolve for millions of years to interact in a face-to-face way. We are very used to small changes in facial expression, small changes in tone of voice and that’s particularly important in work contexts where high levels of trust, especially as work gets more and more complex, and the things we build and make together are more and more complex. Really having that trust and being able to convey really rich information is critical. This is an excerpt from Freakonomics podcast about the open office concept if you’d ...

Harvard Business Review has some interesting advice including traveling and reading fiction... Want to Be More Open-Minded? Open-mindedness at work — about new products, strategies, business models — is one key to success.  But how do you develop it? Research has found there are several things you can do. For one, travel, whether it’s to another country or somewhere closer to home. As you encounter ways of living that differ from the ones you know best, your brain will get better at accepting new approaches and ideas. For a cheaper option, read fiction.  https://hbr.org/2018/11/a-new-way-to-become-more-open-minded?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_campaign=mtod_activesubs_dalertnlsubs&utm_content=signinnudge&referral=00203&deliveryName=DM25002

Lots of Agile organizations utilize a more "open office" layout to enable collaboration and better communication. However, there are good open offices and bad ones, here's a Freakonomics Podcast if you'd like to learn the tips of how to do it effectively... Listen to Yes, the Open Office Is Terrible — But It Doesn’t Have to Be from Freakonomics Radio in Podcasts.  https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics-radio/id354668519?mt=2&i=1000423886159

From our Agile friend, Adam Weisbart... The Bad News? Scrum is Really Popular! Excerpt: In many, many cases, orgs aren’t adopting Scrum because they believe in the values of Agility, they adopt it because they think they’ll magically get teams to do twice the work in half the time . The rest from Adam... I’ve been doing and teaching Scrum for over a decade. Each year I think we’ve hit “peak Scrum”, which gets me worried because I’ve seen Scrum help so many people and organizations. It’s transformative, and I’d miss its magic if it disappeared. But I’ve got some bad news… Each year, Scrum seems to get more and MORE popular. There’s no end in sight. “Wait… what?! Why all this doom and gloom Adam? It’s POPULAR!” One reason: Scrum is so popular organizations are adopting it simply BECAUSE IT’S SO POPULAR. …and that’s a horrible reason to do anything. In many, many cases, orgs aren’t adopting Scrum be...