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 …
Author: Jim Morgan
Customer Satisfaction Beats the Market
A utility meter company I was coaching, part of a large multinational, delayed a customer delivery by a week so it would not book more profits than it had predicted for that quarter. They feared it would hurt their stock prices. Numerous studies have shown that long-term revenues are the primary driver of stock value. …
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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. Coach Jim now posts more personal opinion pieces as articles on LinkedIn.
Proof Empowerment Improves Performance
You wanted proof to give your managers about the need to empower your teams, and here it is: Two major studies prove that if workers have “a sense of control in relation to one’s work,” it improves performance by individuals and teams of all types. These are “meta-analyses,” drawing on data from a total of …
How to Become an Agile/Servant Leader in One Meeting
Forget Kanban, SAFe, LeSS, and even my own system Full Scale agile™ (FuSca™): If you are a manager pondering how to adopt Agile, your direct-report team can be there in just one meeting. Just as quickly, you will become the kind of servant/transformational leader generations of management gurus have talked about, but few managers actually …
Tolstoy on War and Peace and Agile
Due to covid-19, my local library was closed for two months. Actually, other urban systems in my state opened much earlier, so part of that period was due to a lack of agility by the library system’s managers. This segues to the title of this post. I took the closure as an opportunity to finally …
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 …
“Agile vs. Waterfall” Started with “Aristotle vs. Plato”
The interest in Dead White Male Philosophers is limited to a tiny slice of the population, I realize. Especially in my home country; as far back as the 1830s, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville observed, “I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States.” …
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. …
Stop Calling These Practices “Radical!”
TED talks by managers who try radically weird leadership practices and get amazing results… those are the exceptions that prove the rule, right? If the way most companies are run is a problem, more would change, right? Sorry, but no. The reason companies succeed while using standard practices is because they are competing against companies …
Does Diversity Improve Financial Performance? Yes, But…
I support workplace diversity not only on ethical grounds, but because it can be a source of competitive advantage. Diversity enhances communication across a broader customer base, expands the pool of qualified job candidates, and provides access to information that would otherwise be unavailable.[1] But data suggests getting those benefits isn’t easy or guaranteed. After …
My Final Post Ever on Meeting Facilitation
Rarely has writing a blog post made me downright angry. The problem isn’t that new evidence has convinced me I was wrong about something—that has never bothered me. No, I am angry because new, high-quality evidence proves I have been right for 25 years. The bile comes because very few managers practice what I taught …
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 …
Trust Me: Here’s the Truth about Trust
Back when “team building” was the hottest fad in management, no activity garnered as much derision as “trust falls.” The self-proclaimed team builder would have the team gather behind one member and ask that person to fall backwards, trusting their peers to catch them. The ridiculous, and much-ridiculed, idea was that somehow not letting another …
Executives Who Really Want Diversity Must Reconsider their Public Words
Imagine the scene: A large hotel conference room in America filled mostly by white males in dark suits and plain shirts. A coterie of darker-skinned servers works the sea of tables. An older white male emcees the proceedings, and another asks everyone to bow their heads in prayer before delivering a Judeo-Christian blessing. After lunch, …
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 …
Save Electronics Design Costs by Thinking Safety Second
If you’re reading this on anything bigger than a phone, turn the device over. Depending on where you in the world you got it, you might see a label with one or more sets of letters like CE, UL, or FCC. You might be surprised to learn what goes into getting those letters, and what …
Executives Cannot Rely on HR to Prevent Harassment Lawsuits
“‘I’m here so that this company doesn’t hire someone like me to come in and destroy your career.'” That’s the ear-catching line a successful litigator of harassment lawsuits uses to get the attention of executives glued to their phones when he is introduced as a speaker. Mark Baute is quoted in an article in The …
You Don’t Need a Framework to be Agile
Any systematic approach to managing work is better than no system. And any of the existing Agile frameworks are better than a “waterfall” method where Agile is more appropriate, the majority of cases. But you don’t need Crystal or SAFe or even my Full Scale agile™ to be Agile. At the same time Scrum was …
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 …
Start Your Startup with the Customer’s Needs
Millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money are funneled into a wide range of startups every year. Any taxpayer might reasonably ask, what do we get for our money? Quite a lot, according to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF): “Some well-known firms, such as Qualcomm and Symantec, received early support from the NSF program. …
What an Older White Cis-Male Learned at a Diversity Conference
I am a middle-aged, white, Anglo, straight cis-male using he/his/him pronouns. I hope I got that right. I have learned it’s not my place to claim I am an “ally” of minorities, but I am trying to be. Throw in that I was raised upper-middle-class in the American South and own my home debt-free, and …
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 …
How Power Impacts the (Even Slightly) Powerful
The British explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes wrote a book about the famous Battle of Agincourt from a unique perspective: His ancestors were leaders on both sides in the battle, as they had been in the wars between England and France over four centuries. His great-times-30-grandfather commanded the first army to invade the other side, for …
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 …
Think Like a Scientist to Make Better Decisions
Many people are skeptical of science these days. Though my successes over 30 years have been based on scientific learning, I understand why. Scientists make mistakes like everyone else, but the profession makes it easier to admit that, so the public sees the errors. Some cross ethical lines, as in every profession. Most scientists have …
Cheap Agile: Don’t Hire a Team of Coaches
Multiple times a week it happens: No matter how many ways I try to make clear I am only a solo or lead transformation coach, people contact me about joining the team of Agile coaches in some large company. The worst part is not the waste of my time. The worst part is the waste …
The Sorry State of Management Education
I am not the first to point a finger at training as not only a solution to, but a culprit in the Management Knowledge/Practice Gap. That’s the well-documented gulf between techniques proven for decades to create more effective workplaces and the techniques still used by most managers. Researchers of the Gap have noted many problems …
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 …
To Succeed, He Threw Out the Management Books
In 1980 when Ricardo Semler took over SEMCO, a manufacturing plant with 100 workers and $4 million in annual earnings, it was nearly bankrupt. By 1989 he had introduced many radical changes, and his outline of those and the results were published in Harvard Business Review (HBR). When Semler first took over, he tried to …
Bad Teams Talk Too Much… and Too Little
Presenters often extol the value of more communication. At the same time we hear complaints about “information overload” and “too many meetings.” I am among those who have advised managers to err on the side of overcommunicating, and in The Truth about Teambuilding I cover evidence that talking more improves team decision-making. However, I added …
Should Startups Take Time to Get Organized? Here’s the Evidence
When I was working as a group manager at a mid-sized startup near Seattle years ago, a fellow manager said it was the fifth startup he had worked in. Of the other four, only one survived. That one had stopped work for two months to get its processes in order. Our current startup was a …
Agile Truths from an “Agile” Project before Agile
I trained four administrative teams to meet the principles of the Agile Manifesto seven years before it was written. Their story busts several myths about Agile that continue to hinder its adoption 25 years later. As mentioned in a recent post, Los Alamos National Laboratory faced a major risk in 1994. Their equipment management system …
Agilists Still Face Tesla’s Enemies
As you read this, give thanks to Nikola Tesla. An extraordinary genius whose career spanned the turn of the previous century, his inventions are the basis for the systems powering your device and transmitting this post wirelessly. He had so critical a role in the technology undergirding our life today, the author of a 2018 …
Half-a-Dozen Proven Ways to Innovate
For those of you trying to decide right now the best way to get creative about your products, processes, or problems, a new report is worth a look. Nesta, “The Innovation Foundation” in the United Kingdom, recently released A Compendium of Innovation Methods. It was written by 24 contributors including researchers, leaders of innovation organizations, …
Don’t Call the Job “Agile Project Manager”
A Self-Contradicting Job Title Though a free-lancer these days, I keep a few job alerts running just in case something fitting my exacting requirements pops up. Plus, it is a way to monitor what is happening in the real world of Agile versus the theoretical one of blogs and books. One of the biggest indicators …
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 …
Please Don’t Feed the Seagulls
Nearly every week, I am contacted by a recruiter wanting me to become a consultant who guides clients in Agile transformation on a traveling basis. It feels like every major IT consulting/staffing agency is getting into the game. Too bad the only evidence this approach works comes from drop-in consultants and their agencies. A look …
Studies Say, Question Articles about Studies
Start with the Source In previous posts I talked about attempts to close the management knowledge-practice gap through evidence-based management (EBM), and the problems with the information sources most managers use. Science is only one source in EBM, but it is the least understood, so in this post I will give you the tools to …
Cheap Agile:
You Don’t Need Full-Time Scrum Masters
A team with a full-time organizer is not “self-organizing!” My path from technical writer to Agile Coach started at Los Alamos National Laboratory 25 years ago. A new project was framed as a rewrite of a manual. But it became clear this required getting four groups on the same page—pun intended—within and across groups, and …
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 …
The Management Knowledge/Practice Gap
Dangers when Doctors Ignore Science In the 1980s, researchers began raising alarms about the lack of current scientific knowledge among practitioners in a business clearly based on science: medicine. Although hundreds of medical studies were published every year to update our understanding of the human body, only a small percentage of doctors were consulting that …