Ha! Just as I wanted to increase the frequency of my postings, summer came. And I took a time out. It was good to step away (a little bit) from media and publications. I still read a lot of stuff and still collected lots of stuff, but I used the time to take a deep breath and reflect on my situation. Now we're in October and I will pick up my posting schedule again. Let's see where it leads us.

We are on our way back into our offices. The "New Normal" they call it. I am uncertain. The "New Normal" approaches that I have seen so far do not embrace the new possibilities nor regard the new challenges of being able to work anywhere, anytime. What most of the approaches are missing are the psychological and cultural aspects. If you take a look at companies and organizations that really adapt to the new opportunities you will see a difference in their cultural values and a stronger focus on the social aspects. I think the worst thing we can do is to turn the "New Normal" into a simple mathematical equation.

Articles

• Picking up my comments above, here's Johanna Rothman on the topic of going back to the offices.
• Some companies have always been working remote, some companies are starting out. Here are some lessons learned from running & leading remote teams.
• Are you organizing decentralized teams, too? Here is the Handbook of Handbooks of Decentralized Organizing.
• While you are building or re-building up your team again after the pandemic, regardless if you are in the office or not, here John Cutler has a nice exercise to execute with your team that will probably create needed clarity.
• Suffering from too much work? Can't reduce your WIP limit? Here is a beautiful twitter thread story of a CEO that reduced the WIP of his org to 0.
• We all talk about change every time. Change is hard, change is difficult and risky, but most often we agree, that something needs to change. And we often agree on what we need to change, too. But here is where the challenge starts: It's the how and the when, that makes it difficult sometimes.
• Can you fix a broken team culture?
• Enough team-building for today ;-) Here are some useful techniques to destroy your team.
• When you are in a post mortem or root cause analysis you will come across counterfactuals. What are counterfactuals? Well, here is an explanation and a rationale, why they can never be the cause of anything.
• I thought there is nothing more to write about testing, but here's a beautiful article on testing that sums up everything pretty nicely (including again a few reasons why you should test extensively).
• To me nothing has created more un-commitment in orgs than the dreadful RACI matrix by ivory tower design. Here's a take on accountability vs. responsibility. (Remark: I usually have nothing against RACI, I just often witness that they are used pretty poorly in orgs)
• As leaders learn new ways to interact with and enable organizations to pure performance, they are often struggling with the right approaches. What does self-contained mean? Here are some great advices for leaders who want to empower their organizations.
• Anne Abell and Carsten Jakobsen on Debt as a guide on the journey to agility.
• Roger Martin on the responsibility of the chief strategy officer.
• A beautiful article on the agile rebellion. (German)
• Here are the best and most famous board game designers according to the ranking of their games on boardgamegeek.com.
• Roman Pichler comes up with some good advices to fix some product backlog mistakes that can happen in a complex world.