tribes – NeoPragma LLC

First, here’s the short version for those poor souls suffering from tl;dr (too lazy, don’t read much) syndrome, that peculiar malaise that characterizes our times:

Can working from home be effective
compared with collocated teams?
Opponents are quick with invective
and full of opinions, it seems.

But what if we increased, in some way,
the ratio of signal to noise?
Could we discover a good way to
routinely deliver with poise?

And now to business.

One of the ongoing debates in the IT world over the past few years has been about the relative merits of team collocation, including intense collaboration, paired work, and continuous osmotic communication, versus solo work, including work from home and other forms of remote work as well as office spaces fitted with individual cubicles. Continue reading Does remote work work?

It’s a commonplace that large organizations tend to be stodgy and bureaucratic, and smaller ones tend to be innovative and flexible. When we see a large organization that seems to be innovative and flexible, we are amazed. The press springs into action to report on the existence of this Highly Unusual Thing. It’s an oddity, a curiosity, an anomaly, a freak of nature. The organization is cited as a case study in business books and academic papers. Executives in other companies try to mimic what they think they see the exemplary company doing.

Having participated in various change initiatives in organizations of all sizes (from around 20 people to around 240,000), it strikes me that size alone does not lead to stodginess. I think there’s something more fundamental: Identity. That is, the sense of identity on the part of the individual members of the organization. Do people feel like members of the same organization, all aiming for the same goals, or do they feel like members of a local tribe: Team, work group, department, division, etc.? As an organization grows, what factors might contribute to one sense of identity versus the other?

Continue reading Size doesn’t matter