Not all asynchronous collaboration is productive. There are four ways I see teams get “async” wrong.

While tools aren’t the end-all and be-all for distributed collaboration and knowledge sharing, they’re hardly trivial. Companies cannot allow their collaboration tool stack to languish. They must aim for a world-class user experience.

Forcing functions are constraints that nudge people towards desirable behaviours. In this article, I discuss five forcing functions to promote effective meetings.

The “whiteboard effect” refers to a deep work phenomenon that occurs when two or more people problem solve together in spells of intense focus. The presence of this effect doesn’t mean, however, that we must always be in whiteboard mode.

When people can identify themselves in all their interactions with each other, it reflects a high psychological safety. But just like a failing test can be invaluable in coding, you need the test of “anonymous contributions allowed” to test if your psychological safety is indeed as high as you’d like it to be.

Audio and video can add a new dimension to asynchronous communication. In this article I explain how we can be effective at communicating with audio and video.

The sooner a new team can norm, the sooner it delivers value to its stakeholders. This article provides a recipe for leaders of distributed teams to accelerate team norming.

Most tech companies want to run well-leveraged teams; i.e a few senior people and a bunch of junior people. But many of us lack the process discipline to do this well. How do you design a team environment that’s inclusive of junior people? That’s the million dollar question I address in this article.

If you adopt asynchronous work, everyone should be able to work on a schedule that’s convenient to them. But that may not be the case from day one. You must first build your deep-work muscle.

Group chat can be both a helpful tool and a distraction in the workplace. While suitable for quick exchanges and simple information sharing, it falls short for more important discussions and tasks.

Advocates of in-person work often say they need to get their teams together for brainstorming sessions. This is a waste of time. The effectiveness of brainstorming is a corporate myth.

Want to be a better async worker? Check out this guide on how to read effectively and provide feedback. It's shorter than the writing guide, but just as helpful!

If writing is the number one remote working superpower, then we must all get better at it. Here’s how to level up your writing game.

Well intentioned, busy people want to be collaborative. But they often end up as bottlenecks. I argue that busy people must change their model of collaboration.

I think sending meeting recordings instead of meeting minutes is inefficient and insensitive. You can do much better.

Wait, what? Write in slides? Well, yes. And I’m sure you’ve seen this yourself. Heck, I’ve done it myself as well. Guilty as charged!

If you’ve normalised this approach to writing and sharing information, then I’m here to tell you that you should write differently. That’s what this post is about.

The agile manifesto claims that the best way of communicating in a team, is face-to-face. Does that claim hold up to scrutiny? 21 years after the manifesto came to life, have technology, the nature of our projects and our ways of organising and working taught us something different? I explore all these questions and more.

In a world of work that’s changed rapidly in the two years of the pandemic, I feel we need to ask the “Why” more than ever before. This is a new normal and as we switch between work patterns, such as forced-remote, remote-first, all-remote and hybrid, some practices will have to die. Others may have to change.

In this post, I want to explore two sprint ceremonies with a “Why” lens. I’ll also share a few ways you can buy back time for your team by taking lightweight, more async-friendly approaches to manage iterative development.

If working remotely is more productive, what’s face-to-face (F2F) good for anymore? In today’s post, I want to explore that question in some depth. I have strong opinions; so don’t get all bent out of shape when you read this.

Sometimes we give a free pass to any activity that seems collaborative. Before you know it, you’ve built half a dozen gate checks to deliver a single user story. Each of those “collaborative” gate-checks doesn’t just create interruptions and context switches. It also leaves an attention residue - your mind continues to think about the interruption even when you’ve switched to the task on hand. In this article we examine the ad-hoc “huddle” through a series of questions, so we can find out how much we really need them.