The remote-work divide between employers and employees feels more stark each passing week. Lest it descend into an adversarial relationship, I believe we must view this exchange as a two-way street.

In large organisations, it’s tough for a small team to cling to its own subculture for too long. It’s not impossible to have an ‘async island of excellence’! It’s just hard. I want to use this post to reflect on the challenges your async-first team could face. In the process, I want to explain why it makes sense for the entire company to eventually go async-first.

Senior leaders are often victims to blind spots and corporate superstition. And just like in real life, superstition hurts at work as well. So, let’s examine some common superstitions we all face at work, with a critical lens. By the end of this post, we’ll know which of them hold up to logical scrutiny.

If as a leader, agile coach or change evangelist keen on introducing asynchronous work practices on your team, you may be daunted by the potential obstacles you may face in the journey.

In this relatively shorter article, I’d like to share with you three ideas that may help you prime both your broader organisation and your team for the change. We’re not yet at the level of an implementation checklist and a playbook for individual practices will follow in due course, but for the time being, consider this as a framework to help align your team.

The first port of call for any change journey is your immediate team. If your colleagues don’t commit to change, it’s unlikely that even in a conducive organisational culture, a shift will happen.

As an evangelist, coach, consultant and change maker, anticipating push back from your team will help you deal with it as well. So in this article, I’d like to share with you some blockers you’re likely to encounter from your colleagues and towards the end of this piece, we’ll consider some high-level approaches to address these blockers.

Introducing change in large organisations is tough. Synchronous work has a 250 year old legacy and organisations are used to it for a number of reasons. As an advocate of asynchronous work, you need to be aware of the potential challenges you’ll face when you try to introduce a new way of working in any organisation.

This article outlines some of the obstacles you should expect.

Distributed agile software development projects rely too much on synchronous communication. This not only leaves too little time for deep work, it also leads to burnout, less diverse teams and knowledge and information sharing practices that don’t scale.

Asynchronous work has the potential to transform distributed agile so it’s fun, sustainable, inclusive and scalable.