One of the biggest changes the Coronavirus has made to the way we interact is that we are now interacting with each other not in the office, but in each other's homes. Their living rooms, kitchens, verandahs and home offices. The thing that strikes me about this is how personal those spaces are compared to our offices, and how comfortable people appear in their own spaces. Seeing this really brings home how much physical space matters in our work lives, and how much the design of our offices really lets us down.

Offices these days pretty much come in two flavours - the sterile cubicle farm and the modern funky. Your cube farm is the classic office layout, all beige or pastel panelling. An off white plywood desk in a tiny individual cubicle or (horror of horrors) a communal "pod". The modern funky office on the other hand is all bright colours, faux industrial chic furniture, exposed plywood, lots of communal spaces and plenty of green. This sort of office space is designed to scream out "Look at us…look how modern and funky we are!" Both of these office layouts are bad and, despite their very different appearances, for essentially the same reason.

Last time we looked at what it means to be a learning organisation. There are obvious benefits to having a learning organisation - better decisions, better products, better processes, better, well, just about everything. There are also some non-obvious benefits that are, in some ways, even more powerful than the obvious stuff - it turns out that learning is extremely motivating for people. Learning organisations tend to have very highly motivated, switched on, dedicated people in them and that gives them a huge advantage. It's not just that these organisations attract those sort of people, but the really amazing thing is that the people already in the organisation become more motivated when the organisation embraces learning.

It turns out that learning - getting better at something - is one of the key things that motivate us. When we talk about motivators in a work context we tend not to think about things like learning. We tend to think more about things like pay and bonuses. Psychologists who work in this field divide up motivators into two types - extrinsic (meaning coming from outside) and intrinsic (coming from inside). Things like pay, bonuses, company cars and the like are extrinsic motivators. Things like learning are intrinsic motivators. Guess which turns out to be more powerful? Yep. Intrinsic motivators win. Extrinsic motivators tend to work in reverse - the lack of pay is a de-motivator, but once you are paid fairly, more pay does not equal more motivation. So, what are intrinsic motivators and how do they work?

Hi Folks. Back after the new year (and a major unplanned upgrade to the blog that knocked me off air for a few months…so much for keeping up to date with maintenance) I’ll be kicking off with something I talked about at the end of last year - an in-depth look at my views on what an agile culture looks like. If you can cast your minds all the way back to 2018, I posted an overview of 5 things that I feel are the foundations of a good agile culture. To refresh everyone's memories (including mine) after the holiday season, here they are again -

• Supportive leadership

• Strive for quality

• Learning organisation

• Enable people 

• Enhance safety

Today I'll be looking at the first one - supportive leadership. Agile folks talk about this all the time by different names. Servant leadership, supportive leadership, people-focused leadership, and a host of others. We all mean the same thing. The trouble is, when we are asked "well, what exactly does that mean, we generally aren't very good at defining it, and are even worse at giving leaders real, practical guidance on what to do to become a supportive/servant/people focused leader. So here is my attempt.