Sometimes people just won’t do what you want them to do—what they should do—no matter how hard you try to persuade them. Why is that?

It’s been quiet on this blog for awhile.

For one thing, the house construction mentioned so long ago has finally started moving forward after a long struggle procuring the necessary permits. (That’s an external dependency that was estimated extremely optimistically!) For another, I’ve been traveling almost non-stop helping an out-of-town client with an Agile transition. This is made even more interesting by the fact that the team is distributed, and composed of people from two formerly separate companies. Tucked in among these was the AYE Conference—extraordinarily valuable, but also completely consuming while I’m there. I learn so much and meet so many interesting people that I never want to miss a minute of the action.

It’s all a great deal of fun, but leaves no time during the day. By evening, usually a peak time for me, I’ve been pretty exhausted. I’m not generally a morning person, though I’ve gotten up early this morning to write this note. Don’t expect me to get up early every morning, though!

Enough about me. I didn’t get up to write this posting to tell you about the complications of my life. That’s just the preamble. As I was thinking about these things that I’m doing, I also thought about people caught in an “interesting” Agile transformation or other change situation that makes high demands on them. Not only are they dealing with the normal issues of the Satir Change Model but when dealing with such change(s) and also being expected to maintain a high level of productivity during the change, maybe they’re just tired.

It makes me want to read the book, Slack by Tom DeMarco…. There, now it’s ordered for my reading backlog, along with The Deadline.