Let's improve leadership, culture, and engagement
"The best version of you helps others be the best version of themselves"
I'm Shea Heaver. I came to workplace culture through project management, which is a less strange route than it sounds. Agile fixed how software teams work by making the process short, iterative, and owned by the people doing the job. It struck me that culture and engagement were stuck with exactly the opposite: slow, top-down, and disconnected from daily reality. That idea became The ACE Manifesto.
Here, I share the thinking behind it, along with whatever else is on my mind about leadership, teams, and how we run projects.
Author of The ACE Manifesto, applying Agile to culture and engagement
Inspiring Workplaces Chief Inspiration Officer for South Florida
Three-term VP of Technology, PMI South Florida Chapter
Innovator of the Year, PMI South Florida, 2007
The ACE Manifesto
Agile transformed software development by replacing long, rigid, top-down plans with short cycles owned by the people doing the work. Culture and engagement never got that treatment. Most organizations still run an annual survey, present a deck, and wonder why nothing changed.
The ACE Manifesto (Agile Culture and Engagement) applies those same principles to the human side of the business. It gives HR leaders, managers, and employees a shared method for making real improvements in weeks rather than fiscal years.
Half framework, half workplace drama. Each instructional chapter is paired with a fiction chapter that follows a company called Dawgavron as its leaders discover and apply ACE in real time. You get the method, then you watch it play out somewhere that probably feels familiar.