Why I Wrote The ACE Manifesto
Agile fixed how software teams build products. Twenty-something years of running projects convinced me it could fix how organizations build culture too.
Nobody had written that book, so I did.
The thing I kept running into
I spent years managing global IT projects. Different countries, different companies, different technologies, and the same pattern every single time. The projects that succeeded were not the ones with the best plan. They were the ones where people felt they had some say in how the work got done.
Meanwhile, one floor up, the organization would be running its culture the exact opposite way. An annual engagement survey. A presentation of the results some months later. A committee. A list of action items that nobody who filled in the survey ever heard about again. Then twelve months of silence, and another survey.
What Agile actually taught me
When the Agile Manifesto landed in 2001, the radical part was not the stand-ups or the sprints. It was the admission that you cannot plan a complex human endeavor eighteen months in advance and expect the plan to survive contact with reality. Better to work in short cycles, get feedback constantly, and let the people doing the work decide how to do it.
I served three terms as VP of Technology for the PMI South Florida Chapter, and I spent a lot of those years arguing about methodology with people who cared deeply about methodology. What kept nagging at me was that we had solved this problem for software delivery and left the human side of the organization running a waterfall process that everyone privately admitted did not work.
Culture is not a project you deliver once. It is exactly the kind of complex, shifting, feedback-hungry thing Agile was invented for.
What ACE is, in short
ACE stands for Agile Culture and Engagement. It takes the core principles of Agile and hands them to HR leaders, managers, and employees as a shared way to improve culture in short cycles instead of annual ones. It is not a program you buy and install. It is a system your organization adapts and makes its own.
The full framework, along with the tools and resources that go with it, lives at acemanifesto.com.
Why half of it is a novel
Here is the problem with business books. You finish one, you agree with all of it, and then Monday arrives, and you have no idea what to actually say to the person sitting across from you.
So every instructional chapter in The ACE Manifesto is paired with a chapter of fiction. The story follows Dawgavron, a mid-sized company stalled on every metric that matters, as its leadership team stumbles into ACE and starts applying it. You read the method, then you watch someone fumble it, argue about it, and eventually get it right.
I did this because the objections matter more than the theory. In the fiction, somebody always says the thing you are thinking. The skeptical operations lead. The manager who does not have time for this. The employee who has already watched three initiatives die. Answering those objections inside a story works better than answering them in a bulleted list.
Where Dawgavron got its name
The company is entirely invented. The name is not.
DAWson. GAVin. RONan. My three sons, in order, stitched into the name of a fictional mid-sized company with a culture problem.
Once I had that, the rest followed. Nearly every character in the book is named after someone who matters to me, mostly family, or after a place in County Fermanagh, where I grew up before moving to South Florida in the mid-nineties. There is no key at the back of the book and no hidden meaning to decode. It was a way to keep myself company through a long stretch of writing, and it felt right that a book about people feeling valued should be built from the names of the people I value.
If you know me, you will spot a few. If you don't, it costs you nothing. Dawgavron is still just a company that badly needs to fix how it treats its people.
What's inside
Alongside the framework and the story, the book includes a working toolkit:
- Micro-Practices: small things any manager, employee, or team can implement this week
- Goal-setting worksheets
- Survey question banks that ask better questions than the annual one
- Team workshop and engagement activities
Extended versions of many of these are free on the book site, whether you have read the book or not.
Where to go from here
The book is coming soon. If you want to know when, the launch list is on the book's site, and I will not use it for anything else.
What ACE is, in short
ACE stands for Agile Culture and Engagement. It takes the core principles of Agile and hands them to HR leaders, managers, and employees as a shared way to improve culture in short cycles instead of annual ones. It is not a program you buy and install. It is a system your organization adapts and makes its own.
The full framework, along with the tools and resources that go with it, lives at acemanifesto.com.
Author of The ACE Manifesto, applying Agile to culture and engagement
Three-term VP of Technology, PMI South Florida Chapter
Innovator of the Year, PMI South Florida, 2007