I had quite a few one-on-ones with developers today and almost all of them started with:
“Wow, I didn’t realize you took out the desk.”
Last Thursday my desk partition was removed and replaced with a smallish circular table for meetings and to have more of a team room atmosphere. My normal office these days is a cubicle out on the floor with everyone else. It’s a bigger layout, but I think I still surprised some of my team. In an effort to seek improvements however small, I’m constantly adjusting things.
This time it was an office desk versus a table, tomorrow it may be adjusting our code review process or adding an impediment chart to a Scrum project. I think it’s the scientist in me that loves the experimentation and testing of a hypothesis. If you try out a lot of ideas some of them turn out to be really useful, and who wants to do the same thing all the time.