Stress kills. Here’s the proof. And most of it can be avoided. But in the workplace, we put way too much emphasis on the task, and not the goal; on being busy rather than being successful. We say “yes” to more than we should, building our stresses. Why? Because we’re human. We’re social creatures, wired to please others and reap the rewards of acceptance. But if we say yes to everything, we’re probably going to start dropping the ball. A lot.

When you’re working towards SMART goals, you’ve got to be able to measure the impact your efforts are having. In fact, that’s what the M in SMART goals stands for. In Agile teams and DevOps, measuring performance is critical to quantifying the impact of your team’s work. And, without measuring how things are today, it will be impossible to know whether all our hard work will actually make any difference in the future.

Change is human nature. Sometimes it’s powerful. At other times, subtle. Change can be painful, liberating, scary, exciting – or all of that, at once. Regardless of how we perceive it, change is inevitable. Humans have experienced it throughout our tiny blip of cosmic existence, before the invention of anything. 12,000 years ago, the Neolithic revolution transformed human societies from hunter gatherer tribes, into farming communities. Slowly, we became experts of the land.