At our group, we have worked on some performance tracking and employee community engagements. Gamification was something we looked into but found it wasn't very motivating at all so changed track. Engagement has been a really hard thing to measure (even imperfectly). It seems like some combination of outcome performance and retention (or estimation of churn/attrition) is one model to use. I wonder how this differs for passion. How might we balance the differences in personality (say introverts vs. extroverts), interest in communicating externally (blog posts were written), etc. to identify passionate people? Maybe there isn't a good way to put a number on this and it really requires managers to look at qualitative discussions with their employees.

Groups that have the ability to change themselves while still focusing on an end goal are more likely to do a good job at this. The Boydian thinking of OODA loops, analysis and synthesis try to allow for this type of adaptation of the team to circumstances. Another great starting point are the principals put out for Agile. There are many many ways to do agile, but the core tenants are great.