Agile Complexification Inverter

Polish Poet and Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska on How Our Certitudes Keep Us Small and the Generative Power of Not-Knowing “Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’” By Maria Popova  - BrainPickings Purely for the fun of it, Maria Popova drew Wisława Szymborska’s poetic island in a map inspired by Thomas More’s Utopia. Polish poet Wisława Szymborska (July 2, 1923–February 1, 2012) "explored how our contracting compulsion for knowing can lead us astray in her sublime 1976 poem “Utopia,” found in her Map: Collected and Last Poems ( public library )" -- Maria Popova UTOPIA Island where all becomes clear. Solid ground beneath your feet. The only roads are those that offer access. Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs. The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here with branches disentangled since time immemorial. The Tree of Understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple, sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It. The t...

First, allow me to lay out some ground rules and a touch of the backstory... I'm not a professional book reviewer, nor paid in any way to read.  But if I could get that gig... I'd be a happy camper.  I've never written a book, but I've hacked out some code, a few articles, some of which might be considered book reviews.  I've worked in the Agile industry for more than a decade (but who's counting), and so - I may be a little close to the topic to have a proper literary impartial bias.  In fact, let me just go ahead and be explicit - I've done this, been there, got the t-shirt; I shit you not - this shit is for real! Agile  Noir  by Lancer Kind Now the ground rules...  I think this review will be written ... what's the word... while I'm reading, at the same time, without much delay in the reading-writing phases.... in situ .... iteratively... oh I give up... So don't be surprised - dear reader - if I just drop off in the middle......

In the practice of Scrum many people appear to have their favorite method of calculating the team's velocity. For many, this exercise appears very academic. Yet when you get three people and ask them you will invariability get more answers than you have belly-buttons. Velocity—the rate of change in the position of an object; a vector quantity, with both magnitude and direction. “C alculus is the mathematical study of change.”  — Donald Latorre  This pamphlet describes the method I use to teach beginning teams this one very important Scrum concept via  a photo journal simulation. Some of the basic reasons many teams are "doing it wrong"... (from my comment on Doc Norton's FB question:  Hey social media friends, I am curious to hear about dysfunctions on agile teams related to use of velocity. What have you seen? mgmt not understanding purpose of Velocity empirical measure; teams using some bogus statistical manipulation called an average ...

What can you do to save the world with an Amazon Dash Button? Has a new era of enablement reached the hockey stick curve of exponential growth?  I think it has.  I've been picking up this vibe, and I may not be the first to sense things around me.  I've got some feedback that I very poor at it in the personal sphere.  However, on a larger scale, on an abstract level, in the field of tech phenomena I've got a bit of a streak going.  Mind you I'm not rich on a Zuckerberg level... and my general problem is actualizing the idea as apposed to just having the brilliant idea - or recognizing the opportunity. A colleague told me I would like this tinker's Dash Button  hack.  It uses the little hardware IoT button Amazon built to sell more laundry soap - a bit of imaginative thinking outside of the supply chain problem domain and a few hours of coding.  Repurposing the giant AWS Cloud Mainframe, that the Matrix Architect has designed to enslave y...

IDEO-University 'From Ideas to Action' Lesson 1. Join the dialogue on G+ Agile+ group . Dialogue on Collaboration  on Facebook (PDF) Collaboration starts with who we are and our story - not the technology or the data "The Future of Work Is Social Collaboration from Inside Out, where people connect around the why of work from who they really are as individuals in community. They collaborate in generative conversations and co-create what’s next, i.e. their unique Contribution of value to society – what we might call Social Good. They collaborate by taking the time to appreciate and align each other’s unique, hard wired, natural strengths, creating new levels of authentic and trusting relationships to take the Social Journey." Jeremy Scrivens  Director at The Emotional Economy at Work What does dialogue mean... what does it contribute to collaboration? Here's what the inventor of the internet Al Gore had to say about this: Audie Cornish speaks with form...

Learning tools are beginning to benefit from the exponential growth process of knowledge creation and transference.  Here is Seeing Theory an example of this.  Did you do well in Probability and Stats in school?  Funny enough I can predict with astonishing accuracy that a majority of you said "NO!"   I also struggled with those courses, may have repeated it a time or two.  But now with some age I find it much more fascination to study this subject. Seeing Theory Leaning Site "By 2030 students will be learning from robot teachers 10 times faster than today"  by World Economic Forum. This is what happens when humans debate ethics in front of a super intelligent learning AI. See Also: TED Radio Hour : NPR : Open Source World   Tim Berners-Lee tells the story of how Gopher killed it's user base progress and CERN declared their WWW open source in 1993 April 30th, insuring it would continue to prosper.  And was it's growth exp...

You have not empowered a person by telling them "you are empowered."  This is a classic mistake in communication.  When one does this, they misinterpret their message, "I'm empowering you..." with the action that a verb such as empowerment requires to happen.  This person is taking a short cut, by giving the platitude of empowerment in place of any action that would be view by the other as empowering. "When told that they are empowered to do something; this message is actually interrupted to dis-empower the persons agency." How does this misinterpretation occur?  Why do we humans mess up this simple act of communication? Let's look at an example: For a few months I had been working with a new team of software developers at a large organization.  Like many organizations they had already done the agile/scrum thing and it didn't work for them.  Recently the leadership had built a satellite office and started from a very small pool of tenur...