Agile Complexification Inverter

A package just arrived, express mail from a toy store.  I tear it open and inside are 40 PEZ dispensers and candy.  They are gifts for the teams.  Tomorrow will be a delightful day. PEZ in place of Task Hours When the team acknowledged that the task estimates would never accumulate to the number of work hours in the week - we had a great discussion.  The team of 5 people worked the typical 40 to 45 hour workweek.  Yes, we had lots of overhead chores that took us away from actual productive work on story tasks each week.  As well as those pesky Scrum meetings like planning, review & retrospective.  Heck - just doing the company's time accounting BS each week took an hour.  Yet, it wasn't like we only worked 3 to 5 hours per day.  Maybe we would be much more effective if we worked half days. Is it our inability to estimate accurately? Our over-optimistic nature? The fact that many of our tools required too much time to navigate and we...

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...

Here is a new set of books for Synergic Reading, lessons from more perspectives than one can wrap their minds around. I just ran across the book:   The Billionaire and the Mechanic on "the Face Page" (what my 85 yr old father calls it).  Apparently it's the choice of flight reading by Lia, a row boat captain who plans a trans-pacific crossing single handed this year.  See her awesome row boat:   Row Lia Row . The America’s Cup, first awarded in 1851, is the oldest trophy in international sports, and one of the most hotly contested. In 2000, Larry Ellison, co-founder and billionaire CEO of Oracle Corporation, decided to run for the coveted prize and found an unlikely partner in Norbert Bajurin, a car radiator mechanic who had recently been named Commodore of the blue collar Golden Gate Yacht Club. Julian Guthrie’s The Billionaire and the Mechanic tells the incredible story of the partnership between Larry and Norbert, their unsuccessful runs for the Cup in 2003 ...

A fractal flower pattern I find Scrum practices to be very self-similar at various scales of granularity. For example the Sprint appears to start with a planning sessions. Yet within the flow of a sprinting team the planning sessions actually starts with a Sprint Review and Process Retrospective and only then do we look into the future. So in the big picture, planning starts with review. Just like in the Scrum Standup meeting - the 3 questions - it starts with a review. What did you get done (past tense)? Next, what will you do (future tense)? And last, what impedes your progress (current tense)? The Scrum Standup meeting has a flow of past, future, now. When laid out end to end sprints have a similar pattern: Review & Retro (past), followed by Planning (future), followed by sprinting or doing the work (every day, the now). This self similar pattern can be found in many of the Scrum practices. Practices that mature agile teams use to deliver working tested product increments...