Agile Complexification Inverter

The Committed Sardine By Ian Jukes  A blue whale is the largest mammal on earth. The adult blue whale is the length of 2½ Greyhound buses and weighs more than a fully loaded 737. A little known fact is that a blue whale is so large that when it decides to turnaround, it can take 3 to 5 minutes to turn 180 degrees in the opposite direction. As a result, some people have drawn a strong parallel between blue whales and our school system. It just seems to take forever to turn them around. There as some people who just don’t believe the public school system can be turned around. But compare the way a blue whale turns around (slowly) with how a school of. . . Sardines – which is the same or even greater mass than a blue whale. . . A school of sardines can almost turn instantly around – how do they do it? The answer is simple. If you take a careful look at a school of sardines you will notice that although all the fish appear to be swimming in the same direction, at any one ti...

Have you ever been in a situation where you thought the technique needed to move forward was one thing, yet the person leading (your leader) assumed something else was what was needed?  Did you feel misaligned, unheard, marginalized?  Would you believe that 54% of all leaders only use ONE style of leadership - regardless of the situation?  Does that one style of leading work well for the many levels of development we see on a team? Perhaps your team should investigate one of the most widely used leadership models in the world ("used to train over 5 million managers in the world’s most respected organizations").  And it's not just for the leaders.  The training is most effective when everyone receives the training and uses the model.  The use of a ubiquitous language on your team is a collaboration accelerator.  When everyone is using the same mental model, speaking the same vernacular hours of frustration and discussion may be curtailed, and alignm...

I'm from the Carolina's where legend has it that our family commonly just hunkered down in the home on the coast and waterways than to head for inland shelter. Now that's from the old school days of barely improved (read paved) roads. They counted a storms severity by how high on the back porch steps (about 15 - top to ground) the water reached.  I don't recommend this action in todays world of long range forecast and transportation options. I do recommend a drink or two in a hotel bar, far far away. This is the week that Harvey came ashore in Texas.  I live on a hill in the little old town of Grapevine outside Dallas and Fort Worth.  And thank you all for letting me know that a storm is coming... I didn't get out and walk Malibu before the rain hit, so I grabbed a hat and we went anyway.  Much nicer walk with the drizzle, I'd say. I'll raise a glass to you - if you were not smart enough to do the responsible thing, at the last responsible moment. ...

Pondering some messages... both the implied, the implicit, the unintended, and the overt. What are the messages when a manager calls a meeting and schedules it for an hour... then repeatedly states that they have nothing really to talk about, and after the group does the appropriate amount of beating the horse, the manager states "I will give you back 20 minutes."? One overt message is the meeting is over you are dismissed and you have 20 minutes returned to you to get real work accomplished. Another implied message is that your time is not your own and now the manager is returning their time, time they require of you to attend their meeting, is now returned to you so do with it as they have done - spend it well.  [ Because anyone delusional enough to think that time belongs to someone, is just off enough to believe that one can spend time. ] The unintended message - the part that rubs me raw; like when manager's refer to people as resources (typically implying...

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...

I learned this technique from the facilitators of Language Hunting  and Where Are Your Keys , they term the technique How Fascinating   and practice it quite a few times each game. The purpose of the technique is to invert the physiology of failure into a learning moment to reflect upon what just went wrong and instead of cringing and curling up into a safe ball, we open up the body and the mind to learning and the experience of reflecting and allowing the universe to teach us something. Try it a few times... See Also: The Failure bow -DeepFUN by Matt Smith Go Ahead, Take a Failure Bow by  Beth Kanter  at HBR TED Talk:   The unexpected benefit of celebrating failure "Great dreams aren't just visions," says Astro Teller, "They're visions coupled to strategies for making them real." The head of X (formerly Google X), Teller takes us inside the "moonshot factory," as it's called, where his team seeks to solve the world...

Which form of industry growth would you prefer - why? Which path leads toward the culture you desire in a software development organization? This is a wonderful article on the topic - read it and discuss with your colleagues. Programmers don’t need a union. We need a profession.    BY   MICHAELOCHURCH "Unions work best for commodity labor, and I use that term non-pejoratively. Commodity work is easily measurable and people can often be individually evaluated for performance. For example, a fishing boat operator is measured according to the quantity of fish she procures. A lot of very important work is commodity labor, so I don’t intend to disparage anyone by using that term. Commodity work can be unionized because there aren’t large and often intangible discrepancies in quality of output, and collective bargaining is often the best way to ensure that the workers are fairly compensated for the value they produce. Software is not commodity work, however. It...

The new and revised edition of Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs for the 21st Century. See Also: The Starbuck's Test

Guest post by: Tracy Gibson  ( tracy@gibson.name ) "If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living." ~ Gail Shelly Long-term results are the impact of coaching. We all want to improve our life in an area of career and work, money and wealth, people and relationships, health and wellbeing, and/or learning and growing. Yet how often have we vowed to change and sooner or later, the resolve that we have to start has waned or the methods chosen seem too hard. That wavering moment is where coaching steps in and strengthens our resolve. A good coach is someone who is an expert at helping others create positive change in their lives. For some clients, the positive change they most want may be focused on personal goals such as relationships, time management, work-life balance, stress reduction, simplification, health, etc., but other clients may be more interested in professional or business goals such as leadership, getting a pr...

I've collected a few videos that I find explain the new paradigm of the 21st century management. Punishment or Reward?  Which is more effective? by Veritasium Discusses the gambler's fallacy and regression to the mean when samples are taken from a normal population.  The importance of control groups in scientific studies. Dan Pink: The puzzle of motivation. TED Talk 2009 Dan will demonstrate that what science knows, business does not practice in the 21st century.  Watch this if you are a manager - you've been lawyered ! Dan Ariely: What makes us feel good about our work? Dan Pink: Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. RSA Animate Sir Ken Robinson  TED talk:  How to Escape Education's Death Valley Dr. Anita Williams Woolley, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory presented to alumni at Reunion 2013. Most of us are familiar with the idea of "general intelligence" in individuals, b...

If you're task is to motivate people - you may be surprised that you will fail very often. Invert your thinking.  Figure out, how do you not demotivate people?  It is easier to not demotivate people than to motivate them.  Here are a few ideas from Jim Collins, author of Good to Great. Don't first sell people on a vision.  Confront the reality (the facts). Don't decide first and then appear to discuss.  Have a true dialogue, then decide. Don't make progress toward the goal invisible.  Show progress, make it obvious. Related posts: my notes on Dan Pink's book Drive! see Sinek TED Talk video in  Be or Be Not; there is no Do in Agile

I wonder about these questions a lot - what types of task belong on the task board?  Does every task have to belong to a Story?  Are some tasks just too small?  Are some tasks too obvious?  Obviously some task are too larger, but when should it be decomposed?  How will we know a task is too large? I answer these questions with a question.  What about a task board motivates us to get work done?  The answer is: T.A.S.K.S. to DONE! Inherent in the acronym TASKS is the point of all tasks, to get to done.  That is the measure of if the task is the right size.  Does it motivate us to get the work done?  (see notes on Dan Pink's book: Drive - The surprising Truth about what motivates us ) If we are forgetting to do some class of task then putting it on the board will help us remember.  If we think some small task is being done by someone else, then putting it on the board will validate that someone else is actually doing it.  ...

Why do we practice this thing we call Agile?  Is it for the results it provides?  I've been working with companies and people that use the "A" word in many different ways.  Sometime the word is used as if it were a method of working. "We are doing Agile on this project, but the team has 34% story carry over each iteration." Sometimes it is used as a bludgeon to beat someone not behaving as one would like them to behave. Sales:  "I'd like you to work on this severity one bug, it just came in and the customer while not really blocked is considering a purchase of our SuperWidget and if you just sneak this in today they will be really happy."    Team Member:  "Sorry, talk to the PO we have sprint commitments."  Sales:  "Well, that's not very Agile !"    While at other times it is a promised land, a utopia of project management where we all live in harmony.  Many times it is used as a technique to achieve some other ...

Here is an excellent question:  Would you make the trade?  Trade a happy marriage for career success. Two things happened to Sandra Bullock [in March 2010]. First, she won an Academy Award for best actress. Then came the news reports claiming that her husband is an adulterous jerk. So the philosophic question of the day is: Would you take that as a deal? Would you exchange a tremendous professional triumph for a severe personal blow? New York Times Op-Ed Columnist  David Brooks The Sandra Bullock Trade According to one study, joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income. According to another, being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year.   One method of resolving this question is to understand motivation versus satisfiers as Herzberg described them in his Two Factor Theory .  Money is a satisfier, happiness is a motivator.

Yes I own "Our Choice" by Al Gore, for two reasons: It is the best book on the most important question of our era - our choice to save humanity.   It is the first innovation in books since Gutenberg. Al Gore Invents a Showpiece E-Book  By NY Times David Pogue. Oh - maybe there are many more reasons - the interactive info-graphics developed for the "book" by Push Pop Press , but then that just falls under the heading of innovation, doesn't it.

I've got to write my personal Performance Appraisal Goals & Objectives.  So in the process I thought I'd see what experts think about the whole system.  It appears that the system of performance appraisals crossed the chasm back in the 1950s.  Peter Drucker's Management by Objectives (MBO) spurred on this new technique.  Previous to WWII very few companies used this technique, the military did.  Going back even further the Civil Service Commission's system was in place back in 1887  (from Dick Grote's " The Performance Appraisal, Question and Answer Book "). McGregor's 1960 book  "The Human Side of Enterprise"  introduced the Theory X & Theory Y concepts of management . McGregor writes in Harvard Business Review (1957):   "Effective development of managers, does not include coercing them (no matter how benevolently) into acceptance of the goals of the enterprise, nor does it mean manipulating their behavior to suit organiza...

A paper and presentation at The Chair Academy , April 1 - 4, 2008 in Denver, CO. THE_DIGITAL_GENERATION_v2.ppt (PowerPoint presentation) Did You Know video by Karl Fisch & Scott McLeod.  Join the ShiftHappens conversation . THE_DIGITAL_GENERATION.pdf PDF Authors Info Tracy L. Gibson, Ed.D. Assistant Professor Organizational Leadership Chapman University -Bangor Mark Van Den Hende, Ph.D. Vice President for Academic Affairs & College Dean Waycross College University System of Georgia David A. Koontz Agile Coach Introduction   Traditional aged students today were born in 1987 and according to the Beloit College's Mindset List for the Class of 2009, “they don't remember when "cut and paste" involved scissors. They learned to count with Lotus 1-2-3. Voice mail has always been available. They may have fallen asleep playing with their Gameboys in the crib. Bill Gates has always been worth at least a billion dollars. Pixar has always existed. D...