Agile Complexification Inverter

I've been attracted to people that are self-aware of their own cognitive bias.  And I will have to admit that I'm not as self-aware.  Yet, I now have a wonderful mental model of human cognitive bias.  A tool to understand and categorize the many, many biases and the questions to inquire into my own preferences and biases. The article on Medium by author Buster Benson tells the story of his research and learning and the collaboration with graphic artist John Manoogian III - I suggest you read it. References:    Cognitive bias cheat sheet - Better Humans Wikipedia's list of Cognitive Biases Buy the Cognitive Bias Codex poster

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...

Concept of Product Development Flow "I believe that the dominant paradigm for managing product development is fundamentally wrong.  Not just a little wrong, but wrong to its very core.  It is as wrong as we were in manufacturing, before the Japanese unlocked the secret of lean manufacturing.  I believe that a  new paradigm is emerging, one that challenges the current orthodoxy of product development."  -- Donald Reinertsen Reinertsen goes beyond the advance ideas of lean manufacturing, what he calls Flow-Based Product Development. Scrum was sparked by a paper called The New New Product Development Game by  Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka (1986).  Are you seeing a synergy of ideas? Lean principle of Flow In the manufacturing world Toyota exemplifies the achievements one may obtain in 50 years of practicing a new mindset of principles.  Manufacturing deals with repetitive tasks predictable processes to produce component parts, hom...

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...

One can not manage Time . Why we talk like this is possible, might just lead to a billion dollar self help industry. Or we could invert the way we talk and think… Scheduling Your Energy, Not Your Time   By Scott Adams Yes that Scott Adams! In that short article Scott give you his secret to  success - it's basically free.  Now you could go out and buy a book like one of these to get other advice about your time usage.  Or - you could start by taking his (free) advice ... the decision is yours; but it's past time to make it. The Time Of Your Life | RPM Life Management System  $395 by Tony Robbins 100 Time Savers  (2016 Edition) [obviously time sensitive information] Tell Your Time: How to Manage Your Schedule So You Can Live Free  by Amy Lynn Andrews See Also: I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional  by Wendy Kaminer.     "The book is a strong critique of the self-help movement, and focuses criticism on ot...

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

Leadership is well defined - that's not the problem - the problem is it has many, many various definitions. Leadership definitions change throughout time. Your grandfather's definition of leadership may vary quite drastically from your's - ask him if you have the opportunity. A modern classic definition: Leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal. -- Peter Northouse Series Outline: A brief history of Leadership    A working definition of leadership    Is leadership a process    May leadership emerge from a group    Is leadership more than a form of coercion and power Various Leadership Approaches    Situational, Skills, Style, Trait Leadership Theories    Contingency Theory    Path-Goal Theory    Leader-Member Exchange Theory    Transformational Leadership Model     Servant Leadership Model   ...

Do a Google search on "servant leadership" and you will get plenty of hits (2.5 million for me just then). So if you don't know what it is cruise on over to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership and check out the 21st century " Cliff's Notes " on the topic. Disclaimer: as this blog is a from of note keeping for me - an extension of my cognitive model of the universe of knowledge - this article and the series of article may be in great flux until complete (or good enough to quit editing). Greenleaf's enlightenment of Servant Leadership stems from his reading of   Hermann Hesse's short novel, Journey to the East . "Hesse's story is an account of a mythical journey by a group of people on a spiritual quest where the recognition of the true leader of the group takes place as a result of his acts of service and self-sacrifice for the benefit of the whole group. As Spears tells it, upon reading this story, it seemed suddenly clear t...

Many coaches suggest that teamwork starts with trust.  Simon Sinek would have us believe that there is a perquisite for trust:  followers feel safe . That feeling of safety builds trust, and that trust sets the environment for teamwork. Do your team members feel safe?  If the project succeeds or fails do they still have a job on your team?  Answer no to that one simple question and you have your answer to why collaboration and teamwork is a challenge in your organization. Work toward changing that and you are demonstrating leadership. Did your software development organization follow the lead of many Agile companies and create a large open space floor plan with rows of cheep tables and expensive chairs?  Did this environment create the collaboration that it was intended to?  I've been in several companies recently that believe they have an Agile environment - this is far from the truth.  Let's look at what they really have and wha...

Before one scales up their functioning teams (I'm assuming one would not want to scale up non-functioning teams - yet I've seen that done) one should look for alternatives to the scaling problem. "Scaling Agile methods is the last thing you should do" — @martinfowler , 2003 This scaling problem has been studied: "In 1957, British naval historian and management satirist Northcote Parkinson [known for Parkinson's law: “work expands to fill the time available for its completion”] painted a cynical picture of a typical committee: It starts with four or five members, quickly grows to nine or ten, and, once it balloons to 20 and beyond, meetings become an utter waste of time – and all the important work is done before and after meetings by four or five most influential members." Scaling up Excellence Why Big Teams Suck  by Robert Sutton is a Stanford Professor and co-author (with Huggy Rao) of Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More without Set...

Watch this video ( Can You Solve This? by Veritasium ) to see the scientific process in action (well it takes a while for the people to become scientific... but they do).  My guess is that you - like me - will fall into the fallacy of confirmation bias at the first opportunity.  A phenomena referred to as the black swan fallacy. So scientific processes have a little trick up their sleeves called the Null Hypothesis .  The null hypothesis, or default answer, is generally assumed true until evidence indicates otherwise.  How often do you use this process to mutate your software development process?  How do you protect yourself from the confirmation bias during your process improvement experiments?  Do you see this null hypothesis at work in the TDD process of proving a unit test fails before the implementation code creates evidence to indicate otherwise? France is Bacon Since this scientific process is not very natural for us humans; it leaves ...

I hear lots of colleagues using the term 'technical debt' and the scenario that plays in my brain's cineplex is from The Princess Bride when Inigo Montoya remarks to Vizzini; "You keep using that word.  I don't think it means what you think it means." Inconceivable! So what does "Technical Debt" mean?  And what do my colleague's typically mean if it is not truly technical debt. The first is easy; the definition of Technical Debt: He who coins the term gets to define the term ( that's Ward Cunningham ). Ward Cunningham on Technical Debt Metaphor  OK, so to be truly technical debt one must negotiate the debt with the business.  The business should achieve some objective sooner and incur an obligation to repay the technical team the time and effort required to put the system back into a proper state of clean well factored code. But, wait... what could my colleagues mean when they misuse the term technical debt?  I think the...

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...