Agile Complexification Inverter

 Here is the set up of the classic joke: A human brain, a dolphin brain, a octopus brain, and an  ant brain walk in to a bar.... Well that will not happen... but 4 diverse experts studying those creatures brains did walk into an interview and this is what came out of it. "Redefine 'Man',  redefine 'Tool', or accept chimpanzees as human." -    Louis Leakey PARTICIPANTS: Simon Garnier, Suzana Herculano-Houzel, Frank Grasso, Denise Herzing MODERATOR: Faith Salie

A few months ago Michele of Sliger Consulting, Inc. asked about my first Agile Light Bulb moment, I've had a few of them but one that easily came to mind was this one with the Washington State Appellate Clerk court case management systems people back in 2005. In just two months our newly delivering Scrum team had put into production the "undoable" feature - BAM! - value delivered, trust confirmed, transformation successful. "My light bulb moment was during the product demo in the Sprint Review Meeting, when the state of Washington Appellate Clerk of Court told me he and the courts had been waiting 20 years for the feature that our team had just delivered. In just two months our newly delivering Scrum team had put into production the "undoable" feature - BAM! - value delivered, trust confirmed, transformation successful. He later sent me the requirement spec for the 20-year-old feature and it read just like our epic story and its children we discovered...

How does the brain process visual clues to the environment and synthesize meaning about an ever changing landscape?   Tom Wujec explains the creation of mental models and why AutoDesk invest in visual management techniques to plan their strategic roadmaps. Also in one of Tom Wujec's talks on How to Make Toast , he explains another important point of visual management - system's thinking and group work. Don't worry... the mind will do all the work.  It will fill in the missing details, and abstract the patterns into the concept.  Here's an exercise, Squiggle Birds by David Gray , to experience this. On a similar topic - Your view of Time Do you know where you perception of time comes from... it's not the same all over the earth.  It's a cultural construct.  If you are like me (English speaking/writing) you have a perception that time flows from left to right (the direction of reading written words).  Ponder that a moment... time flow is...

When asked, many people wish to get better at estimation by tracking actuals and then assuming that some form of reflection upon those actuals will lead to better estimation.  I've long held a belief that it doesn't happen quite so simply in reality.  There are many assumptions in that proposal that are just glossed over.   Let's list a few (just for fun):  Actuals are accurate and precise representations, time will be allotted to reflections and learning,  people (teams of people) will all arrive at similar conclusions and learn from the reflection of estimate not equal to actual, future behavior will change significantly and quickly, among other assumptions. Well finally science has something to say about this.  A study: " How unrealistic optimism is maintained in the face of reality " by  Tali Sharot , Christoph W Korn & Raymond J Dolan  published in Nature Neuroscience (2011) has some fMRI proof that these behaviors are hard to...

I've been reading the futurist Ray Kurzweil's latest book ( book's web site ). I find his theories fascinating.  He has quite a record for predicting the future (see ch. 10  The Law of Accelerating Returns - How my predictions are fairing at KurzweilAI.net). Kurzweil's model of the neocortex described in detail in this book,  The Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind, may be sufficient to build a Artificial Intelligence.  This computer mind system may be capable of demonstrating the emergent property of intelligence.  And then by extension the emergent property of consciousness. The sections on hidden Markov models, hierarchical architecture, and evolutionary genetic algorithms are worth reading if your into software design.  If you wonder why Apple released Siri before it was perfect, this book will give you the reason.  Kurzweil and company are the innovators of speech recognition. Apple Had No Choice But To Release Siri As An Imperfect Prod...

I've listened to the audio book several times on trips across country, and each time I've said that I needed to buy the book (paper version) so that I could study it better.  So I did, and this is an attempt to outline the books major points. The book:   The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking  by Burger & Starbird. In the audio format I found it hard to visualize the 5 elements, perhaps because of the analogy to the classic elements of earth, fire, air, and water.   So before any confusion sets in, here are the author's 5 elements: Grounding Your Thinking; Understand Deeply  [Earth] Igniting Insights through Mistakes; Fail to Succeed  [Fire] Creating Questions out of Thin Air; Be your own Socrates  [Air] Seeing the Flow of Ideas; Look Back, Look forward  [Water] Engaging Change; Transform Yourself  [the Quintessential element] "In any movie, play, or literary work, media scholars tell us how to determine who truly is the mai...

I'm wondering if there are better techniques or resources for finding new interesting useful words than the techniques I'm currently using. My current technique is to just happen upon a good word - either in print/web/conversation. I have to admit, however, that few happen in conversation, fewer still in print such as news (typically a 5th or 6th grade reading level) - most new words are sourced via books and web articles. How do you look up a word that means, what you want it to mean - yet you don't know the meaning of? The inversion of the Humpty Dumpty quip in Through the Looking Glass. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master — that's all." The web has...

Here is an info-graphic that while interesting makes me a bit sad. How the Internet is Ruining Your Brain I do believe than we have entered into a very volatile micro-evolutionary portion of human history.  I do find that I off-load to various electronic media pieces of information and knowledge that might have years past be committed to memory.  I'm not sure this is a bad thing, yet we may surprise ourselves at the brink of our extinction.   We are in the exponential age - or as some call it the anthropocene . So there are some controls one could place on the rot of your mind.  Try SelfControl an application that blocks the internet for a period of time - perhaps long enough for you to be productive.  I also tried RescueTime for a while, but found it not very helpful.  It did not motivate me to change my behavior. I do find that many of us are delusional about our abilities to multitask.  My superpower is a...

Just imagine proper form and you can increase strength in your pinky finger 35%. Imagine Increased Muscle Strength!-Experiment In a fascinating experiment, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation discovered that a muscle can be strengthened just by thinking about exercising it. For 12 weeks (five minutes a day, five days per week) a team of 30 healthy young adults imagined either using the muscle of their little finger or of their elbow flexor. Dr. Vinoth Ranganathan  and his team asked the participants to think as strongly as they could about moving the muscle being tested, to make the imaginary movement as real as they could. Compared to a control group – that did no imaginary exercises and showed no strength gains – the little-finger group increased their pinky muscle strength by 35%. The other group increased elbow strength by 13.4%. What's more, brain scans taken after the study showed greater and more focused activity in the prefrontal cortex than before. The rese...

Do you believe you are more productive because you think you can multitask?  Studies show you are wrong.  Why do we believe we can; why do we think we are super-special and have powers above the average?  Answer: (pay attention) cognitive bias - attentional bias . Media multitaskers pay mental price, Stanford study shows People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found." I think I will lower my personal kanban work-in-process limit to ONE.  There really is only one ( Highlander - then there was the sequel). Just last week, coaching a new team with their Scrum task board we had a conversation on the number of tasks a person could be working on at one time.  The reason given for the four tasks in process on the big visib...

Information is Beautiful is taking a survey on the inner workings of the mind. What is Consciousness? Click the link "Make up your own Mind" to take the interactive survey.  One to join the fun, two to see how good a survey tool could be with interactive graphics. I'm revealing my inner truth.

Time Machine I'm trying to restore my Apple Time Machine - after a hard disk upgrade my time machine backup has choked on the extra large data set.  It gets quite complicated but in the end, the machine can not reconcile that the new data is just a continuation of the old data and it should just piece it all together in one continuous flow of information.  At last the machine breaks down.  It can not see the forest for the trees.  It has no big picture overview of the scene. This same day my father-in-law sends me this YouTube video of the "Human Camera" Beautiful Minds: Stephen Wiltshire  Watch the video and be awe struck at what a human mind can do. This is a power and skill we all have - but very few have ever nurtured this ability. Stephen can connect both the detail and the big picture and flow all that data into the information to recreate the image.  Many artist can do this same feat, they have practiced endless hours to master the skills. H...

I think I have spotted a trend.  The most popular books today have a single word as the title.  Sure, they have a subtitle that gives us the context within which to understand the catchy one word title.  The authors  (or marketers) are simplifying to a very sharp focus, such as to create a meme.  And this works for me. I can be discussing a topic an make a connection to a book I've read and say - "Have you read, Blink?"  They say "Why, yes!"  We now have an instant cognitive model that gives context to our dialogue. Switch  How to Change Things When Change Is Hard Outliers   The Story of Success Drive The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us Freakonomics    A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything Blink   The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Think   Why Crucial Decisions Can't Be Made in the Blink of an Eye Cod   A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World Salt   A Wor...

Computers should never be compared to a human brain. Computer just don’t measure up. What we know about the brain is amazing, what we don’t is unknown (I can just hear  Rumsfeld now… [sorry down that path leads to insanity] ). One of the funny things about what we know about brains - most of it, the predominate research is upon American graduate students, so this may give a unique bias to much of what we think we know about the brain, how it is structured and how it learns. Rules of memory 'beautifully' rewritten By James Gallagher, April 2017 - BBC News "The US and Japanese team found that the brain "doubles up" by simultaneously making two memories of events. One is for the here-and-now and the other for a lifetime, they found. It had been thought that all memories start as a short-term memory and are then slowly converted into a long-term one." http://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_on_3_ways_the_brain_creates_meaning.html In this video you can wa...