Sunday Morning The courage to communicate (soft woossie skills, etc....) - Diana Larsen I need more of this stuff. Going to one of these sessions isn't going to really help, but it's a start. I am definitely going to search out some NLP training soon. Particularly after talking to Ben from WDS. They sent their entire team, on NLP training and it changed the team and the individuals. I don't know that the underlying NLP is correct - in fact I very much doubt that it is. But like Neils Bohr said "they say it works even if you don't believe in it." Sunday Afternoon Transitioning to XP - Mike Hill Mike is energetic, charasmatic, and has a lot of fantastic insights. One is that the industry is demoralised. Amongst the thousands of terrible developers out there, many have just been crushed by years of failure and being treated as pluggable programming units. If there morale can be lifted a surprising number of these can rise to become competent social geeks. Another insight is that XP is more a culture than a collection of practices. The practices simply establish and nourish the culture. A transition to XP is a cultural, rather than technical, change. At the end of the month is the Cynefin course in Greenwich. Cynefin, amongst other things, is about investigating and changing culture. Mike talked about the transition to XP involving a dip into chaos; Cynefin practitioners take organisations to the edge of chaos to precipitate change. More and more I can see the relevance of Cynefin to agile. For instance I hope that the narrative techniques of Cynefin can be used not only for requirements crystallisation, but to document the culture of XP.

Monday, June 20, 2005 | Permalink | 0 Comments