I am Paul Wilson; Mere Complexities Limited, sells my consulting, coaching, and coding services. I am passionate about Agile, particularly Test Driven Development.
Excellent BBC R4 interview on the controversy over allegedly Lean processing at (United Kingdom) Customs and Revenue. It is at the beginning of Tuesday's You and Yours. Will be available only until midday on Tuesday 28 November. I'll comment later.
Update: Permanent link for programme found here.As the advert says, DVD piracy funds criminals. Being good members of society I imagine those in the DVD industry would prefer criminal groups to concentrate more on DVDs than socially harmful activities such as drug dealing. So how could they encourage illegal downloads and pirate DVD purchases? One way is to make legal copies less attractive. I have three suggestions:
Here was a chance for us to look at our careers so far, detect positive and negative patterns, and plan the next move. The simple technique of plotting events against happiness was effective. With nine people’s careers to dissect we ran out of time, but I did get some extra advice and a bundle of great unpublished work from Johanna.
Virginia Satir’s defined congruence as balance of self, other, and context. The AYE \ Weinberg premise is that congruent people, conversations, and statements are far more effective than those which have a blaming, placating, irrelevant, or super-reasonable stance. “I think that it’s your code that is screwing up the project” is a blaming statement: it diminishes the other. A response such as “how does that make you feel about me?”, attempts to reassert the balance to lead the conversation towards congruence.
Jerry Weinberg, Virginia Satir, and Meyers Briggs Indicators are at the core of AYE. It payed to learn and practice congruence in this session, although it’s all a bit like doing a 1/2 day introduction to skiing course then being let lose on the black slopes. A week on, and I feel in need of a refresher course. During the Deep Dynamics course Ben Fuchs suggested the idea of a negotiation dojo; I’d love a venue for regular congruence practice through role play.
The hardest thing about writing is sitting down to write, and a major block to sitting down and writing is the internal critic that tells you that you’ve nothing interesting to note and you’ll do it badly anyway. Johanna and Naomi led us through exercises and discussions to help us getting over those blocks. An amazing aspect of the exercise was the number of people who wrote and read out some excellent pieces after a 15 minute exercise.
I chose this for two reasons: a fun ending for the conference; I keep noticing improv cropping up on the fringes of teamwork and negotiation discussions. It was fun and would make an excellent team building exercise especially for teams in complex domains (eg software development). To perform improv well you need to accept the other’s offers, relinquish your own ideas for the greater good, avoid interrupting the flow for your own glory, operate with multiple shifting goals.
Yesterday’s pre-conference tutorial was a pretty good getting to know session, mostly for us newbies. We got to know each other and gained familiarity with much of the shared vocabulary/concepts/narratives around AYE. The major stories revolve round Meyer’s Briggs indicators (I’m INTP has I’ve previously mentioned) and Virginia Satir therapy. I often hear regulars say things like “that’s typical N behaviour or well you can’t expect me to be on time: I’m a P&.
If you go to AYE do this. To be effective externally you need to be effective within. Besides, the Satir models influences much of the other sessions, so it’s worth going to the source. I won’t describe the session because it would sound ridiculous; it wasn’t. It was very intense; very emotionally powerful. It was much truer to me than NLP.
An exploration of different kinds of power, though the device of negotiating a common definition of power. Interesting. A lot of things happened. To be honest, I’m not sure of the significance. I need to mull on things. Unless the writing workshop radically changes my blog habits, no doubt I will fail to write up my conclusions.
when people become obsessed, the cure to any failure in application of their obsession seems to be more of the same….... However BPR advocates want their method to apply to everything. When the failures start to be documented they don’t realise they have exceeded the applicable boundaries of their concept. Instead they argue that it was not done properly, or the management were not committed enough or worst of all: the culture was not aligned. Next thing we know, six stigma arrives: BPR on speed…...
Just because something works in one domain, it doesn’t mean it will work in another. Everything has limited applicability. You don’t want test-driven bomb disposal. Put like that it’s obvious but people1 love their golden hammers. Some things are best modeled as state machines; most things aren’t.
Even Scrum style planning might not be appropriate to a all projects: if you have unlimited resources, you don’t have to worry about delivery dates.
1 Including me: I like to think of myself as a person.
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