These days, I sometimes shave with a manual razor, sometimes with an electric. At times, I find myself having to turn my head way to the side, and reach far around with my right hand, in order to get spots on the left side of my jaw and my neck.

This got me to thinking, and I decided to try shaving the left side of my face with my left hand. Only with my electric razor, of course, since I don’t entirely trust my coordination enough to take a chance at slicing myself open with a manual razor.

On reflection, I realized that this was also a mental pattern. There are so many things I do in a certain way, because I’ve always done them that way. And there are many ways I think that I have always thought, because that’s the way I’ve always thought.

We all fall into patterns, and then lose awareness of those patterns and just do things that way. While at times I think this is enabling – read about my shower principle in I&I over P&T – at other times it causes me to ignore other possibilities because I just think happily along in the same old rut. Stopping to question why I think or do things a certain way is good.

Doing them – or thinking them – differently is healthy.

Shave with the other hand. See what happens.

Part of the background includes that the owner, a lovely fellow who lives nearby and has a wife and children and with whom I’ve developed a nice relationship, is not always terribly well organized. This past summer, he spent about six weeks out of the country, and had a relatively recently hired driver take care of the business for him while he was gone. The business ran beautifully. In fact, it ran better! The driver, a woman who has been a driver for a while, would send me nice confirmations of each reservation (they have no automated or online system), and would send me a nice reminder confirmation the day before each trip. On the way to the airport, she’d confirm the return trip.

I’d asked the owner to send me invoices/receipts for each trip, but still had to contact him to request one each time. I think this should be automatic, but because I like him so much, I was willing to put up with the minor inconvenience to asking each time.

Each time I arrived in Austin, a driver would be waiting for me in the airport (the nice thing about a small airport), ready to help me with my bags and lead me to the car.

Until the last time. I arrived and there was no driver. I went to wait for my bag to come out, and still no driver. I sent a text message: “At airport. Where is driver?”

The response I received was something along the lines of “Sorry Steven. One car in shop, the other in Dallas. Please take a taxi.”

Now I’m fine with the fact that stuff happens that is outside of our control. I’m fine with having to take a taxi once in a while. What I’m not fine with is that I had to reach out to him to ask. As a customer, my position is that he should have reached out to me as soon as he knew they couldn’t pick me up. I’d have been understanding and we would have moved on.

I’m not feeling understanding. I wrote him a lovely letter saying that I felt this was unacceptable, and that I would not be using his service any longer. He wrote back and said his child had been running a fever, he’d had car problems, and he’d expected that if anyone would understand, I would. And I do. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is bad business to leave a customer standing at the airport without any information.

I thought about his response (“I hope we can continue to be friends”). I reflected on my feelings and my decision. Was I being unreasonable? Was I being closed minded, or lacking understanding?

Then I asked myself this question: Is that how’d you’d treat your mother?

This fellow loves and respects his mother. I cannot imagine him leaving her standing at the airport, wondering whether someone would be picking her up.

That’s how he (and all service providers) should treat their customers. Like their mothers.

That includes respect, attentiveness, consideration…

If my friend’s mother was at the airport, he would have done whatever he needed to to make sure she was picked up.

He left me standing there.

Bad business, unprofessional, and rude.

When deciding how to treat our customers, we should always ask “Is that how I’d treat my mother?” If the answer is “no,” then do something different.

Neudesic is a Microsoft National Systems Integrator and Gold ISV Partner with a proven track record of providing reliable, effective solutions based on Microsoft’s technology platform. Our technical and industry expertise empower enterprises to enhance their technological capacity and respond to business opportunities with greater efficiency.

I get to work with my good friends Ted Neward and Simon Guest, both of whose judgement I respect.

My title is “National Agile Evangelist”. That means I’ll be focusing on how we can be more effective at developing and delivering our services through the use of Agile, Lean/Kanban, and whatever methodologies suit. I’ll also be focusing on how we assist our clients in adopting these practices and principles to the betterment of their organizations.

The process going from day one (“your position is no longer being funded” at TW) to making the decision to join Neudesic was thoroughly enjoyable for me. I got to spend time with people I knew and liked, people I didn’t yet know and discovered I liked, and also to learn about what’s going on in the Agile Coaching space in the United States.

For each of you that contributed to the journey, please accept my gratitude.

I hope I can do the same for others.

Why do you care?

I just returned from attending Agile2011. I spent five nights and five days immersed in the community of friends, colleagues, luminaries, associates, strangers, and vendors that comprise the event. As always, it was entertaining, illuminating, exhausting, and heart-warming.

I had conversations about techniques and challenges, career and day-to-day work, my recent job situation, family, friendship, travel, technology, games,… I’m sure you get the picture.

I spent much of my time in the Open Jam, as I was the Producer and felt some responsibility there, and because that’s where I would spend a lot of time anyway because I love to shmooze with people, and because I’m looking for a new job and it was a good place to catch up with people to talk about it. And I did – shmooze, talk about jobs, and fulfill my responsibilities.

I also attended a couple of sessions, and poked my head into a few others.  I delivered my Facilitation Fun! session in the Open Jam Fringe to a small but enthusiastic group. I coordinated the PechaKucha area and presented there one evening.

I wrote a few blog posts while I was there, stimulated by recent events in my career and by the book I’m currently reading.

Mostly, I was immersed in the sense of community that exists at this event. I’ve experienced it at lots of other events, as well, but the Agile20xx events bring a sense of community that is remarkable. There’s a sense of intention, collaboration, and connection that I rarely experience elsewhere.
And then it was Friday. I had two meetings on Friday morning, so was only able to spend a short time in the halls, catching up with a few people with whom I had not yet caught up, and waving and saying goodbye to and hugging a number of others. The event was primarily at the Grand America hotel in Salt Lake City, with some sessions and some lodging across the street in the Little America hotel.  On Friday morning after my last meeting, as I started to leave the Grand America to go across to finish packing and leaving, I hesitated on the threshhold of the Grand America.

“Have I seen the people I wanted to see, and said goodbye properly?”

I looked at my watch, and thought about it for a minute, standing there quietly, looking across the driveway towards the Little America across the street.

Summer Camp Syndrome™.

I found myself feeling drawn back into the venue so I could extend the immersion and the feeling of connectedness and belonging. I was exhausted, had just enough time to finish packing and check out, and still – irrationally – felt myself drawn back in. After all, with 1600+ people attending, and knowing many dozens, perhaps hundreds, of them, it’s obvious that I had not been able to even see, much less talk with, all the folks that I would have liked to connect with.

So there I stood, on the threshold both physically and emotionally, considering the irrational. Should I go back in, make at least one more pass through the halls, maybe feeling rushed for time, or continue on my way and do the rational thing.

It was agony. The banquet the night before was “the climax” of the event, but of course I only saw a relatively small number of people there. I was feeling like I wanted something like the closing circle of an Open Space. Not exactly, but something like it. Some sense of closure and completion was lacking for me.

I did the rational thing, mentally and emotionally and physically leaving the event and the community, and walked across the street to the Little America.

Of course, it’s never that clean and simple. I ran into friends from ThoughtWorks in the lobby of the Little America and stopped to chat. After packing and while on my way out, I ran into friends from Leandog and stopped to chat. Waiting outside to go to the airport were Lyssa Adkins and Michael Spayd, creators of the Agile Coaching Institute. We rode to the airport together, and I continued the connection while walking through the airport and having lunch with Lyssa.

Lyssa and I separated after lunch, me going directly to my gate, which was right there, Lyssa heading off to another terminal for a later flight.

Summer Camp Syndrome™.

There’s a feeling almost like addiction and withdrawal, regarding an event like this. The immersion is so powerful, so emotional, that it’s almost a physical pain to end it – to cut it off. That’s “Summer Camp Syndrome” – the sadness, sorrow, and sense of disconnection that comes at the end of an immersive, community event in which strong connections are formed. The need for continuation and closure, all at the same time, that leaves me (and maybe you) standing at the threshold feeling simultaneously drawn in and out.

There’s no question that I’m very happy to be home with my lovely wife of 35 years, Debbie.

And there’s no question that I’m feeling sad about the people I didn’t see and talk with, the people I did see and talk with but didn’t get to say farewell to, and even the people I spent time with at the end, because that time ended too. I am, as I said, exhausted, but in the best possible way. And I’m eager for next year’s conference, so I can do it all again.

In the meantime, I hope I’ll see some of these folks at other events coming up, like Pablo’s Fiesta, Agile Open Southern California, and Øredev.

I don’t even want to stop writing this post, because it helps me to keep feeling connected.

But I will.

Last Tuesday, I tweeted – just once – that I was no longer with ThoughtWorks. When I arrived at the conference venue, and started seeing friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, I was astounded, amazed, and overwhelmed.

“I heard, and I’m so sorry.”

“You look great! You look so relaxed.”

“What will you do next?”

Consider that I had not personally spoken with more than one or two people about my change in circumstances. What I had done was to tweet and post on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+.

One of the most amazing occurrences came when I was talking with my friend Doc Norton (@docondev). As we were talking, one of his co-workers sent him a message: “Did you see that Steven ‘Doc’ List is no longer with ThoughtWorks?”

Consider the amazing power of the social networks and community we live in. A few years ago, I would have been calling and writing to people individually and in groups to let them know what’s going on. Today, one posting and BAM!

The implications that go with that are important:

• Your online reputation is important and real
• Since perception is reality, people believe you are who you seem to be online
• Building your network well can mean the difference between career choices and career compromises
• Treating people well online, as well as in person, has real value
• Think carefully about your online persona, and craft it with intent

Think carefully about your online persona, and craft it with intent.

A poorly crafted one will come back to bite you in the butt. A well crafted one will serve you well.

“When asked to explain why a few people are so excellent at what they do, most of us have two answers, and the first one is hard work. People get extremely good at something because they work hard at it. We tell our kids that if they just work hard, they’ll be fine. It turns out that this is exactly right. They’ll be fine, just like all those other people who work at something for most of their lives and get along perfectly acceptably but never become particularly good at it. The research confirms that merely putting in the years isn’t much help to someone who wants to be a great performer.” [emphasis mine]

Too many organizations believe that all they have to do is give employees a place to work, specific roles to play, and an opportunity to do their work over and over and over again, and those employees should get better at what they do. After all, we’re all motivated and driven and have the capability to figure out what we need to know and do to get better/more skilled, right?

Wrong.

“It could be put very simply: What the authors called ‘deliberate practice’ makes all the difference. Or as they stated it with stark clarity in their scholarly paper, ‘the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.’”

As he explains further, “deliberate practice” is not just doing it over and over again.

“Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements, each worth examining. It is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business-related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports; and it isn’t much fun.”

If I find myself in a situation where someone – someone who is supposedly helping me progress toward mastery – just says “again! again! again!”, then I know we’re not making progress. I was trying out a new gym, for instance. It was a kettlebell gym. During one activity we were swinging a kettlebell up and down, from between our legs up to around shoulder level. The instructor said “Snap Doc! Snap!” Needless to say, I had no idea what she was talking about. She didn’t help me to understand the body mechanics, or even what she meant by “snap”. She just kept snapping “Snap!” at me. Not helpful.

On the other hand, a different instructor said “Use your legs, not your arms and shoulders. Your arms and shoulders are just there to support the bell. Use your upward momentum with your legs to move the bell, and snap into position with your body upright and your butt tight at the top.” That was far more helpful. When this person said “That’s better. Now try for more snap.” I knew what was meant and how to move into deliberate practice.

In a work environment, if you are not being challenged and offered ways to learn, then you might have reason to question the situation. It’s all too easy for employers to discriminate based on talent, where Colvin would argue that talent is real, but is a relatively small influence on how skilled or capable someone is at a particular endeavor. The shift from “let’s find talented people” to “let’s find people who understand the importance of deliberate practice” is as important – and difficult – as the shift that Dan Pink talks about in Drive (intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation). Colvin says:

“…it’s one thing to say that a manager is ‘good with people.’ It’s another to ask whether a manager notices when a direct report seems no longer challenged by his or her job. If so, is that seen as a problem or an opportunity? What responses are proposed? Of these, how effective or ineffective do they seem, and which, if any, are applied?”

Management, along with its close friend Leadership, is a set of skills and a mindset. Sadly, too many organizations treat it as a job that someone can pick up on their own if they just do it day after day. Good management, effective management, requires deliberate practice. It requires mentoring and guidance and – worth saying again – deliberate practice. It really makes me sad to see people who have the potential to be strong, effective managers and/or leaders being led by people who are not strong, effective managers and are therefore being taught the wrong stuff. Sometimes the teaching is in the form of abstention: their “leaders” let them do foolish things, or ineffective things, and don’t help them to learn better, wiser, more effective ways. And this becomes generational, as each “generation” of organizational leaders “raises” the next generation.

If you’re in a situation like this, you have three choices, two of which require you to take action:

1. Do something about it – change your organization
2. Shut up and take it – but do it with awareness, not ignorance
3. Leave – change your circumstances

If you have stories about situations like this, I’d love to hear about them.

“You must be the change you want to see in the world.” ~Mohandas Gandhi

My wife of 35 years* is not a big fan of change, and has said that being laid off would feel to her as if she were being judged, and had been judged to fail.

I, on the other hand, know that whatever reasons they gave or actually had, the people who made the decision to lay me off had their own reasons. Those reasons were mostly about them, and only a little bit about me.  Their decision does not change who I am, what I’m capable of, nor my value to an employer or to the world I live in.

The fact that it was done the way it was** is annoying, and speaks more about them than about me. Having worked at a number of startups in my career, and having been laid off more than once, I can tell you that there are good ways and less good ways. This was a less good way. It makes me wonder why.

However, the main point of this is this: looking backward makes you stumble, so look forward.

It’s possible this may happen to you at some time in your career. After all, businesses suffer setbacks, some fail, and sometimes they just feel the need to shuffle things around. You may be the beneficiary or the victim in these circumstances. If so, I hope you’ll remember this lesson.

Let me say it again: Their decision does not change who I am, what I’m capable of, nor my value to an employer or to the world I live in.

Of course, if you find yourself without income or employment, and the market is not healthy, it may be harder to see it as an exciting opportunity. Try anyway.

I know – I’ve written about change and how frightening and threatening it is. Nonetheless, I find my adrenaline pumping. I’m exploring the world. I’m meeting new people. I’m facing the challenge head on, and reflecting on who I am and what I want to do. That’s a good thing.

If you give in to the fear of change, you lose. If you let “them” lead you to feeling less good about yourself, you lose. If you forget how important and valuable you are, you lose.

For me, predictability is both essential (I am TRULY borderline OCD) and boring. As I say when I’m talking about “Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools”, processes and tools (and predictability) should be enablers not the focus of my attention.

I have an opportunity. So do you.

Look forward.

* yes, I’m bragging

** no, I’m not going to fill in any more details

I’m frequently asked “What is the hardest part? Is it the engineering practices? The predictability (or lack thereof)? Staffing?”

None of the above (you probably guessed that).

Boundary friction. Yup, that’s it. Boundary friction.

Imagine two trains. They’re running on tracks that sometimes run parallel, and sometimes diverge and come back together. When they get close enough, they actually touch.

Got it? Got the image of two trains racing or plodding along, coming closer and moving farther away, and sometimes coming into contact? Can you hear the train whistles and the sound of the wind and the wheels?  Feel the vibration?

If they’re both moving at the same speed, what happens when they come together?

Nothing. Smooth, easy, no friction.

What if they’re moving at different speeds? Faster versus slower is not better or worse, just different. So what happens?

Friction. Things heat up, maybe metal gets bent or crunched or marred. It is not smooth and easy, is it?

When organizations are implementing agile (or any systemic change, really), without considering the whole organization, friction is inevitable. Let’s say that Business Operations is used to doing things one way, and isn’t ready to change (yet). Along comes this project team that’s doing Agile. Again, I’m not arguing that “agile is faster/better”, I’m just saying that it’s like they’re moving at different speeds. Where they come together, there will be more or less friction depending on how close to parallel and how close to the same speed they are.

In this case, it means that if both organizations are not embracing the change in similar ways, there will be more friction.

You can’t impose a change on part of the organization without affecting the rest of the organization. That’s ostrich behavior.

The trick, the secret (it’s actually neither a trick nor a secret, though) is to figure out how to get them to truly come together.

That doesn’t mean telling Business Operations (or Sales or Product Management or…) “For this to work, you have to adopt Agile principles and practices and methodologies. Now. Today.”

No, it means figuring out how to evolve together, taking smaller or larger steps when they’re appropriate. Like embracing the Last Responsible Moment principle. Like the Simple Design principle.

Implement as much change as you can readily absorb, in order to get you a bit further along. Then inspect and adapt. Don’t rush.

Organizations are organisms, and the organs and skeletal structure are all part of the same organism.

Or trains. Yeah, they’re trains.

Here’s an excellent video that explains it clearly.

He said a colleague of his started including something special in their job postings:

Include this word (<word>) in your cover note.

Of course, those who read the posting carefully see that and include the <word> in their cover note.  Many do not, according to Thomas.

He says that as they’ve tracked the correlation between those who do and do not include the <word>, and those who do well in interviewing and on the job, the correlation is high. Those who notice the requirement to include the <word> are more successful.

Intriguing.

If you’re interested in following this thing as it evolves, it’s at mastery-quest.blogspot.com

He showed an example of a bank website that offered a way to select a statement: two drop down boxes for month and year, plus a “go” button. The problem was that you could select a future date, and get an error, or select a date more than twelve months in the past, and get an error. The simple solution was to provide a single drop down that only offered the users the months for which they could get statements. Simple.

Here are my design constraints:

• Make it as easy as possible for the user to get it right.
• Make it as hard as possible for the user to get it wrong.

A mistake that many of us make is to think that every little detail is important. It might be important to you. Ask yourself whether all of those details are important to achieve your purpose.

Here are some questions for you:

• What is it that you want your listeners to learn from the story?
• How much context do you need to create?
• Are the details contributing to either the cognitive or emotional impact of your story?
• How does the story contribute to the larger talk/presentation?
• Is it more important to include more of this story, or to include other stuff?

It’s not as simple as saying “Every story should be <so long>!” I have stories that take 30 seconds to tell, and others that take ten minutes.  I include more shorter stories in training and in short presentations.  That said, I include my ten minute “signature story” in my one hour keynote talk (a motivational talk, from my earlier professional speaking days).  It’s a matter of your goal.

Short stories include brief anecdotes, and stories that are there to make a point or give a brief example.

Longer stories are there to totally captivate and engage your audience.

If I say “In 1996, thinking I was perfectly healthy, I had a heart attack. It changed my life.” I’ll get a gasp and immediate attention. If I’m making a point about a healthy lifestyle or diet, this is all that’s needed (well, I don’t think I can actually leave it at that ).

In my keynote, on the other hand, the ten minute version was designed to get people to think and reflect and leads up several key points that I want to be the last thing that the audience hears and thinks about.

Do you tell stories? Could they be shorter, and still have the same impact? Are you telling them for your own pleasure, or to make a point? What’s the point?

In many situations, there is certainly a sense of accomplishment. In fact, at our internal training at ThoughtWorks, we’ve² moved away from lecture and classroom intensive training, and toward project-focused, experiential learning. This allows the participants to gain feelings of achievement and accomplishment, to learn about collaboration, and to find a sense of discovery. Much of the instruction has moved to a Socratic Method, which both leads and allows the participants to use their intrinsic motivation.

The question I’m exploring is “can we apply these same methods and techniques in a public, less-controlled setting?” I believe the answer is yes.

What would the changes have to be?

• Far less lecture. Just enough to give them a basic understanding, but not enough to fill their heads.
• Challenges that allow them to discover, rather than be spoon-fed.
• Questions rather than assertions, to allow them to incorporate changes in their thinking.
• Achievements that allow them to feel good about themselves while they are learning.
• Some extrinsic motivation, as long as it’s not the main focus.
• The idea of a constant progression toward mastery (which takes me back to Shu Ha Ri and my post Is easy the same as hard?).

We’ll be working on this in our educational content. Expect to see the first results publicly available in the next few months.

Just because, look at this TED Talk by Sugata Mitra. It’s fantastic. (it should be embedded right here)

1 Just in case it hasn’t become painfully clear yet, I am avoiding the word “training”.

2 While I say “we”, in fact I had nothing to do with it. Take a look at Sumeet Moghe’s blog. Sumeet is the driving force behind all of our internal education at ThoughtWorks.

P.S. We’re hiring at ThoughtWorks again (still).

Of course, it’s got me thinking.

Alternate Reality

Does this mean some kind of weird science fiction stuff? No. It means games that can be played in the real world or in virtual worlds that may apply different sets of rules or contexts. McGonigal mentions the virtual worlds of Halo and World of Warcraft in the book. These are two very different contexts and scenarios. Halo is warfare set in something like the real world we know. Okay, there are aliens. But other than that…

I’ve never been a big, enthusiastic gamer, but I do like shooting things and blowing them up. And yet, somehow Halo has never called to me.

And then there’s World of Warcraft, which is a fantasy world in which you complete quests, fight, and band with others. If you’d asked me last week, I’d have said that I had no particular interest. But thanks to Jane McGonigal, I decided to sign up for a free trial of the game. It was more what she said about Intrinsic Motivation (see Dan Pink’s “Drive”) and how the quests relate, and the overall idea of collaboration but not (necessarily) competition.

The quests are compelling. Nothing really happens. I don’t get any prizes or recognition or anything but leveling up in the game. Somehow, in spite of that, I want to keep doing quest after quest. There’s a feeling of satisfaction about it. Finish one, start another. Level up periodically. Fight monsters, deliver messages, get lost and wander around, go up trees and down into the earth… On one level, it seems entirely pointless. On another, I FREAKIN’ GET IT!

Training?

How does this apply? Is there a way to use this kind of approach in delivering what we oh-so-annoyingly* call “training”?

I’m thinking about the idea of intrinsic motivation, quests, achievements that allow each of us to feel a sense of accomplishment, and extending it beyond the specific educational situation. That last includes some form of “social medium” and also thinking about how to extend it into the workplace.

Agile teams are pretty good at this. Each time a person or pair completes a story, they get to move it on. There’s a sense of achievement in that. Of course, they don’t get a nifty “+1″ floating over their heads. They don’t level up to the next level of developer or tester. Maybe there’s a way?

For now, my immediate focus is on how to apply this in the educational/learning situation. Is there a way to design and create learning environments that take advantage of the work of Jane McGonigal, game designers, and others?

* I say “oh-so-annoyingly” because we should NOT be doing “training”. We train pets to certain specific behaviors. When I’m working with a project team or a bunch of folks from an organization that wants to adopt Agile, I’m not training them. I’m leading them to think differently and adopt different behaviors. So “training” just seems the wrong word to me.

In traditional/waterfall, it’s all too likely that we are being dishonest, either through commission or omission: about being on time; about how much is left to do; about when we’ll be done; about the quality of our work. The whole system seems to encourage, or at least support, this kind of dishonesty.

Let me be clear: I am not condemning waterfall wholesale, nor those who practice waterfall. I am examining the cultural biases generated by this approach, and the effects they have on the people.

A phrase I use frequently in Agile:

Based on what we know today, if nothing changes,…

Think about a burn-up chart or burn-down chart. It is immediate. It is based on what we know today, and the forecast/projection only holds true if nothing changes. All the information is clear, it’s right out there for anyone to see, and it’s honest.

When will the project be done? Based on what we know today, if nothing changes…

Because we allow for changes in scope and capacity (velocity), all we know for sure is based on what we’ve accomplished to date, and the current status.

How much is left to do? Based on what we know today, if nothing changes…

As above, the scope might change. If the scope doesn’t change, then we can look at a burn-up chart and tell, with some accuracy, how much is left to do between now and when the progress line touches the scope line.

It goes on and on. The charts are on the wall (including the card wall itself) or in some readily accessible and visible virtual location (like in Mingle).

When I do training, I always make sure that people learn this: “Based on what we know today, if nothing changes…”

It’s honest, based on history, experience, and evidence, and it’s all there for anyone to see.