Satir workshops

It seems kinda silly now, but it was enough to infect me pretty thoroughly.

Thirty-some years ago, I recorded some tracks in a barn studio in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, just about a year after that I decided to drop out of the music business and finally, after a seven year delay, enroll in university.

Well, I've done a few different things since then, but I've always gravitated back into writing songs. Last weekend some friends stayed with us and, as usual, I performed a few of my songs for them.... Here's the first recording of Paint Me A Picture, and my first musical recording in a very, very long time.... I hope you enjoy it.

Podcast

Paint Me A Picture

I’m workin’ my way through
Only two more sets to go and I’ll be gone.
The spotlight sees right through me,
But I don’t think it shows,
I mean I’m holdin’ on.
‘Cause I’ve been deceiving myself through the worst of it
Just hopin’ to make the best of it someday
Hey, hey.

I’ve been feelin’ way past due,
and smelling your smile in every other song.
I thought these spotlights ought to free me,
how was I to know
that they would hold so strong?
Here I am living my dream of the best of it,
while dreaming of the rest I left behind to play.
Hey hey!

Paint me a picture of the world as it should be
The world as it could be with all of her charms.
and write me a letter on old motel paper,
Just anything handy could brighten my day.
You’re so far away
I know you’ll trundle off to bed
Thinkin’, “He’s out there somewhere,
Singin’ his heart out to a room full of recent strangers,
While the one he really cares about sleeps soundly.”

Is life ever what it seems?
Does my voice betray what I dare not say in song?
Before this spotlight ever caught me,
We’d managed to survive
by simply holdin’ on.
we held on tight through the thick of it,
Though I’ve been losing my grip when I slip onto this stage.
hey, hey!!

So paint me a picture of the world as it should be
The world as it could be with all of her charms
And write me a letter on old motel paper
Just anything handy could brighten my day
You’re so far away
I know you hate to go to bed
Thinkin’ I’m out there somewhere,
Singin’ My Heart Out to a room full of empty strangers
While the one I really care about sleeps lonely.

I’m workin’ my way through
Only two more sets to go and I’ll be gone.
The spotlight sees right through me,
But I don’t think it shows,
I mean I’m holdin’ on.
‘Cause I’ve been deceiving myself through the worst of it
Just hopin’ to make the best of it someday
Still hopin’ to make the best of it someday,
Hopin’ to make the best of this someday.

11/29/2008
©2008 by David A.

Smith, trailblazer)

With my sincere apologies to those (like me) who could really care less about improving software practice, but who might have an interest in historical patterns, I submit this excerpt from an overlong post to a Yahoo Discussion Group.... The suits understand that there's no leverage in being a trailblazer (no royalties to earn on trails blazed, just perhaps a short-term commission to explore and write a report, maybe trap a few beaver along the way), or in being a pioneer (free land, but you have to build your own cabin and prove the land by living on it for X years)....

So, SEI shoved out those pioneers who wouldn't submit, or drove them deep underground, replacing them with compliant, well-educated suits who know how things are supposed to be done, often without ever having actually done any of it themselves.... Well, at least they embrace the endless possibility of achieving this, without ever actually achieving this.

Well, they argue, most of what we do ain't properly characterized as either trailblazing or pioneering. ...The Farm Bureau has been insisting on 'a level playing field,' encouraging state and federal regulators to insist that small producers comply with the same rules that commodity producers are held to, even though the context is world's different.... None of them would properly adopt as necessary the agricultural equivalent of the DoD's EVPM system or even CMM, which was never intended to be used in their context, anyway.... The big guys might peek into their world and longingly sigh, remembering when farming was for them family and not corporate farming, but were they to adopt wholesale the agile practices, their system, which depends upon different leverage points, wouldn't sustain them.

Interesting piece in a recent American Scientist on the critical importance of metaphor to the forward progress of science. While objective observation and rigorous measurement are important to science, narrative and metaphor are no less crucial. It is through translating discoveries into stories that real meaning and real understanding emerge for the author no less than for the reader.

Metaphors paint pictures we can see, and imagine ourselves stepping into. Arguably less real than the science bits, they unchain the door to deeper understanding. Even science depends upon myth-making and story-telling to make real progress.

"When I ask a project manager to describe her ethics, I usually get a bit of mumbled motherhood and some mangled apple pie.... I couldn’t possibly know for her, and neither of us are situated, in that moment, to choose exactly what either of us should do. I am genuinely curious, though, how she will go about choosing when that moment comes."

The final installment of my series considering The Ethical Responsibilities of Project Work appeared last week in Projects@Work.

What did I learn?... I relearned that as a human, I can't expect myself to be endlessly mindful, but I can appreciate just how critical my own mindfulness is.... Of course, as a human, I'm likely to yank and faunch for a while before I remember mindfulness, but that's okay, too.

The failure modes are polar opposites and exact equivalents: expecting to avoid mindlessness and expecting to be mindful.... We can likewise depend upon mindfulness, but not always upon where we'll find it.

This is, as I wrote long ago, a sloppy opera and a stupid ballet.... What we choose to do when we don't know what to do makes all the difference in the world.

We're all familiar with the concept of Tipping Point, that point in a progression where one trajectory turns into another, cannot help but turn.... This posting isn't about Tipping Points.

Tipping Points are powerful, but iffy.... In the men's rooms there, each urinal has the image of a fly etched near the bottom of the bowl. This subtle bit of context architecture has reduced the amount of 'spashback' needing to be cleaned up.... What boy worth his salt could miss?

Tickle Points are tiny nudges, guiding you where you probably prefer to go (excuse the expression) anyway. Where posters encourage disobedience, and process descriptions produce zzzzzzzs, Tickle Points gently nudge compliance into being.

Ever notice how no one ever cusses at grandma's table, though no one ever prohibits it? Grandma's table is a powerful context marker that renders the urge to cuss unthinkable, and so undoable.

In our process-obscessed culture, we miss this subtle point.

I am, for instance, no better at predicting outcomes than I ever was, unless I'm doing something I've done many, many, many times before. Of course, no one's ever done their latest project before, so project maturity might be about out-growing the naive notion that one could consistently achieve by prescribing and predicting.

But this was a huge enterprise aiming at getting even larger, targeting economies of scale....

I once calculated that if my newborn son continued growing at the rate he grew that first month, he'd outweigh the Empire State Building before he was twenty.... A lot of wineries that pre-sell everything they produce and don't aspire to get any bigger than they've ever been.... When their value outgrew the volume of all other trades, they became an ever-taller house of cards balanced on the head of a relatively ever-tinier pin.... Though this created ever more jobs for managers, it resulted in ever less space for the people populating those positions to do what people do well....

Those who embraced something less than the industrial ideal of growing to produce an ever-larger scale slime trail were marginalized during the recent run-up.

Those who might really understand are so distrusted by those who don't, they can't explain a thing to anyone else's satisfaction.... Dismal again.

Fact might be that none of us have any personal experience with 'an economy,' which doesn't exist anywhere but as a network of figments.... We thrive on 'em. Until they do us in.

Our certainty is the most curious part of our relationship with figments.... The size of the boat relative to the size of the body of water that formerly floated it puts the bailer in a weak position.... And the bucket remarkably small in comparison.

I read this week that the value of hedged instruments was estimated at perhaps ten times the annual gross world product.... Well, few understood how to value what was there before, either, but it's easier to float on a positive figment than a negative one. We love positive figments and fear the negative ones.

Maybe we only ever come close to experience the real power of collective figment certainty when the bottom falls out from under our confidently maintained fantasy because we experience real hunger then.

Projects@Work published the third installment of my Project Ethics series this morning.

Project Ethics (Part III)

There's a link back to the second installment there, too.

This series, the final installment will be posted next week, encapsulates what I've retained about project work. The distillation might make some of it hard for you to swallow, but this is how it is for me over here.... What wouldn't even register then on my innocent radar has taken central position in my understanding now.

The executive summary: Project Ethics are about choice.... Does it follow then that creating choice is the key to satisfying the ethical responsibilities of project work?

The challenge is that the choice points are cloaked, hidden from casual observation. It might even be true for you, as it most certainly has been for me, that the greater the choice point, the less it feels like one in that moment where my choice might make all the difference.

The series became a treatise on mindfulness.... The editor there likes people to leave comments, and so do I, though I don't always know how to respond to them.

This time, he unwraps what might well be the strategy behind Obama's remarkable election victory (although I did hear a Faux News commentator yesterday wondering why he only won by such a narrow popular vote margin---had his strategy been mindless, he suggested, he should have won by a much greater margin...). Anyway, this explanation (the one linked to below, not the Faux commentator's) is interesting, even if it isn't really explaining anything remarkable.

"The M&M or Motherhood and Mismatch Strategy was conceived by the American strategist, Col. John R.... The basic goal of an M&M strategy is to build support for and attract the uncommitted to your cause by framing a "motherhood" position -- i.e., a position no one can object to, like the mythical "motherhood, apple pie, and the American way" -- and then inviting your opponent in to repeatedly attack it and, in so doing, smash himself to pieces at the mental and the even more decisive moral level of conflict. Self-destruction will happen inevitably, if you can successfully induce your adversary into attacking your motherhood position in a way that exposes mismatches among the three poles of his moral triangle, defined by (1) What your opponent says he is; (2) What he really is as defined by his actions; and (3) the World he has to deal with. Whether consciously or not, I believe Obama has an intuitive feel for the moral leverage inherent in the M&M strategy and this enabled him to outmaneuver McCain and his campaign and bring them to the verge of mental and moral collapse.... I claim that while teamwork is nice and even useful, it cannot meaningfully influence outcome without using it with a broader, ProjectCommunity mindset that considers everyone who can effect and everyone effected by the effort on equal us-ness with the core team.... Even those who concede, but continue to consider the community to be comprised of 'stakeholders', over time grow to appreciate what it feels like to be considered a vampire with stakeholders stalking them.

I'm also seeing this strategy used in what feels to me to be a destructive way, though I guess any strategy that succeeds in producing an outcome I don't support might be fairly characterized as destructive.

This year, I'm not celebrating.

News yesterday from a Silicon Valley correspondent reports that PMI meetings there have swelled with attendants.... It's been several years since I attended any PM-related conference where the out-of-work PMs and PM consultant wanna-bes didn't greatly outnumber those who were there to share information.

Just yesterday, I reviewed yet another job description claiming to want someone capable of bringing projects in consistently on-time, on-budget, and on-spec.

Contracting for government work these days requires the applicant to engage in the most absurd fantasizing, as if, before work began, one could with some precision, spreadsheet hours by major task, then sign some dotted line validation of the bid's accuracy.

I thought we might have learned better by now.... What passes for professional practice in the Project Management "Profession" today wouldn't quite qualify as prostitution in most professions, and would be indictable, even convict-able in several. What went wrong?

I think the aspiration that focused upon making project management a profession on par with dentistry or occupational therapy turned it into its opposite.... More critically, where will we convince anyone chased away by all this foolishness to come back and risk doing some real discovering, some genuine skulduggery to accomplish something, anything never even imagined before?

In celebration of International Project Managers' Day, don't join in any celebration.... What we used to have to earn with every engagement, the certification to actually guide the effort, could only be bestowed afterwards, and had little currency the next time. Hired with misgivings, misunderstood, sometimes reviled most of the way, the worthy ones walked away from the successful ones with a little less than a nod of appreciation, and needed not even that!

Just before election day in 1968, a fellow in advertising who worked for Nixon wrote a newspaper ad that began, "It will be quiet on Tuesday.... It's a very special day, just for grown-ups.... on Tuesday, the shouting and the begging and the threatening and the heckling will be silenced. It's very quiet in a voting booth. And nobody's going to help you make up your mind. So - just for that instant - you'll know what the man you're voting for will do a thousand times a day for the next four years. Now it's your turn."

Here are my conference photos. Portraits mostly :). Enjoy

Later, we bought a second duck to keep the first one company, but the original wouldn't have anything to do with the late-comer, who eventually moved into the duck community in the city park. Years later, the original duck was killed by a rampaging dog.

I mention this duck because I've been deeply considering what it is that I do, and as usual, this reflection leaves me feeling like an odd duck.

Like my duck, I imprinted early on a medium of expression that few would equate to my later career(s).... Silly or serious, I have pretty much always been a songwriter.

Because of this, I have an odd-duck sense of form and style that remains mysterious, even to me.... I'd try to explain what was missing, but even to me, my descriptions sounded like so much odd-duck quacking.

What is this felt sense?... So is the craft of life.

Odd ducklings that we all are, we each imprinted early upon some primary means for expressing ourselves in the world.... No need to explain or reform, just quack like the duck you know you are.

As a songwriter, I long ago abandoned the notion that I needed to write like Frank Loesser or Dave Frishberg, both true masters.... (Dave Frishberg has an eloquent word or two to say about Songwriting.)

In business as well as in life, the desire to mimic style seems imperative under the don't re-invent the wheel doctrine.

Eric Lefevre and I co-organized a coders dojo at CITCON Amsterdam a few weeks ago. A coders dojo is where programmers meet to collaborate on a programming challenge, so that they can improve their skills.

What is a dojo?

The dojo takes its’ inspiration from martial arts, where practitioners get together to repeatedly practice excercises (’katas’), amongst each other or guided by a teacher.

Coders dojos exist in many shapes. The form I often use is called ‘rand

ori’ : one or two people prepare an excercise, explain the excercise to the group and start pair programming on the excercise in front of the group, using a video projector. After five or ten minutes one of the original pair rotates out, and someone from the audience rotates in. Rotation continues every 5 or 10 minutes.

yours truly and Eric Lefevre kicking off the Randori

Benefits

• Improve your skills by doing, and seeing other people do it (also teaches small things about editor etc.)
• challenge and be challenged: accept criticism, defend your ideas, deliver criticism in such a way that others are encouraged to act on it
• Learn how to better work in really, really small steps. If you want to rotate out in 10 minutes with a green bar - all tests pass - you have to

@ CITCON Amsterdam

This is also the form Eric and I used at CITCON Amsterdam a few weeks ago. We both had posted a coders dojo on the open space schedule. I wanted to do a dojo with Mockito (a relatively new mock objects framework for java), so that I could try out a modified excercise for an upcoming training on Responsability Driven Design with Mocking. Eric wanted to do a kata on legacy code, so that he could experiment with an excercise he uses in courses.

We decided to apply some courage and try to see if we could combine the two: use Mockito to add tests to Eric’s case. We started after very little preparation: while we were preparing a heated debate with other conference attendees on how to teach mocking and what (not) to use) already started… We introduced the case and started to work towards adding a test. We found a defect in the only test present (it was not completely legacy code ), and we let the audience decide whether we should fix the test first.
The audience decided we should fix the test. We listened. Therefore we did not show how to use Mockito… Fixing the test eventually took the better part of the coders dojo, and we never got around to having the participants to try out Mockito to make a test running. Eric already summarized what came out of the mini retrospective at the end of the session.

The audience vs. Ivan Moore and …

Coding in front of an audience can be confusing at times

A test is not worth fixing, if it is the only one you have.

I would normally delete this test, guess its intention(s) and re-write the test from scratch. The reason this test was so difficult to get working, was that it was trying to do multiple things. In making the test work, it started to test even more things, so while fixing it, it became increasingly more difficult… If we had rewritten the test, we would have discovered this early on. We then would have noted the other things to test down on our ‘to do’ list, gotten a green bar quickly and then moved to the next item on our to do list.

Programming as a spectator sport. Henk Van Voorthuizen, Marc Evers watch Intently, Jamie Dobson takes notes (he was making a diagram of sorts I believe).

Some things I learned

Having some of the most clever bastards of Europe in the room made this session extremely interesting. It definetely showed me there is ‘more than one way to do it’, and that includes refactoring and adding tests to legacy code. Some will do nothing without a test, some will use automated refactorings only (me) and then add the first test ASAP. Many of these strategies work most of the time… “Many people can be right most of the time, not all people can be right all of the time”, and that shows in a dojo. Most strategies would work to make the situation of the legacy code base better (better factored and/or more tests), but changing strategies every few minutes does not ;).

As Eric says, I’m sure we’ll do better next year. One thing I would try would be to spend more time at the start demonstrating and setting out a direction before rotating in someone from the audience. That way, I would expect less confusion by the participants, and more work in the same direction. This is what I normally do during courses, but the session slot had so little time that we (erroneously) skimped on it.

In the meantime, I’ll be doing some more experiments in (ab?)using mocking tools to shorten the “time to first test.”

Credits

• Laurent Bossavit and Emmanual Gaillot for popularizing the idea of a coding dojo
• The writers of DeliberatePractice for explaining some of the benefits of a dojo
• Marc Evers for making photos (and lending me his camera during the dojo)
• Eric Lefevre for the first writeup
• The participants for making this a very interesting dojo

Nicole Belilos and yours truly are going to present “Pimp my Retrospective” at the first Agile Holland conference this friday:

Title slide, with a photo by Colin a pimped ‘Lemon’ at the ‘24 hours of Lemons’

Slots there are just 45 minutes, so we made an interactive presentation with two short excercises: we’re going to ask participants suggestions on how to ‘wreck’ a retrospective and then spend more time on how to ‘pimp’ one, followed by our own favourite pimpin’ practices. We made all the slides like the one above, some pimped cars, some wrecked, and some plain strange (as well as Saint Nicolas on his horse). I notice with slides like these, I’m much more looking forward to giving a presentation.

Curious? Join us at the AgileHolland conference Oktober 24 in Amsterdam or read on for the full session description.

Do you have a retrospective regularly? Are they always effective, and always yield useful actions? Does each and every member of your team look forward to it? Does everybody participate actively?

Keep it that way! Your retrospectives are like a flashy new sports car…

Or do your retrospectives turn boring after a while? Do the participants yawn loudly? No new and refreshing results? Does this result in reflection happening less and less often?

Then there is only one solution: pimping!

In this session we’ll take the participants to our garage, and figure out how to transmogrify an old, steady retrospective into a super hot Retro. We’ll share our experiences and tips, and would love to hear yours. So, whether your Retro is a dented old Lemon or a shiny Ferrari, there’s always something to take away from this session.

Credits:

English session description based on dutch description by Nicole

photo by Colin has a Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-Alike license

I imagine torches and pitchforks, accusations and indictments, the righteous search for those who were supposed to be in charge and failed to properly connect us, initiating yet another round of symbolic regulations (how do you spell Sarbaines-Oxley?)... Again.

If we do, indeed, actually live in a world where we are all connected and no one's in charge, what regulating force might we depend upon?... Our choices matter more simply because we are so tightly connected and because no one is in charge.

My mother, bless her heart, has lived her life trying to get away with something, anything. I think her great grandfather was ruined in one of the late-ninteenth century financial panics, and her family's language rails a lot about the plutocrats, those who lead simply because they are wealthy.... Always trying to get away with something, apparently for the simple joy of feeling in charge.

Her sense that she is not in charge seems to encourage some of her more irresponsible actions.... Later, we learn that some critical constituent has been carrying stones in his pocket ever since, and has positioned himself squarely between our imagined efficiency and our aspired-to goal, and we cannot get there from where we've innocently positioned ourselves and our misbegotten project.... Ethics are simply choices, well-informed or poorly informed makes all the difference in a world or a project where we're all connected and no one's ever really in charge.

Then concluded that it never would work?

Well, it wasn't just them saying this, I've said it myself.

What happened to "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again?"

Not in the modern corporation, thank yew.... Looking back (and then projecting forward), I can't see a single situation, other than that time when I decided to jump out of that tree onto a steep slope and cracked a metatarsal bone where, "We tried that once and it didn't work" actually worked. What worked, or seems to have worked so far, involved a lot of "We kept trying, even though it didn't work at first." Some stubborn someone wasting time, money, and reputation on what they (and perhaps no other at first) were convinced held some potential merit, until it did.... What if they are?

"It’s not only in the United States that the ­Depression-­era tendency to “throw the bums out” looks like something less than a rational policy judgment.... In the adjacent agricultural province of Alberta, voters replaced a socialist party with a right-leaning party created from scratch by a charismatic radio preacher peddling a flighty ­share-­the-­wealth scheme, and the economy improved.... In every case, the party that happened to be in power when the Depression eased went on to dominate politics for a decade or more thereafter.

We were doing an extended engagement in NYC a few years ago and, as we often do when working there, we played what we call Broadway Roulette. Show up at Duffy Square a half hour before curtain time and see what tickets are left, buy a couple and head off to a show. We happened one evening on the revival of Kiss Me, Kate, and were delighted. This one piece (in the above YouTube video), where two hoodlums, backstage to shakedown the male lead for gambling debts "accidently" wander on stage during a performance, was the highlight of the show for me, because it reminded me that whatever truth we might nudge out at the client's shop, we needed to respect their traditions, or, more to the point, Brush Up Our Shakespeare.

Of course, it's silly that merely reciting the Bard would make the difference our clients sought, but not knowing the Bard might well prevent the change we all aspired to.

We've all been subjected to the next best thing, delivered by someone clueless about the present history supporting everything.... Change, whatever its intent, needs to be melded with the familiar status quo if it is to be meaningful and successful.

So, the next time I (even you) intend to make something different, remember to brush up on whatever amounts to Shakespeare there first. As Virginia Satir said a very long time ago, "Change rests upon the full, albeit temporary acknowledgment of the way things are."

“Meaningless work is the soul of being in the body of nothingness.”

For much of my working life, I have been a strong advocate for meaningful work.... But today, I want to sing the praises of an under-appreciated kind of work, meaningless work.

Meaningless work is an act of selflessness.... No mugging for the virtual camera, no showing off for whatever passes for company.

When I am my work and my work is me, we transcend meaning.... We, my work and I, become one, a dance of joy between hand and surface, between time and soul, between mine and mindlessness.

I labor to exhaustion, not to become exhausted.... I am not investing my time or consciously expressing myself, just being here---not there, now---not then, the purpose perfectly tautological, explaining nothing at all.... No one will long remember, not even I will notice that time and action performed in perfect silent harmony and that time, for an unmeasured moment, stopped moving in any discernible direction and simply was.... Or both sometimes.

I pose today, understanding that those who throw their rational mind between themselves and their sight might only see me working slowly, when I'm merely dancing with meaningless work, slow work.

He even blamed his own staff for not performing as he expected.

He finally proclaimed, exasperated, that “this isn’t rocket science!”... The larger problem, as I later told him, was that he was not a rocket scientist.

I suggested in my recent post, You Suck@Projects, that the lousy level of understanding in the executive suite about projects contributes a great deal --- quite probably more than any other single factor --- to the continuing poor performance of projects.... Tighten down the screws until no degree of freedom remains, then complain about how unresponsive the effort is.

Ignorance fueled by authority equals true stupidity.

This week, we’ve been watching while a Congress, clearly ignorant about even the first principles of economics, wrestles with a shit-simple decision. Distracting each other with finger pointing from atop lofty principles, insisting upon a label that misrepresents the outcome, insisting infant-like that irrelevant issues also be addressed as a part of the “solution,” then complaining that the resulting response doesn’t actually solve anything.

Where has the metaphor machine gone that managed to label a bill destined to disenfranchise a third of students No Child Left Behind?... No, it’s not just a matter of simply hitting the chosen target, rocket science is all about maintaining scrupulous attention to just how far off course you are at any point in time.... How Christian are they?

The rest of the world stands gape-mouthed as we chop the legs out from under ourselves --- and them, too.

We are no more rocket scientists than we are project managers.