Satir workshops

The Satir Journal, Volume 2, Number 1, 2008. Loaded on 2008-04-13

The Satir Journal, Volume 1, Number 3, 2007. Loaded on 2007-11-12

The Satir Journal, Volume 1, Number 2, 2007. Loaded on 2007-04-15

The Satir Journal, Volume 1, Number 1, 2006. Loaded on 2006-10-09

These were invariably hosted by some geeky guy in an untucked blue, long-sleeved oxford cloth shirt (sleeves half-rolled); a scraggly, half-long hair with a box filled with cables.... God Bless Us.

"There's a show going down tonight
It's the hottest show in town
Down to that Gypsy Cafe
Where the freeway turns around
Once a week or so you know
These people show up to play
And they're gonna be stars someday
They're gonna be stars someday!"

This morning I heard this guy on the radio who's music evoked those days.... He carries his own polish that smells faintly of the stale beer and cigarette smoke-infused shag carpeting that decorates every Open Mike venue and sticks to more than the lining of the performer's guitar case.

Those of us who performed there mostly performed for each other.... I walked late night streets looking for inspiration, moving to the cadence of my boots, trusting my eyes, returning to try something by ear, then building up the story, the melody, and the hook.... Never could, never did figure out notation.

Amos Lee reminded me of those sweet, tough days, the days before I learned to play this different-shaped guitar I play for you today.... Those old men in short-sleeved dress shirts and straw dress hats no longer smoke sullenly in the back of the bar invaded once each week by kids seeking stars. And those world-weary kids we were, who in the hell even knows where we are now?

Here's to The Last Exit on Brooklyn and the Little Red Rooster, to Clinkerdagger's, The Mordor, and that place they tore down (what was its name?)

Continuing the investigation of the secular religion of Management-ism started HERE, where I started explaining, "How We "Managed" to Screw It Up," finding a curious kind of management lurking, and continued HERE and HERE with the story of an HMO-weary doctor "Going Off The Grid" to establish a real Health Maintenance Organization, before delving into the deep Abstractions nourishing management-ism HERE.... In absence of relationship, though, where we merely inhabit roles and perform process scripts, managing by such metrics might seem to make all the sense in the world.... You already know!

This is no isolated incident, though it might serve as the model or pattern for an under-recognized reality operating within even industrial-scale organizations.... This will just get its conniving imagination working harder.

The choice is not to work for someone else or work for yourself, you're always working for yourself, no matter who signs the paycheck.... They happen as a resonance of a set of ancient ethical responsibilities that every human was born with but that the industrial, management-ist mindset scrupulously ignores.... (Some just call this bullshit.)

One of these ethical responsibilities is: You hold the ethical responsibility to work the system so the system can work.... It will not reliably work for you, so you will have to change it in order for it to work for you, and for your organization.

Today, we have Management-ism instead of that foolish practice.

Continuing the investigation of the secular religion of Management-ism started HERE, continued HERE and HERE ...

The last installment introduced Dr. Bob Ironside, a General Practitioner who fled the managed care system to start a subscription-based health advocacy clinic, where his clients actively collaborate WITH him to maintain health rather than simply treat illness.

Dan Starr, in his comment on the third installment, noted that the HMO (Health MAINTENANCE Organization) concept originated in just this idea, a physician/client partnership focused positively, to maintain health and so reduce health care costs.... How maintaining health shifted into minimizing costs might serve as the general pattern defining the difference between the manager and the management-ist.

Management-ism thrives on homily and abstraction.... Some descriptions devolve into the even murkier realm of "leadership", which has all of the sparkle and promise common to personality cults.

In a Harvard-sponsored teleconference on leadership training, one of their B-school researchers admitted that not even Harvard knew how to train for leadership, and that their efforts would probably be best focused not on the B-school, but upon the Divinity School.... There, the perfect ambiguity cocktail, a steady diet of which utterly fogs reality.

One thing I noticed missing from Dr. Bob's description of his practice was the absence of any mention of specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound goals.... He was not managing his clinic, he was being it.

The professional management-ist is careful to maintain clear boundaries between self, others, and organization; he remains above all else "professional."... He is, above all else, politically astute.

Quite a stereotype, huh?

In practice, the management-ist might well exhibit all of these patterns, but would never characterize himself in this way.... Like the mythical character who falls in love with the swan, the management-ist falls in love with his gauges, managing what he can measure and trying to measure whatever he aspires to manage.

Sponsored by the local Chamber of Commerce to bring the business community together to consider: Surviving the downturn.

To our surprise, most reported no loss of lift, no panic.... I'd spent the morning waiting with my dad while my mother was injected, inspected, reflected, and ultimately rejected for now: no obvious cause.... Another is word jazz, where the sound and shape and meter carry as much meaning as the words: see below-

I sat on the bar while Amy roamed.... Here’s a tip: Fewer trips.

Real Estate professionals crowing: lots of inventory, prices fairly steady, though it is a buyer’s market now.

Tim Larkin reported that, when bank stocks went south, $100 million evaporated from this valley. This was mostly investment money, so no one’s missing meals except, perhaps those who rely upon donations from the better heeled and the restaurants might feel the pinch of people pinching penny stocks—so recently, real equity—and suddenly feeling poor.

On the other hand, fat commodity prices offset the markets here.... (That’s not much of an economy, either.)

And the construction workers at the Mall renovation left town until their payroll starts again.... Stop watching the news and maybe we can choose to let the downturn pass our valley by.

A fellow agile coach told me recently about his project to write the Ultimate Agile FAQ list - solutions to problems people recurrently have when installing agility somewhere.  There were sparkles in his eyes.  My reaction may have been harsh.
I've started wondering why we feel compelled to write FAQs about agility when the Most Typical Answers are always the same - "Yes, it's important," "It doesn't matter (as long as you do it one way or another)," "Trust your judgement" and "It depends."
"Yes, it's important."
Typical answer to questions like "do I really have to write tests before production code?" or "I don't like pair-programming, do I still have to do it?"  Don't get fooled.  These aren't real questions - someone is just asking for permission to do something the easy way without having to face consequences (remember - "Mommy, do I really have to wash my hands ?").  You may decide the person is wise enough to understand the "right" (?) answer - I'm not going to tell you which it is - but were the person wise enough, they wouldn't ask the question in the first place.  They'd try and experiment not following a practice to see how it goes, and would accept to rock the boat on their behalf.  So be patient, smile and remain firm.  Yes, it's important to write tests before production code.  Do it.
"It doesn't matter (as long as you do it one way or another)."
Typical answer to questions like "What tool should I use to track progress - Excel or Marker&Paper?"  Yes, I know, you have your own preference and I have mine.  Face it, though.  It's not about how you (or I) would do it, but how they will.  I find it's more efficient to leave to the doer the responsibility of chosing the tools work best for them.  It engages them toward action instead of submission - or rebellion.  More important than your relationship with them is their relationship with their work. So take a deep breath, stop (believing you have the power of) controlling others, trust them and nurture them.  What's important is to track progress.  The way the tracker prefers doing it is important too, and it's up to them to choose.
"Trust your judgement."
Typical answer to questions like "On what practice should I focus for now?" or "What techniques do I need most beside agility?"  Typical answer could be "all of them" or "it doesn't matter" but that's not what the person's ready to hear, really.  Again, it isn't so much a question than an attempt to delegate you the responsibility of a learning process.  Unlike the "Do I really have to..." questions, "What do I need to do now?" questions bear some hope though, for they're open questions.  The person is ready to try out something, and maybe the best thing they could try out is thinking for themselves.
"It depends."
Typical answer to questions like "How do I get my manager support our learning TDD?" or "My team and I want to go agile - where do we start?"  I like questions that bring up "it depends" answers.  It means they're context-sensitive and that you'll need to assess the situation in some way before being able to give some practical, useful answer.  Since answers to such questions depend from context and every context is a bit different, giving more precise answers than "it depends" prior to knowing more of the context bears the risk of creating an illusion - that the person may follow blindly the answer you've given.  Of course, you may have valuable, relevent answers to more specific questions, wrapped with a context.  And here's the dilemma - the more precise the question, the less frequently it's going to be asked.  The more your answer will be valuable, the less it'll have its place in a FAQ list.
So - where does that lead us?
Should one write FAQs?  Well, it depends.  The way I get it, being agile has more to do with experimenting different things at different times than with litterature knowledge.  And yet, FAQs on other subjects aren't useful. And also, others may know better that I do.
How do we get new ideas about what to try when we're stuck?  It doesn't matter - as long as you seek to try something different everytime something isn't working for you. 
Is it actually important to find answers to our burning questions?  Yes, it is important.  Honestly.
... And how much can we trust you on this?  The answer to this question is left as an exercise to the reader ;^)

This third installment of my investigation of Managementism, the profoundly popular theology influencing everything from food production to health care, looks at one example of one practitioner who choose to step "Off The Grid."

In the last installment, I introduced a doctor, Bob Ironside, who, dissatisfied with the management of the health care system he was a part of, took personal agency to make his part work much better. I was sitting in an extremely comfortable room—I would not call it a waiting room, because it was clearly not designed for any activity as wasteful as waiting—for a chat with Bob about his life off the grid.

...I spent the few minutes after the receptionist left checking out the room.... I asked, "Bob, why don't I feel like a cow in a cattle car waiting for the conductor to call my stop?"

He explained that people don't open up when you treat them like cattle. He'd designed this clinic to not feel very much like a clinic because the traditional design shuts people down, and he needs people to speak freely there.

He went on to explain how his clinic works.... Instead, he creates a sense of joint inquiry, fueled by deep personal interest and, as I already knew but was about to learn even more profoundly, an uncommon advocacy.

His practice is now all about advocacy.... Now he has a client load of about a hundred.

Incredulous again, I wondered, "So, you can do more with less, but what about the bottom line."... Bob's practice doesn't replace the need for personal insurance coverage, but it quite effectively reduces the need to resort to it in crisis.

I asked Bob if he'd become a pariah in the local medical community, and he recounted a conversation with a local cardiologist at a recent meeting.

When a doctor was ready, a patient's name was called out, and the door to the examination rooms opened, and that patient was ushered down the hall.

In other words, a typical doctor's office.

The most important information, more important it seemed than the patient's condition, was the condition of their insurance, for upon entering the office, every patient visited the sliding glass window and discussed how they would be paying.... I felt like I was purchasing a vacuum cleaner on the installment plan.

All typical doctor's office stuff.

I waited quite a long time, and since I had left work in the middle of the afternoon for the appointment, I noticed the time going by.... What rule, I wondered.

"The Health Management Organization (HMO) monitoring this clinic," he reported, "has calculated that I should need to spend no more than seven minutes with any individual patient."... "But I need at least a half hour to get to know anyone well enough to diagnose for them, so I break the rule, especially when the patient is someone interesting like you."

I felt flattered, but also felt the indignation Bob was spewing.... I felt as oppressed as Bob obviously did.

He spent his half hour, made a recommendation or two, and we parted.

Over the following years, I followed Bob to a couple of other clinics, one's he and his colleagues started to try to sidestep the hated HMO.... He went on to say that he was thinking very seriously of simply going off the grid.

I'd not heard that term before, so he explained that his vision was to start a clinic where insurance would not be accepted as a valid form of payment, where patients contracted directly with him for his services, prepaying to eliminate billing and collections, in return for care without the management.

Fast forward a decade.... I spoke with his admin, and scheduled a late afternoon hour in his new off-the-grid office.

The offices of D2 are on the top floor of a medical office building directly across one of Portland's familiar tree-lined streets.

How did we manage to do that?

I just finished reading Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, which continues his commentary, started in The Omnivore's Dilemma, on the sorry state of food production and distribution.... a) We don't yet understand what all the elements are and how they actually relate, and b) We have been misusing science to support the notion that we DO know what we actually do not.... His description of the Industrial Food System and the emerging Industrial ORGANIC Food System can pass for a reasonable description of our Managed Health Care system, too, and our Homeland Security System, as well as our business management system.... If we can pull it off.

The professional manager is informed by a body of knowledge referred to as "management science," but like Pollan's description of nutritionism, management science is a curious kind of science, indeed.... My management training did little more than indoctrinate me into a way of thinking that separated me from some of my more important human capabilities, inducting me into a social class bred to be nourished by self sacrifice and rewarded according to my ability to encourage others to sacrifice themselves, too. For this effort, I was paid more than the rank and file.

Pollin labels nutrition science "nutritionism" because it became science in service not to nutrition or to humanity, but to short-term competitive advantage.... There, where management managed everything, creating a permission-focused culture where otherwise sentient adults ask their managers permission before doing anything.

In the next installment, I'll tell the story of a doctor who decided to go "off the grid" and stop accepting insurance claims as reimbursement for his services.

When we let participants pair program in courses, it is always difficult to make them stop… Over time we have experimented with various techniques. Marc and I are at the ESSAP summer school this week, and we needed to pull out all the stops - they were that focused

Techniques we used to get people to stop

• Pomodori (kitchen timer set to 25 minutes, with 5 minutes in between), it makes noise, so some people stop.
• Marc’s Horn - this gets some more peoples attention
• and finally this:

I shout “Step away from the keyboard, and put your hands where I can see them!”.

That gets everybody’s attention (and laughs). We are having good fun, and seem to have found a good way to explain refactoring when you are almost having some tests (more about that later, hopefully).

More pictures from this session (including the retrospective stickers)

Earlier this year, I posted a start of a sticky idea to mixed comments.... I can spend a lot of time in consideration sometimes. Here's the link back to the earlier piece: Link Back

This past weekend, I received a notice from my friends at the International Society for Systems Sciences about a new field of study they're promoting called Relational Science. Smelled interesting.

Here's a link to the wiki they're put up to outline the basic idea: Link Here.

Feels like I stumbled upon an old friend. The material points out at least one powerful idea for me: that present investigations assume that the future can be some kind of derivative of the present.... And this omission seems material.

The models we create influence the future we experience, and this modeling behavior---how we characterize what we're in and what we expect to come next---needs to be included in our consideration to achieve a full understanding of what we're in and what we expect next, creating a recursive, self-referential relationship with ourselves, others, and our context. And also, seems to me, with our future, too.

There are ---ahem--- more adult ways to give explicit directions, the Danes, as usual, are WAY far ahead of the rest of us!Topless Speed Signs

See more like this on kontraband.com

...If I must refer to an ink-blot of a plan or unfold a passenger compartment-sized map---or, take my eyes off the road --- to access the information, explicit direction might well undermine my performance.

So, why all the signage?... (I should have figured something so danged stupid would have to be a risk avoidance strategy!)

We seem as a society to have acquired an advanced case of The Erma Bombeck Disease, as described by the late syndicated columnist Erma Bombeck, this disorder is a compulsion, caused by spending too much time with children, that forces one to lean over and cut their dining partner's meat for them.... We look around for explicit direction instead.

In a recent discussion of Soviet-style Five Year Planning, someone noted that the one thing those explicit plans preserved was the commissar's role as arbiter, judge, jury, and (sometimes) executioner, because when (not if!) the explicit plan went awry, those "following" it would have to seek judgement, dispensation, (or contrive some way to spin or cloak the result), and each of these responses elevated and preserved not the proletariat, who's fault was assumed if the plan failed, but the boss.... Or do they?

Judging from the performance of most drivers (including me!), speed limits are interpreted as "posted speed plus five mph," STOP signs mean "slow down enough to shift into first gear before proceeding," and YIELD signs actually mean "YIELD (to the temptation to cut through opposing traffic)!"... An example that maybe it IS possible to teach an old hound dog a new trick or two.

One final short video which better explains the Explicit Direction Myth.

After running it in-house (Marc and I are travelling to Switzerland in two weeks to do just that ), we are now happilly responding to demand for an open-enrollment Unit Testing Masterclass. In this class we practice more Test- and Behaviour-driven development in small steps, you will experience various mocking techniques as well as how (not) to make tests that you and your colleagues can understand.

First courses planned are 8,99 and 22,23 September in Tilburg, Netherlands. See the course page for a full description and the booking form to reserve your space. We are looking forward to meeting you there!