Satir workshops

The new year seems to be an excellent time to think about your time management. It seemed to be for mine, and around new year I was chatting with Marc. Marc said “I’m reading a new book on personal productivity”. That made me think. Marc is one of the most productive people I know, so why would he bother reading yet another book like that. He has many, and I knew him since before he had any of those or was into,  say methodology. Then, just like now, he is one of the most productive people I know.

“So, why bother?” I asked him.

“I’m productive, but I would like to do it with less stress”. I can understand that. And then I  thought that by thinking about more productivity and less stress, you might achieve they opposite. I’ve met some very relaxed people. Were they thinking about stress? Probably not. Not thinking about stress may be like not thinking about a banana. You’ve probably read about research where they ask people to not think about something a banana, for instance, and it turns out they think more about it when you ask them not to…

Take Getting Things Done, for instance. The book has as subtitle “the art of stress-free productivity”. I have the book, and have tried it a couple of times. To me, it seems to have too many moving parts. Even if you take just one part, it might cause you stress. For instance, Johanna Rothman just wrote how Inbox zero is hard for her. GTD states that you should end every day with an empty inbox.

I tried that a couple of times, and after a while I could not get it to work either. In the mean time, I was stressing about it, worrying that I was not working to the norm I had set myself… Thus achieving the opposite of what I set out to do.

So, before Marc got around to explaining that The art of getting everything done by putting it off to tomorrow, and the main principles are of his shiny new tool, I came to the conclusion that it might be best for me to eat my own dogfood, and apply to myself what I tend to advise to teams these days:

Reflect, find out what works for you and do more of it (and do some experiments every once in a while to see if something else would work even better).

Trying out another methodology would not work for me at the moment, because, I might be worrying if I was ‘doing it right’. Asking if you’re doing it right is often the wrong questions to ask… And following a methodology to a T might give you more stress, and thus less productivity, instead of the other way around.

So don’t think about stress, I wish you a relaxed day!

Marc and I just got word from Jason Gorman, that our session Responsibility Driven Design with Mock Objects has been accepted for the conference that has outlawed index cards, post-its and lego: the Software Craftsmanship Conference in London, February 26.

The year is getting off to a good start - we did an iteration on the session proposal January 1st. To fit with the spirit of the conference, we’ve added a coders’ dojo to it. I look forward to going back to the BBC site, having facilitated in-house dojos before.

I’m still wondering what happened with our other proposal - the continuous integration install party. It might not have gotten through, but I guess we could run it as a BoF (possibly at the SPA conference in April, also in london).

Chris Matts is drafting comic strips on real options and financial options in the new decision coach blog he and Olav Maassen started yesterday.

I particularly liked the draft on Financial Options, it explains a number of not so intuitive financial instruments and techniques (e.g. naked short selling and futures) in such a way that I find them easy to understand, and possibly explain them to others. Not a bad thing to have in turbulent financial times. Chris’s goal is to make them  understandable by ‘basically everybody’ - I encourage you to go and read it, and give him some feedback on bits you don’t understand.

The Satir Journal, Volume 2, Number 3, 2008. Loaded on 2008-12-25

The Satir Journal, Volume 2, Number 2, 2008. Loaded on 2008-08-06

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

A while ago, I wrote an article demonstrating what we do at a Coders' Dojo: code and talk in front of others.  It took the shape of a story in which YOU (yes, you) are the hero - you know the kind.  Although in the first place I intended it to be printed on paper, it was definitely crying out for a more suitable medium, namely hypertext.  It took me some time to do the transfer - and a nudge from fellow dojo attendees - but thanks to Google Sites, here it is.
I'll be delighted to hear / read your feedbacks about it.

Woke this morning to an interview with John Kao on the BBC. Kao, author of Innovation Nation, is one of those acknowledged experts. His expertise: innovation.

He illustrates innovation by improvising on a piano. He plays the standard transcribed melody to an old standard and relates this to business process.... Then he improvises around the transcription and the result is transforming.

He plays a random series of notes, explaining that while this 'melody' might well be creative, it's not satisfying.... requires respect for a few basic rules of construction, principles of harmony, rhythm, and tone. The manager's job involves letting go, removing barriers, and helping people believe in the objective.

In other news today:

Emmanuel Gaillot just blogged about our upcoming French Refactoring Training.

January 28 and 29 at the office of Octo Technology in Paris. This training will be in French. We ran it together in-house (also in Paris) and it worked quite well . The training was good fun, we did even more things dojo-style (including demos) than I normally would, and we made time for hands-on systems thinking. I think with the experiments we’ve done this year, that we’ve finally found a good way to do systems thinking with programmers. It seems to be a bit more intuitive for managers and coaches,  but presented in the right way, it turns out developers find it eXtremely valuable. Surprisingly (not ) the topic the developers chose for their diagram was not entirely technical: how too much labour turnover was hindering their productivity and maintenance.

In other other news: the QWAN newsletter is out. It has some instruction on how to do your own Temperature Reading, conference reports and the public courses agenda. Enjoy!

Now it is time to relax after a  busy and period. Maybe I’ll finally get around to posting photos from all the conferences we’ve been to since october…

I wrote a teaser post about iterative and incremental rebranding of eXperience Agile in September… It’s been four months and almost as many newsletters since then . So time to de-tease the blog…

Marc suggested to do part of the upcoming newsletter as a Temperature Reading, so besides getting some information, our readers also learn a technique, and it helps us structuring our own reflection over the past year. It’s been about a year since Marc, Rob and yours truly sat together after xp days london to discuss closer collaboration with courses and coaching (but still as loosely coupled as possible, because we like our independence).

A Temperature Reading has five questions, the order of which you can vary, depending on the context (see Temperature Reading for explanation and the default order, I’m going to do something different here).

1 New Information

We proudly presented QWAN = Quality Without A Name

We started handing out these rubber ducks at CITCON Amsterdam, for those cases when we are not around to pair (program, brainstorm, reflect, be innovative) with. Talking out loud helps, and ‘rubber ducking’ is a well known technique for this (e.g. Kathy Sierra writes that talking to pets works even better. We came across it the first time in the Pragmatic Programmer ). We chose QWAN as a name, because we are still inspired by Christopher Alexander’s early work on patterns (Timeless Way Of Building) most notably. QWAN is a label for stuff done by Rob Westgeest, Marc Evers and yours truly, often in co-operation with others.

QWAN co-created a bunch of new courses and workshops in 2008: eXperience Refactoring (also with Octos’ Emmanuel Gaillot), Unit Testing Masterclass, responsibility driven design with mock objects, dirty jobs (with Tjakko Kleinhuis), pimp my retrospective (with Topic’s Nicole Belilos), political games (with Emmanuel Gaillot), story testing with Rspec, and a revamped rightsizing your unit tests (and then some that I forgot. This collaboration seems productive, many more than last year it seems. We supported conferences in one form or another, e.g. by sponsoring, as co-organizers or ‘just’ running a session: CITCON Amsterdam, several Agile Opens, XP Days Benelux and London, ESSAP summerschool, Agile2009, AgileHolland.

2 Appreciations

We’d like to thank everyone who participated in our courses, conferences and workshops. Your enthusiasm and feedback helps us to improve and, not least, have fun in our jobs. Everybody who provided encouraging feedback when we published our brochure earlier this year. Especially Nynke Fokma, Becky Winant and other keys for giving detailed suggestions for improvement. We’ve had several great customers (you know who you are), who created amazing conditions for us to focus on our work. Thank you!

3 Complaints with recommendations

We’ve made some progress in supporting ourselves with a Customer Relationship Management system. There are still some improvements that would make our work easier (usability) and that of our customers (sign-up and notification of new courses). (Marc wishes for a more sustainable pace. I’m careful what I wish for - a more sustainable pace would be nice, but I’m also quite happy with our productivity, passion and income at the moment)

4 Puzzles

We made progress in selling open enrollment courses, and are still puzzling on better ways of selling those (as well as making it easier on our customers to plan and buy participation). The context for courses seems to be shifting at the moment - working more effectively has value, but many large corporations have the knee-jerk reaction of putting all training on hold when sales slow. At these corporations people have little time for training when things are good - too busy, and no budget for training when things are bad. Luckily we also have customers with a long term perspective, who invest in training, education and hiring continuously.

5 Hopes and wishes

We hope the ‘interesting’ economy will mark the breakthrough of lean and agile ways of working in more places. We hope to carry out more integrated on-site coaching … With integrated we mean doing whatever works best in a given context : a whole systems approach using combinations of lean, scrum, extreme programming with ’soft’ skills inspired by Satir and systems thinking.

We wish you a healthy, fun and prosperous 2009, and look forward to collaborating with many of you.

(meta-appreciation: thanks to Marc for coming up with the idea for a Temperature Reading, and giving feedback while listening to the items while writing them. Thanks to Marc & Maroesja’s kids Maris, Marden and Marijn for providing the necessary distractions )

We humans remain interested in prediction even though it's kind of an anti-life occupation.

There's probably no better way to undermine the present than to stick your head far into the future.... The great tragedy at the end of a pursuit, the end of a project, happens when we realize that while we achieved or even exceeded what we said we wanted, at the end, none of us want to do another one anything like that one together again. Our success destroys our ability to succeed together again because we ignored our present, not because we failed to achieve our future.

One of the Tarot cards advises to consider how you want it to feel, not just what you want to achieve, to avoid hollow victories.... Most are currently unemployed or underemployed, but even those employed full time were facing the certainty or high likelihood of layoff, slowdown, or shutdown in the near future.

One friend owns a twenty year old rare book business.... Another couple, world-class consultants, have no idea what they will be doing after the first of the year.

Just this morning I learn that a friend with decades of executive experience in the Pharma industry, who transferred to a spin-off start-up, will lose his job this month.

None of these folks predicted --- or could have predicted --- any of this.... Each understand that this strategy is even less sustainable than they believed their former success was.

So, we can live in dread of the future, it seems, or hold on tight through these troubles.... Our work is complicated by the absence of the familiar financial reinforcement, but not---unless we insist---eliminated by it.

This posting is the first in a series focusing upon a new phenomenon in our culture, where systemic unemployment is not centered on the industrial working class, the under-educated, or the traditionally disenfranchised.