There’s a certain type of quiet movie that I like a lot. It usually starts with a stranger entering a closed group, e.g. a village and the dynamics that enfold because of it. “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert“, “Fried Green Tomatoes” or “Kitchen Stories” are excellent examples. Did you ever stop to …
Category Archives: Food for Thought
Agile @ Universities
Don’t you love it, when you’re sitting in a talk with a “this sounds vaguely interesting”-attitude and it turns out to be really inspiring? Happened to me at ALE 2011 with Bruce Scharlau‘s talk about “Agile at the University”. He presented the various ways, he teaches agile at Aberdeen and how all of us in …
Software Craftsmanship
A couple of days ago we talked about the Software Craftsmanship movement at work. I thought of the movement as an extension to the agile movement, that goes full circle to agile’s roots in software development, and focuses on practising coding skills. This is the Software Craftsmanship Manifesto: As aspiring Software Craftsmen we are raising …
That goes without saying! Not.
Whenever someone complains about a third (absent) person I usually suggest talking to said person directly. In my mind it makes perfect sense that we can’t expect someone to behave differently in the future, if they’re unaware that their behavior offended someone. Surprisingly often I get replies like: “But that should be self-evident! I really …
“I don’t have time for that!” O RLY?
In one retrospective a colleague rebuffed a proposed action item with: “I don’t have time for that!” Wrong. We all have precisely the same amount of time. What he really was saying is that the issue was not important enough to him to make time. Which is fine. Time is often a scarce resource and …
Decision Fatigue
Today my twitter stream contained a most interesting article: Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? The article is long, but worth the read! Just in case you’re short on time or too exhausted, here’s a summary: Decisions are exhausting, even small ones Especially trade-offs, which are an advanced form of decisions Unfortunately decision fatigue doesn’t …
7 Stages of Emotional Dynamics during Change
Two weeks ago some colleagues and me took part in a seminar on “Removing Impediments / Change Management”. The main point we took away is that change is all about emotions: Each change invokes emotions – positive and negative ones. The positive are accepted, while the negative are unwanted and dismissed as resistance. But you …
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Change through regularity
The title is not as contradictory as it may seem: Agile and scrum stress the need to be flexible, to change and adapt. But let’s not forget that there’s also merit in the steady, the regular, the predictable. Humans are creatures of habit and I’ve found that the chances of successfully changing behavior increase if …
Scrum Master Creed
Two weeks ago I resigned as scrum master and will soon go back to just doing UX. Ironically I’m not resigning because I don’t care about agile anymore but rather that I care too much. .oO(Does that make sense to anyone but me?) Anyway, I’d like to share with you my vision of “scrum master-dom”, …
Want Change? Start with yourself!
[This is a follow-up of my post about three crucial books.] The title really says it all: If you want change, you have to take some sort of action, to make it happen. It won’t happen by itself, with you just sitting around hoping for it. Today that seems blatantly obvious to me, but it …