Wanna make a difference? Maybe some money? Look into this under-tapped market: Agile Mentoring. Google it. Hard. Do you see people providing this?
There is pain. You can step in.
I’ve thought about it. Hard. (Twice.) And then put it down. Even harder. (Just as twice.) I even got a domain name, started a Slack group, and recruited some introductory members, deepening relationships while embarking on a program.
Here is my pitch:
Continue reading Agile MentoringWould this get me to jump out of bed in the morning?
There. That right there. That’s the metric.
Continue reading The First MetricPut your wallet down.
Look, I hear ya – you want to be better, but I bet you want to be sustainably better. I know your organization may want change, but I bet it wants lasting change. You hear good things about Agile or Scrum or Kanban or Kanscrum Scrumban, and you’re tempted to bring in an Agile Coach.
Here is where I try to convince you, counter-intuitively, to not hire me and my kind.
At least, not at first.
Google “Aristotle quotes”. Here’s the first one I see:
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle
(Oooh. Starting with philosophy. Dorky. I like it.)
In his book “Atomic Habits“, James Clear builds off of this notion. Habits are those actions we take without trying – they’re automatic. The reason they’re automatic is we have found value in making them automatic – we either do them very frequently, or we have practiced them a lot. The benefit of automating them is so that we save brain energy to think through things that are novel, or things that matter, instead of things we do with a high enough frequency, like brush teeth before bed, or wash hands after coming back home, or wiping our sword on the grass before putting it away after the weekly field battle for the Hill of Arowyn with the neighbouring tribe.
(Oooh. An attempt at a Welsh word. Gaelic. I like it.)
Continue reading Agile HabitsHere’s an SAT-style analogy for ya, partially because I like wordplay, partially because I value effort over outcome, partially because I like Simon Sinek, and partially because I dislike New Year’s Resolutions.
Backlog : Product Experiments (the what) ::
Frontlog : Process Experiments (the how) ::
Forelog : Vision Experiments (the why)
This isn’t the best analogy, since ‘the how’ per Sinek’s Golden Circle is more akin to ‘principles’, but this’ll work well enough. Continue reading Introducing a Frontlog: Experiments in Process