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Monthly Archives: August 2021

Stand and Deliver

August 5, 2021
Agile, Software development
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Stand and Deliver

I’ve rarely participated in, or observed, a useful daily standup. Oh, wait, actually that would be never. And in those teams where we’ve not had daily stand-ups, we’ve never missed them.

Daily stand-ups are a signal –  a signal of latent dysfunctions in your development organisation. Of course, for many organisations coming from a highly dysfunctional environment, they can be a step forward. But like training wheels on a push-bike, daily stand-ups are a step we’d all like to be over with as soon as possible. Frankly, I think they’re unhelpful, time-wasting and what’s more, embarrassing.

The Daily Stand-up In Principle

A quick daily meeting to check the pulse of your project. Setting aside the raft of dysfunctions inherent is the idea of a project, let’s take a look at the origins of the idea:

“You want everyone to know what’s going on, even if they weren’t there when something interesting happened. You want to know who’s got a problem you can help with, you want to get help if you need it. You need a forum to announce interesting upcoming events.”

~ Stand Up Meeting, C3 Wiki

Every day at a specified time (C3′s is 10 AM), everyone on the team (developers, customers, people passing by) stands up in a circle. Go around the circle and briefly describe what you’re working on, how it’s going, anything interesting you have discovered, any problems you are having.

The Daily Stand-up In Practice

Here are some of the dysfunctions I have regularly observed in daily standup meetings, in practise:

  • Substitutes for regular communication throughout each day.
  • Poor understanding of context (the needs of the Folks That Matter).
  • Poor appreciation of cadence (little urge to get things done).
  • Lack of fellowship (bickering and name-calling).
  • Lack of clarity on common (shared) purpose.
  • Discomforted management (lack of visibility into the team’s progress).
  • Disconnected Scrum Masters

Daily stand-ups are a signal of latent dysfunctions in your development organisation. Are you paying attention to the signal?

– Bob

Quickies

August 4, 2021
News, Quickies
5 Comments

Quickies

In an attempt to create a more dynamic relationship with and between the readers of this blog, I’m experimenting with an idea I’m calling “Quickies” – posts that are short enough and frequent enough to evoke the tweeting vibe.

“Why not just rejoin Twitter?” I hear you ask. A fair question. My response: Because I’m forsworn of Antisocial media. Let’s see how you like Quickies.

Look out for these Quickies: they’ll be short posts with the title prefix “Quickie:”. Let me know if they irk or delight.

Feedback on the idea welcomed. And please feel free to comment on quickies like you would reply to e.g. tweets.

– Bob

I Have A Dream

August 4, 2021
Organisational effectiveness, Organisational Therapy
2 Comments

I Have A Dream

I have a dream that organisations everywhere will become part of the solution to the world’s social ills, rather than a part of the problem. That work will become intrinsic to and supportive of humans’ flourishing. Indeed, that the very idea of “work” fades out to be superseded by the idea of “playing productively together”. And eventually our collectively regarding the idea of working to earn a living – as opposed to a means to find joy in mutual society – as nothing more than an anachronistic curiosity.

I dream that when we talk about “productivity” we’re really thinking about the quality of our relationships, rather than the amount of good or services we can produce in an hour or a day. That “being productive” is counted in units of joyfulness, rather than in $Dollars or £Pounds.

I dream that organisations and the people comprising them recognise their own needs and go about building the kind of environments, workplaces, societies where those needs can be discussed, and addressed.

I dream that every organisation has a focus on its health, on the quality of the experience that people who work in it, with it and in contact with it have every day. I dream that organisations get to a place where they’re aware of what they think and believe, collectively, and can looks at those shared beliefs in the light of the big picture of what they’re trying to achieve.

I dream of a day when organisations are sane, and flourishing.

More Than Just Dreaming – Making A Start

Dreaming is all very well, and sometimes gives us the energy or motivation to act. For my part, I’m acting to bring about my dreams via Organisational Psychotherapy.

I take much comfort from the words of Martin Luther King, Junior. Not least:

“This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists. Our planet teeters on the brink of annihilation; dangerous passions of pride, hatred, and selfishness are enthroned in our lives; and men do reverence before false gods of nationalism and materialism. The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.”

~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Invitation To Learn More

So, please allow me to extend an invitation to learn more about organisational psychotherapy. Either as a potential beneficiary or as a potential therapist. Not to learn from me, you understand, but perhaps to learn some things together. Might that help you get some needs met – either others’ or your own?

– Bob

Further Reading

Science and Sanity ~ Alfred Korzybski
Dreaming ~ Think Different blog post

Who’s Who

August 4, 2021
Community, Feedback
27 Comments

Who’s Who

This post is an experiment to illuminate the readership for this blog, and maybe to foster an increased sense of community, too.

Would you be willing to add a comment to this post with a brief introduction about yourself and what you need from this blog, and from other readers here, too?

A link to an online bio might also be helpful (if you don’t have an online blog with bio, maybe a link to a LinkedIn profile or Twitter page).

Thanks for participating! 🙂

– Bob

Deming: “Cease Dependence on Inspection”

August 3, 2021
Archive, Ex-Amplify.com, Organisational effectiveness, Quality, Snippet, Software development
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Deming: “Cease Dependence on Inspection”

[From the Archive: Originally posted at Amplify.com Jun 29, 2009]

Deming’s view on inspections, which I share: “Cease Dependence on Inspection”.
(Caveat: He way talking about manufacturing and factory lines. Collaborative knowledge work, such as product design or software development, is a different context which will require some re-interpretation and repurposing of the fundamental concepts underpinning his words).

I also recognise that many folks may feel so uneasy in some extreme situations – for example, where life and limb are at risk – that they may still choose to require inspections (via statistical sampling, or even 100% inspection).

Aside: I’d suggest that such unease generally comes from a lack of trust in the effectiveness of the process(es) involved.

Amplify’d from curiouscat.com

From Deming’s 14 management points: “Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.” Out of the Crisis, 1982.
Prior to Deming’s ideas being adopted inspection was often used to select out the bad products. Companies would make products then sift through the resulting output removing those that were defective. If they could re-work them to be sold they would do so. Otherwise they would scrap the defective output.
Obviously this is a costly way to do business. It is much better to work on improving your processes so the output is all acceptable. Deming used to colorfully describe the old practice as “you burn the toast, I’ll scrape.”
Deming believed in improving the process, and doing so using process measures to guide improvement efforts.

In the New Economics, page 179, Deming states:

Conformance to specifications may be achieved in several ways:

  1. By careful inspection, sorting the bad from the good. Dependence on inspection is hazardous and costly.
  2. By work on the production process to shrink variation about the nominal value.

Obviously, option two is the preferred method. He also recognized that there are extreme situations where 100% inspection may be required (where safety may be jeopardized for example).

Read more at curiouscat.com

– Bob

A Quick Guide to Getting the Best Out of the Think Different Blog

August 3, 2021
Guides
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A Quick Guide to Getting the Best Out of the Think Different Blog

For new and occasional readers, here’s a quick guide to this blog:

Intended Audience

Via this blog, I share insights of particular interest to CxOs, other senior business and technical managers, and development folks more generally – insights into the always exciting, often frustrating and sometimes downright opaque world of collaborative knowledge work, of which software and product development are two examples.

Top Menu

At the top of each and every page, below the Think Different title, and strap line, is the site’s horizontal menu:



This provides access to the various sections of the blog:

Home page

The single home page is a continuously-scrolling list of every post on the blog, in most-recent-first order. I guess few will have the patience to scroll through all 640+ posts, so there are other ways of quickly getting to posts that may be of specific interest. These ways include the (excellent) WordPress search feature, various elements of the right-hand sidebar (explained below) and the “Archive” section of the blog, accessible from the top menu.

About

The About section is a brief introduction to me and the blog.

Rightshifting

The Rightshifting section relates to my work with Rightshifting (see introductory posts), including my “Giants“, the Rightshifting community, the Marshall Model and some self-assessment questionnaires.

Therapy

The Therapy section introduces my work with Organisational Psychotherapy.

NoCV

This section presents my issues with recruiting in general and with the flaws in the idea of CVs, in particular.

Research

This section provides a brief overview of some of the research topics I’m concerned with and have in hand.

Archive

The Archive section is a list of the titles of all posts on the blog, in date order, with the most recent listed first.

Search

WordPress provides a fully-featured search facility. I use it myself, often. I’ve not been able to find a guide to the powerful query syntax (do let me know if you find one), but there is a related document (technical!) here. https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/classes/wp_query/

Beyond simple searches for text strings appearing in eg.g. posts, the query language supports a variety of other queries, including order (ascending, depending) for search results.

Left-hand Sidebar

The sidebar on the left of each page provides access to comments – and commenting – on the page,
a date stamp of the date the post was first published, and for each post, a list of categories under which the post is listed.

Right-hand Sidebar

Subscribe

Please enter your email address to subscribe to the blog and receive email notifications of each new post.

Recent Posts

Lists the eight most recently published posts on this blog

Categories

Lists, in a pseudo word-cloud, the ten most-used categories for posts on the blog.

Author

Features the Gravatar information on the blog’s author (me). Click on the headshot to go to the Gravatar page.

Blogroll

Lists some blogs I follow. I’m always interested in adding blogs, so if you’d like e.g. a blogroll exchange, please get in touch.

Goodreads

[Update 4-Aug-2021] I’ve fixed the pesky glitch with the Goodreads element, so it now shows the most recent five books I’ve added to Goodreads, as the element is designed to do. Note: All the books I’ve ever read (well, most of them) feature on my own Goodreads page:

Posts by Month and Year

A list of months back to the start of the blog (2009), with a count of the number of posts published in each month (click on a month/year to see a monthly archive of relevant posts).

Top Posts and Pages

A list of five of the currently most-read posts/pages from the blog.

Sharing

I really appreciate it when folks share my posts with others. The various buttons share the post on the indicated social media sites.

Likes

You can “like” a post. But this irks me – I’d much prefer you to share or reblog posts with others.

Commenting

To comment on a post or page, simply click the “Comments” link in the left-hand sidebar and add your comment at the bottom of the page. I have moderation turned on, which means that new commenters will have to wait for me to accept their first comment. This usually takes me a few hours.

Once a comment has been accepted, future comments on any posts are not moderated, so not stalled pending moderation.

Moderation policy: I will delete/reject without warning any comments I find offensive or downright stupid. It’s my blog, after all. Other than that, pretty much any goes.

Readers’ Hint and Tips

If you have any hints or tips you feel might be useful for fellow readers, would you be willing to share them via the comments on this post?

Please Do Get In Touch

For private conversations in connection with any post, please do email me at bob.marshall@fallingblossoms.com. I welcome the opportunity for conversation and mutual exploration. 🙂

– Bob

Antisocial Media

August 3, 2021
News
3 Comments

Antisocial Media

You may have noticed that I’ve recently quit LinkedIn. That, combined with my prior involuntary, but unregretted ejection from Twitter (it’s a long story), means that my long-running blog here on Think Different is now my primary online presence. Please enjoy the 640+ posts you can find here. Your considered comments are always welcome.

(Falling Blossoms has been without a web site for some years now. And I’m not missing it).

ICYMI, here’s the LinkedIn post announcing my exit:

I guess from the supportive responses to the above post, many feel the same way.

Reasons

In case you’re wondering, here’s the main reasons I’ve given up on the whole social media thing:

Lack of conversations

I need conversations. During the COVID lockdowns more than ever. I’m pretty sure it’s a near-universal need, especially amongst people trying to push the envelope on their favourite themes. Social media has become ever-more unsuited to meaningful conversations and shared exploration of ideas. I have something in mind to address that, but that’s news for another day.

Low signal-to-noise ratio

The final straw for my presence on LinkedIn has been the stellar rise in trivia, irrelevancies, ego-buffing, self-promotion and general twaddle. It seems like LinkedIn has been moving in that direction for years. Enough is enough, AFAIC.

Ineffective sharing

My main reason for joining Twitter, many years ago, was to share things I found interesting. Articles, links, topics, experiences, reflections and the like. In the hope that others too might find interest and utility in those things. Over the years, the experience of sharing – the uptake – has become less and less satisfying.

Misinformation

As XKCD so marvellously put it, “There’s someone wrong on the internet”.

I’m mostly inured to it these days, yet regularly find myself suppressing the urge to call out egregious examples from people in positions of influence.

Snark and Boojum

I’ve been finding more and more unpleasant and downright insulting responses to my social media posting over the past year or two. I don’t need that kind of thing, even though I accept my emotional responses to such provocations are entirely within my own remit and control. Better just to remove myself from contact with those people.

Welcome Again

As a current reader of my blog, may I welcome you once again, and express my hopes for meaningful conversations and productive sharing of things.

Semper Mirabilis.

– Bob