Weeknote 17 — Thank you penicilin — Because… Agile

This is a bit of a weird one, I wrote a weeknote for the week before last, but I was pretty ill (turns out I had tonsilitis) so the weeknote never saw the light of day. Now, I’m feeling quite a lot better (thanks penicilin) and I’m going to give you last week’s weeknote. I may sprinkle a bit of this week in — but honestly, I was spaced out for much of the week, so I didn’t take much in.

I’m also going to see if a new format might work, my old questions were a good starting point but I found as I found more to talk about that I was trying to shoehorn things into the old questions — which felt a bit forced.

Find your People

So recently I was at the BWS Business Roadshow here in Glasgow, I spoke a bit about it in a previous weeknote, but one thing I didn’t mention was Marie Rodgers. As a sales coach, she helps people get better leads and sell with confidence. She said that in a room of 100 perfect potential customers, only 15 will be in enough pain to buy there and then, 35 will in the next 18 months and 50 will never buy from you.

Interesting stuff, it got me to thinking about any group of people. Is it worth thinking about the same percentages when you want to explore a new idea or theme with a group of people? Or a community of which you are part? Would it make the idea or theme more likely to grow and develop if you found the people who were interested rather than take the full group with you? It’s pretty interlinked with the thoughts I’ve been having around communities and teams recently. In a community, people tend to have a common interest, but only some will care about a niche within that common interest, or have the headspace for it at the time when you do. It might help me understand some of the frustrations and behaviours I see. Food for thought.

Maximise the awesome

I was having a chat with some fellow agilists (Matt, Chris and Iain) and we were talking about productivity. I posed the question — ‘What is the definition of productivity?’. There were various things mentioned but this was my favourite: ‘Beast the mundane stuff so you maximise the time for the awesome stuff.’ When I think of times I describe myself as productive, this is pretty much what I’ve done. So I’m sticking with that definition for now.

Oh, that explains a lot

So I’ve spent a few train journeys with Chris McDermott of late. Chris is one of those people who has the amazing ability to make me question myself time and time again. To me, he’s a theories man. This maybe comes from a huge amount of experience he has in the agile space compared to me, but I also think he likes to dig into a bit of social theory now and again (and I’m sure he would agree!)

However, I find that I’m a bit the opposite. I often find myself doing things instinctively and noticing things. I then will tell Chris about things I’ve done and he will tell me the theory behind why I noticed certain behaviours or outcomes. This has two effects for me — It frustrates me hugely because I feel I should have known already, but on the other hand it gives me a huge amount of insight, a new lens to look at the world and often makes me feel good because it makes sense of the world for me. So my thanks go to Chris, for enlightening me and frustrating me in equal measures, it pushes me forwards.

Cadences

I recently had a chat with a team about their retrospective cadence. It was a really interesting conversation because it occurred to me that there really is a spectrum for retrospecting. Ad hoc retrospectives are at either end of the spectrum. Teams either ad hoc and hardly ever do it because they don’t see the value, or teams ad hoc retros because they want to do them more often, the team has the maturity to just talk and reflect when something needs talked about. Most teams are somewhere in the middle. Where they have retrospectives ever 2–4 weeks, because they feel they should, because it works fine or because they haven’t considered anything else.

Retrospectives are one of our most powerful tools in the agile community — I find it so sad when I come across teams who don’t see that, who don’t take a moment to pause, reflect and think about how they can be better in the future.

Finally…

There was a trend on twitter for people to thank 10 women. I took on the challenge and thanked 10 women who have inspired me or supported me over the past few years, each of them is awesome. But I was humbled to appear myself on many similar lists of people in my community. It was amazing to be celebrated with so many awesome people so I want to take the opportunity to thank each one: Sathpal, Chris, Seonaid, John, Ceri, Iain, Cheryl, Lucy and Aino.

That’s all for this week (or last week) Let me know if the new format (or lack of) made it better or worse — anything you want me to bring back?

I’m on holiday the next two weeks, but I’ll be back again when there is something to say :)

Originally published at https://becauseagile.com on November 18, 2019.