The improv day for agile coaches was a blast - many thanks to all who came, and special thanks to Tom Salinsky for inspiring teaching, and Mike Sutton for helping organise the day.

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Blogging from the Munich Scrum Gathering, so here’s a rare Scrum-focussed blog, though (of course) there’s a lot here that parallels other thinking in the Agile and Lean world. The Scrum Picture is Wrong: well, not wrong, but incomplete. Misleadingly, dangerously incomplete. It’s easier to say it’s just wrong, and this is why.
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What sort of conversations can you have with your organisation about software development practice and process? By which I mean not only – what do you talk about – but just as importantly, what do you bring to the conversation that affects how you frame the discussion, and how do you improve its chances of creating lasting change?
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I ran this conversation as a session at the UK Agile Coaches Gathering last week. It was prompted by the common experience of seeing Dilbert cartoons stuck to office walls and partitions. Here’s one of my favourites — as usual, it rings true, and the drawing, writing and setting are spot-on[1]. But wait - did Dilbert just lie to the manager? Is it OK to do that? Maybe it is, and maybe we make ourselves feel superior to the pointy-hairs by doing it.

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All three partners in CATeams (that is, Ben Fuchs, Joseph Pelrine and yours truly) will be in London on 20 May, to kick off what we aim to be a monthly clinic session dealing with Agile adoption, team conflict and organisational dynamics. The premise is simple - mail us to set a time, let us know what’s on your mind, and we’ll arrange a 1-1 conversation with one of us to explore your situation or concerns and suggest some effective interventions. Oh yes - it’s free, too.

If you haven’t come across them yet - Joseph is an Agile pioneer, who’s spent the last fifteen years working at the intersection of agile development, complexity science and social dynamics. Ben is a psychotherapist, international mediator and conflict specialist, who works with some of Europe’s biggest organisations to improve their effectiveness.

More details on the CATeams web site.

So when it all gets too much … what do you do?

After finally solving the problem with SEF links in my Joomla/Mojoblog site yesterday morning, I’d had enough - of PHP, CMS systems, plug-ins, Chunks, Snippets, Rails, the whole lot. So a day and a half off-line has cleared my head.

Staying with Joseph last weekend rekindled my passion for food, so I’ve been cooking (a hat-tip to Joseph for an amazing asparagus and salsiccio pasta recipe). Reading - finished Geoff Dyer’s wonderfully evocative But Beautiful, and almost (so nearly) finished the amazing 2666 by Robert Bolaño - at the point where I really don’t want it to end, I’m so into it. Playing, of course: there’ll be a (rare) musical blog shortly on Sor’s Op.6 studies, and the art of balancing the apparently simple with the intriguingly complex, and achieving perfection in the seemingly ordinary.

A visit to the RA’s impressive exhibition of prints by Kuniyoshi, with my daughter Evelyn and her partner. (Amazing colours, and in the earlier warrior prints in particular an overwhelming sense of movement. These were the original mass-media images, it was interesting to try to rewind my head to the days before screens, TV, video, films, where the only images were static ones).

Having been digging for a while, I found and downloaded a great performance of the Monteverdi Vespers of 1610, by the group Concerto Italiano. Immediate and vivid, and (unlike many performances) using small choral forces.

Helped of course by the gorgeous weather and a good bottle of wine! Head back in the game tomorrow, but it’s been a good weekend.

My friend and partner in CATeams has a couple of video interviews on YouTube on issues around strategic decision-making (and the classic decision traps demonstrated by the US invasion of Iraq): embedded below…
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A small (and belated) selection of what worked for me in 2008…
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The notebooks of W Ross Ashby, British pioneer of Cybernetics and Systems Theory, have been digitised and made available online. An amazing collection of material, indexed and tagged but presented as scans of the original notebooks - a detailed view into the workings of an inventive and disciplined mind. All stimulating, but you may find the aphorisms particularly entertaining.

The other day, looking at some music theory workbooks (ah, the dear old ABRSM) destined for my wife’s piano pupils led me to thinking about how it is that every four-year-old is visually, verbally and sonically hyper-inventive, and yet by the time we’re adults we’re so out of touch with innovation that we need to attend courses and read books on it. The AB workbooks were a case in point - dull, neat, and so very adult, a shame to mess them up with anything as freeform as writing… and very intolerant of mistakes.

Taking a cue from some of the facilitation work we do in team training: so much education is on the basis of “yes, but…” - Yes, but you need to write neatly now. Yes, but that’s not the way to draw a face. Yes, but you’re only allowed to put these sounds together this way. At some point thinking about technique and mechanics is essential, of course, but how would it be if this were approached in the spirit of “yes, and…”. Yes, these words aren’t in the dictionary, but what might they mean? Yes, and if you take that bunch of notes and do this then you have all these new possibilities?

Lessons here for team and corporate innovation too … next post!