Weeknote 18 - Coding and conversation
It’s been a while! I’ve had a lovely holiday with my family and been back at work with a week full of catching up and then a conference at the end of the week. I’m finishing this note up on Monday morning as I ran out of time last night. It’s a good one though, so here are a few of the week’s thoughts.
How many people does it take to write some code?
This week I was working with a couple of teams who will be looking to work together over the next while. They haven’t spent time working together before, so some of my time recently has been spent helping them get to know each other. This week, we tried a joint coding session. We had 20 people in total working together in a joint coding session over two days.
I wasn’t able to join them for day 2, but the feedback from day 1 was great, with comments spanning the value in learning from each other, to suggestions for the future. Another step in the journey for these teams to understand each other and work better together.
The past can’t predict the future
I had a conversation with Marc this week where he was talking about how people have a tendency to look to the past when they try to predict the future. When we look to solve problems that may happen in the future, instead of focusing on things which have happened in the past, try to find a structure or process which would be common to all of those and would help you to deal with any issues in the future.
It got me to thinking - we so often get our heads stuck in the detail, we can’t see the wood for the trees around us. We focus on ‘fixing’ the detail, but we forget that sometimes it’s not the detail we need to fix, there are wider processes that can help us deal with the detail better - every time. I’m not sure I’m explaining that very well, but it made me think - so I need to write it down to ensure I remember!
Agile Scotland’s Conversation Cafe
So a few weeks ago Kevin (organiser extraordinaire of Agile Scotland) messaged me to ask if I could run a ‘community track’ at Agile Scotland this week. He left it to me to figure out what that might look like, but the basic idea was to do something that would allow people to connect and process or debrief their thoughts on the sessions, rather than attend a full day of talks or workshops. I often find those fringe conversations more useful and help me make sense of the things I’ve learned and understand them on a deeper level.
I asked Gary to help me come up with something and when I returned from my holiday we went for lunch. We decided on a format where we would invite people to come and have a chat around the sessions they had really enjoyed or topics they wanted to digest or explore further. The idea was that people could skip the next session and join us for a facilitated conversation to find people with a common interest.
It went really well - we didn’t have huge numbers, but the quality of conversation was excellent. We ran it with a ‘Conversation Cafe’ format and two of the speakers even joined us for some chat after their talks, Carole following her talk ‘The Power of Tech Communities’ and Seb, following his talk ‘User Stories: From Good Intentions to Bad Outcomes’.
I also took some of Mini McLean’s toys as speaking objects, which drew a crowd!
We learned loads of lessons for next time and feedback was great, so we’re going to work out how to make sure people know what we are doing and how they can gain value from it and make a few tweaks before a hopeful return of the ‘community track’ at March’s event. :)
My takeaways from Agile Scotland
I got a few key takeaways from the conversations I had at Agile Scotland in the community track. Thanks to (among others) Gordon, Sergei, Gojko, Karl, Caroline and Irene for their participation and insights!
History - We talked about the history of agile and the history of user stories. It’s important to understand and revisit the history of something to understand why it exists in the first place, so we can make sure we get the greatest value from it.
Diversity - In a conversation around tech communities, we talked a lot about diversity, about making a space feel inclusive and comfortable for all. Some themes were, invite the people who might not think your community is for them, include them in things you are doing and make sure they feel welcome, so their experience with your community matches what you told them it would be!
Mini Cargo Culting - Teams or organisations do cool stuff and tell people about it. People think ‘Ooh, that must be the way to do it’, so they copy, a mini cargo cult. Then when it doesn’t work in their context, they change it because they think it is wrong. Then you end up with many versions of things with the same origin. It dilutes the message, it dilutes what the thing achieved for the original group of people who told the story.
Frameworks - Gary said something that was so succinct that I’m going to use it moving forward. ‘Use frameworks as a learning tool’. The have their place, but when you’ve used scrum, kanban or any other frameworks to learn a few things, move on, don’t force yourself to use a framework when you’ve got all you can take from it.
Progress - I’ve been doing a lot of talking about what progress is recently In one of the conversations we were discussing failure, and how we can actually practice what we preach in terms of being ok with it. We talked about progress and trying to celebrate the small wins - but also getting across the message that working out what something isn’t is just as valid and valuable as working out what it is. I still need some time to process how I can use that message with the teams and organisations I work with, but I like it as a concept.
Terminology - When people go through change, when they ‘adopt agile’ or ‘plug in’ a new framework, ew often hear them suddenly speaking a new language, talking about ‘stand-ups’, ‘sprints’, ‘user stories’ etc. What this group were discussing was the fact that people can often take new terminology and actually don’t change very much - they just name things in their current process differently. So a weekly meeting becomes a weekly ‘stand up’ or a ‘sprint plan’ is just a gantt chart with a new name. It’s an all too common trend and it’s a little concerning.
Finally - I’m going to look up Duena Blomstrom - thanks to Sergei for that! I can’t remember exactly what for, (doh!) but he gave me this link, so I’m going to check it out for sure.
I took all of that out of hanging out chatting to people all day and not actually attending any talks - I’m kind of amazed to be honest. Shows the power of conversation. Maybe you’ll join us next time?
And finally….
I was on holiday in Dubai and picked up this coaster that I loved and thought my Agile community would also enjoy. Hope it makes you chuckle :)
