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Your horoscope for March
How people God grant you the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to change the things you can and the fortune to have little need for either. Some things exist just to make...
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Four mocks? One test? No problem!
Last year, my colleague Ben introduced us to the joys of hand-rolling mocks. This allowed us to ignore interactions we weren’t worried about, leading to cleaner tests. This year, I’m mocking again....
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Ignorance is bliss
I used to get angry with ignorant people, until I realised that it only made them hide their ignorance. Then I realised that I was ignorant too. Now I love ignorant people best of all. I deliberately...
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Perverse Incentives
I proposed an Open Space session at Agile Mumbai to discuss Perverse Incentives and gaming the system in Agile projects. A perverse incentive is one which produces an effect that works against the...
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Your horoscope for April
How people You’ve spent years making yourself invaluable to your friends, family and colleagues. Your confidence is at an all-time high – how many people in the world can do what you do? Watch out,...
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Agile Mumbai slides are up
Naresh Jain has very kindly put up the slides from my BDD presentation at Agile Mumbai. I deviated quite heavily from previous presentations I’ve done and talked about the history of BDD, how it...
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Running your own Retrospective
I’m running a training course for TDD and OO design at one of our clients. Normally when I teach this, it’s to Thoughtworkers or client staff working with Thoughtworkers. This time, I’m teaching fairly...
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BDD Tutorial Slides are up
I’ve been meaning to do this for a while. I have released my BDD Tutorial slides on SlideShare. There are notes underneath each slide which are a cut-down version of the kind of things I talk about....
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Learning English
Since much of my focus is on getting people to talk and communicate effectively, I thought I would share a couple of sites that might be of use to people wanting to learn the language we tend to...
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The Eighth Day
Scholars immersed in books Rise blearily, wiping their eyes, And gather in knots of threes and fours In the angles of the square. They avoid each other’s anxious looks; The crowds who gathered to hear...
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Deliberate Discovery, Real Options and Cynefin
Last week, I held a hangout with a few people from the ALE community. A few people very much enjoyed it and got quite a lot out of it – it’s far less formal than most presentations. It takes me a...
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Disorder, or, How I Got a Black Eye
In the Cynefin framework, the Disorder domain is the one in the middle. It’s the state of not knowing what kind of causality exists. Over on the right we have the predictable domains of Simple and...
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An open letter to Bob Marshall
Dear Bob, We’ve had our differences, mostly around a particular set of tweets you sent out about the Pask award in 2010. I was respectful enough to address those with you face-to-face. You refused to...
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The Hobgoblin Manifesto
For Chris, the most Puckish person I know and who I am proud to call my friend. A Hobgoblin is mischevous from birth We never mean to harm, but to disrupt, To muddle up the stasis of the Earth That...
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Using Scenarios for Experiment Design
In the complex domain, cause and effect are only correlated in retrospect, and we cannot predict outcomes. We can see them and understand them in retrospect, but the complex domain is the domain of...
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On Learning and Information
This has been an interesting year for me. At the end of March I came out of one of the largest Agile transformations ever attempted (still going, surprisingly well), and learned way more than I ever...
View ArticleHow to run a Futurespective
Futurespectives, like Retrospectives, look back at the past… from the future! I find them very useful when there isn’t much to retrospect on: at the start of a project or initiative. I’ve run them for...
View ArticleA Probe by Any Other Name
In complexity (new stuff is complex) we prefer to probe; which means to try something out that’s safe-to-fail. Knowing things are failing or succeeding relies on feedback loops; but who do we get...
View Article5 Rules of Coaching
These rules have nothing to do with any methodology (except maybe complexity thinking, because human.) I have found it useful to bear these in mind while I coach. I’ve passed them on in various forms...
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Out of Time
A couple of years back, I wrote about the 2018 IPCC reports. We were, at the time and as a species, doing pretty badly at safeguarding the planet which is our only home. CO2, methane and other...
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