Year: 2013

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Few People Understand

Many people spend their time, full-time, on elbowing a career, improving their personal position, aiming at a promotion, planning a next strategic move, working on political strategies, making more money, ripping off people, whatever it takes.

Few people understand what motivates me. Few people understand:

  • My drive to make our world a better place to live and work in;
  • My apathy for titles and hierarchy;
  • My respect for people as the core of my actions and being.

Few people understand that no promotion, no bonus, no pseudo-moral bribery, no threats have changed or will change these inner drives. Few people understand that no hierarchies keep me from addressing people’s issues, challenging the status-quo or experimenting with improvements.

Few people have the mental openness to understand that I care only about the content of my work, about working with people, about my autonomy (in team, time, tasks and tools, as described in Daniel Pink’s Drive). Don’t come to tell me what you want from me, or try to use me for power games or self-promotion. It only wears me out, and only causes me to respond emotional and unexpected (much to my own dismay). Come to work with me and great results may emerge.

I share this reluctantly. It is not a pose. Maybe this one-time notice helps. Maybe it helps you to see why we don’t get along or why you feel ignored. In the meantime I have the best work and personal life possible, the greatest career possible; by not minding my career.

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De dag van ‘t gedicht voorbij (gerijmd?)

La NOuvelle Cycluste231 Januari is (was) gedichtendag. Voorbijgehold door mezelf en de tijd wil ik alsnog mijn bijdrage leveren, met werk uit eigen werk, La NOuvelle Cycluste (ONgekelderd en NOg dicht). Helemaal ge-zelf-publiceerd is het ook nog steeds te koop op Unibook. Hmm, een liefhebber in de zaal?

Onderstaande is een leesbaar gedicht:

Geluk

Geluk
,zeggen ze,
hoort niet in een woord.
Geluk
,zeggen ze,
is
wat hoort.
Zeggen ze maar niet.
tJA,
die dichters toch.

Ik schrijf verder echter vooral meetlatpoëzie, gestructureerd, afgelijnd en letterlijk afgemeten. Aangezien dat zich moeilijk hier laat reproduceren, kan je hier het ondertitelgedicht van de bundel downloaden: ONgekelderd en NOg dicht.

Zoals ik eerder al meldde, zette Marc Swoon Bildos ook al gepaste beelden op mijn gedicht “Geheimpje van de Dichter”. Mooie gelegenheid om hier nog eens te tonen:

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A Servant King?

purple-badgeIn 2012 one of the communities at my employer found a fun way to reward people. The community handed out virtual badges for specific achievements. The top badge collectors became kings. The kings recently fought a ‘battle’ to determine who would be the conqueror.

The kings had to present themselves to the battle audience with a little movie. My movie was co-created with a terrific colleague and member of El Porco, who I hold accountable for the poetic expressions that might indicate how I’m perceived. Better than any spoken statement could be.

By the way, I gloriously and graciously failed to win the battle.

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Ways to play Scrum

Scrum.org-Logo-CirclesIn our Professional Scrum classes we also talk about the topics of User Stories, Planning Poker and (Daily) Stand-up meetings. Some attendants have never heard of it. Some have never practiced it. Some are convinced, or have been instructed, that Scrum says these are mandatory to do.

I have grown my own little pattern to work with a class whenever we run into one of these topics during my classes.

  1. I start by asking what Scrum actually says on the practice. In general, people don’t know or are not sure, and conclude that Scrum says nothing about it.
  2. I ask where the practice then does come from, if it’s not Scrum. Few people know that it is eXtreme Programming.
  3. I end up by saying that, despite the XP origins, we do support them in many cases as they represent good ways to play Scrum, they are good practices to chose from. And that this is the reason why we cover them in the course; to inspire people with different options to play Scrum.

But, they are not mandatory from the Scrum framework described in the Scrum Guide:

  • Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace C16614_fUser Stories, written on story cards, are the practice in Extreme Programming to hold and describe requirements from a user perspective. Bill Wake, author of ‘eXtreme Programming Explored’, suggested the ‘INVEST’ acronym as a simple way to remember and assess whether or not a User Story is well formed.
    A Scrum Product Backlog though serves to provide transparency to all work that a Scrum Team needs to do, which might be more than only functional requirements. The obligation, from Scrum, to use the User Story-format would endanger forgetting other important work to be undertaken, or it might force teams spending more time and energy on using the ‘right’ format, thus creating waste. However, for functional items on the Product Backlog, User Stories may be very good.
  • Planning Poker was invented by James Grenning during an eXtreme Programming project where he suffered from having to spend much, much time on producing estimates.
    In Scrum, estimates are to be created by the Development Team and, although not mandatory, Planning Poker is a good technique to do that. It leads to more honest estimates from a complete team. But don’t forget that the intention is to invoke an honest conversation over the estimates. Because that results in a good understanding of the work attached to implementing the discussed item.
  • Daily Stand-up are described in Extreme Programming, which recommended participants stand up to encourage keeping the meeting short.
    Scrum describes this meeting as the Daily Scrum, but doesn’t oblige to do it standing up. However, it is a good idea to do, especially to keep the time-box of 15 minutes.

That is often a relief to students, knowing that it is not mandatory. And I am glad I can help people. I am glad they see more opportunities to discover their own best way to play Scrum respecting the intentions and design of Scrum. They see better how Scrum can help teams and organizations emerge their own process. These ways to play Scrum in teams’ specific contexts turn the selected good practice into best practices.

Scrum, after all, can be called a ‘process’, but it’s a servant process, not a commanding process.

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Writing Scrum Writings

On top of managing the agile offering of Capgemini (Dutch description here) as a Product Owner and mentoring our Scrum coaches and Scrum trainers I also give Professional Scrum trainings.

Scrum.org-Logo_with_taglineAfter my classes I send out a thank you to the participants in which I include some guidelines to prepare for the online assessment they get access to. I also point people to some background readings. Over time I have created a small library of blog notes I’ve written from which I can select some to refer attendants to for additional information on top of the courseware:

I always pick some of following topics to add:

Fyi. have a look at the most beautiful location I have ever trained in.

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Hopsaland naar Plopsaland

We zijn het jaar 2013 goed begonnen, namelijk met een reisje naar Plopsaland.

Plopsaland - 1 MayalandGelukkig genoeg hadden we ons goed voorbereid op het vlak van toegang en (vooral) de verboden voor kinderen met een beperking. Spontaan en probleemloos werd ons een lijst van het verbodene overhandigd (‘Gids voor personen met een handicap en hun begeleiders’), zoals we die op de website al hadden gevonden. Maar op de website stond ook de mogelijkheid om wel toegang te krijgen mits begeleiding en een schriftelijk akkoord (zie ‘Bijlage‘ aan voornoemde gids). En ik was wel verrast dat ik daar heel expliciet naar moest informeren, om dat document dan pas te krijgen.

Nu, we zijn intussen toch al 3 keer naar Legoland geweest, naar Playmobilland en enkele keren naar De Efteling, en daar hebben wij alvast nooit zo’n afwijzende en in sé lafhartige houding ontmoet qua kinderen met een beperking. Ik noem het openlijk lafhartig vanwege de houding die men aanneemt, maar ook het taalgebruik in bvb. de befaamde bijlage aan de al even befaamde gids. De organisatie verschuilt zich achter de anderen, de zogenaamde “publieke commotie”, het advies van de veiligheidsfirma, enz. om vervolgens de druk lekker exclusief bij de ouders te leggen. Waarom kan ik me niet van de indruk ontdoen dat het vooral een excuus is om geen aanpassingen door te voeren aan de attracties, de toegangen ertoe en omringende procedures?

Plopsaland - 2 DobusMaar kom, het bezoek was erg geslaagd. De nieuwe figuurtjes, zoals Maya, Wickie, Dobus en Bobo, geven toch een opfrissing aan het park. Op zo’n 2e januari is het ook niet echt vreselijk druk en dat maakt het aangenamer, vooral door de afwezigheid van wachtrijen. Verder vonden we het nieuwe indoorpark Mayaland erg leuk. Daar hebben we op verschillende manieren door de lucht gevlogen, in het ballenbad en de speeltuin gespeeld en van de maxi glijbaan gegleden. Het was ook aangenaam om er ‘s avonds, net voor het ‘verplicht’ afsluitende bezoek aan de shop en de tocht huiswaarts, nog even lekker terug op temperatuur te komen. Trouwens, Nienke heeft een pracht van een Kwebbel-muts gekregen!

In de namiddag vonden we vooral de show van Dobus wel leuk. Cool om hem zo in ‘t echt te zien. Het was een leuk optreden, met de nodige liedjes, interactie met het publiek en kindjes op het podium.

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Take It To The Team

Lyssa Adkins - Coaching Agile TeamsI have read Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins in a gradual way. I regularly stopped reading for a while because I wanted time and mental room to absorb, practice and reflect about what I was reading before continuing down the fascinating path of insights offered by this book. Although I require from every professional book to give me something I can immediately apply, in this case the richness was so huge that the need to stop-start seemed a lot bigger. I also regularly stopped reading to take my newest gained words and insights to the team; test and try them, plant some seeds, watch out for sparks that might turn into a fire.

In Short

Lyssa Adkins has written a very comprehensive book that covers a great, all-round collection of topics concerning agile, professional coaching and… agile coaching. She uses her past of traditional project manager to describe how she discovered the beauty, the power and the value of agile via Scrum and self-organization. But Lyssa is also a co-active coach, doing coaching from a peer perspective with an emphasis on active collaboration between coach and coachée. The book blends the aspects of agile (via Scrum) and (co-active) coaching in a fantastic and enlightening way. But I highly appreciate Lyssa’s strong emphasis that our journey as Scrum coaches is not only about coaching in general, nor about life, personal or love coaching but that it’s about agile coaching. It’s about helping, mentoring, facilitating people, teams and organizations to become great in agile, to achieve high performance through agility. And that is a lot more than producing still mediocre products, just faster.

Audience

On its cover the book says to address a rather broad audience (‘A companion for Scrum Masters, Agile coaches, and project managers in transition‘). But I see Scrum Masters as an important target audience:

  • Because the book has its origins in Scrum, the most applied agile framework, and Scrum foresees the roles of Scrum Master, Product Owner and Development Team.
  • Because this companion holds extremely useful material on behavioral aspects in facilitating Scrum and from my practical experience and as a Professional Scrum trainer for Scrum.org I see much room for improvement there for many Scrum Masters.
  • Because Scrum Masters are expected to be coaches too, doing much more than just managing the process of Scrum.
  • Because too many people think ‘coach’ is a title to achieve, and not a level of mastery to grow into.

Lyssa clearly depicts what it might take to ‘be’ a Scrum Master (or agile coach as you wish), not just ‘do’ it. Remember that, as servant-leaders, Scrum Masters help the other roles within the Scrum Team to play their part (like a conductor would do, one of Lyssa’s metaphors). They help Development Teams achieve great team dynamics. They help Product Owners interact with stakeholders and discover better product ideas. They inform the organization about the Scrum process. They promote agility, agile behavior and the agile principles. They make sure that the wider organization gets the absolute maximum out of Scrum, as part of the continuous search for the art of the possible. And Scrum Masters know how to adapt their communication and working style according to place, time and audience.

Content

Coaching Agile Teams starts by helping the reader to introspect on behavior, habits and attitude in “Part I: it starts with you”.

Part II (“Helping the team get more for themselves”) obviously is the main part as it shifts the focus to the role of a facilitating coach towards the team. It does so by highlighting the various appearances a team facilitator might want to learn to master, the natural fluency with which appearances can be switched, the honesty and openness it takes to learn and admit failures while learning. Some important coach appearances include the teacher, the mentor and the conflict navigator. Throughout Lyssa offers advice, techniques and insights all based on practical experience.

In Part III (“Getting more for yourself”) Lyssa reverts back to the reader with a chapter that describes failure and success modes, skills and abilities that might help and war stories of some world class coaches. It makes most sense for experienced and seasoned practitioners. The danger of reading this chapter too soon is that people will turn some of the topics into incentives, objectives and goals to strive for, rather than real life findings one wants to match his/her personal experiences against.

At a personal level

Lyssa’s book has helped me in many ways. It gave explicit words, a vocabulary, to some of my existing -often unspoken- observations, practices and behavior. It enriched my existing ways of working with additional insights, evidence and perspectives. It offered many new ideas, insights, practices, papers and backgrounds. It helped me further transcend the technical views on agile and Scrum with the book’s strong focus on human behavior, psychology, people and professional coaching. And I can share this transcendent perspective better with others now.

Many great books on agile have I read, but Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins is one of the few agile books that truly changed my life. And it’s been a while since I had that feeling over an agile book again.

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Love. Life. Fireworks.

The portrait of a young man as vikingThe hedonist year 2012 has passed by. I haven’t been to the hairdresser for over 12 months now. The first half of 2012 it felt like turning into a (wholeheartedly welcomed) transitional year, personally and professionally. But in the second half, 2012 was a crazy madhouse. Energy, fun, children, creativity, hyperactivity, fireworks.

Time for reflection, anger, hope and despair.

The last day of the year brought dark sentiments, negative emotions caused by a random mix of feelings and frustrations upon socially being interlocked-locked out in parallel; the type of unfeelings that otherwise rarely still hit me nowadays. Sentiments that made me buy the remastered edition of Dog Man Star by Suede. It is a master piece, it was Suede’s second album, it broke away from the pagan optimism of their debut, it saw the split of the golden songwriting duo of Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler. It was released in 1994. In 1997 my wife and I danced to The 2 of Us on our wedding evening.

In the end the sentiments served as a reminder. A reminder not only of the sheer beauty of Dog Man Star, but of the fact that some things take time. Becoming what you didn’t know you wanted to be, but also growing one’s own personal culture and traditions in overcoming social shortages. Springs to my mind: the power of independent thinking and pride; the absence of parents and relatives; #(f)ff.

My mother died in 2005. My father died in 2009 (I think). I never miss them. I do miss ‘parents’, but I’ve come to realize that I already did back when they were still alive. My father is probably the most evil person I have ever known. He was a drunk psycho-terrorist that consciously tried to destroy us. The day he died a dark cloud dissolved. It was a sign to invest even more in the choice that had already payed off, the deliberate choice for happiness. Further building on total happiness with my lovely wife and our fantastic children. And we share it with a wider world, with YOU. Hence this blog note. It helps us making life a feast, every day.

2012 has been good, and life keeps getting better, at a personal and at a professional level (a distinction, by the way, I only make for the comfort of the reader).

Message written against the background of Religion (II) by Public Image Ltd and the new soundscapes of The Seer by Swans:

I will keep living the illusion of Ulysses by the sea. Maybe I’ll see you there. Maybe elsewhere, maybe not.

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De fik erin

Net nadat ik het op vakantie had gelezen (augustus 2012), kwam het op de longlist voor de Ako literatuurprijs 2012 terecht!

Erik Vlaminck met Brandlucht

(de genomineerde werken van Herman Brusselmans, “Watervrees Tijdens Een Verdrinking“, en Elvis Peeters, “Dinsdag“, las ik ook intussen. Stefan Brijs met Post Voor Mevrouw Bromley wacht. De ‘winnaar’ werd Peter Terrin met Post Mortem.)

In Brandlucht komt de lezer terecht in een duivenkot van emoties. Erik Vlaminck gebruikt de setting van een gemengd Nederlands-Belgisch huwelijk op Canadees grondgebied om een taalregister aan Vlaamse uitdrukkingen boven te halen en te plaatsen tegen een achtergrond van Algemeen Nederlands, zonder beide tekort te doen.

Ik ben liefhebber van het literair werk van Erik Vlaminck. Geworden. Nadat ik het zesluik ‘Het Schismatieke Schrijven’ verorberde, waarin de auteur aan de hand van familiegebeurtenissen en andere persoonlijke verhalen op een geweldige manier de geschiedenis van een land (België) en zijn inwoners van -pakweg- de voorbije 80 jaar in beeld brengt. In de opvolger ‘Suikerspin‘ brengt hij aan de hand van het kermisleven op een boeiende wijze enkele generaties in beeld.

Research en historisch opzoekwerk lijken wel zo’n beetje de tweede natuur van Vlaminck geworden. Niet dat het stoort, integendeel, je merkt er niks van tijdens het lezen. En het is net die natuurlijke gang van zaken in zijn verhalen die aantoont dat hij het zo goed deed, maar vooral ook voortreffelijk verwerkte in de uiteindelijke mix.

Voor ‘Brandlucht’ is Vlaminck opnieuw naar Canada getrokken, de regio die hij al bezocht en gebruikt had voor het deel ‘Stanny, Een Stil Leven’ uit zijn schismatieke reeks. In dat deel belichtte hij aan de hand van een gevluchtte ‘zwarte’ uit de tweede wereldoorlog al heel subtiel de complexiteit van de collaboratie. De lokale kolonie van lage-landers in Canada moet hem opgevallen zijn, want deze nieuwe roman is aan hen gewijd.

En weer brengt Vlaminck een erg complexe materie tot leven. Aan de hand van een aantal in de tijd gespreide fragmenten weeft Vlaminck een totaalbeeld van enkele generaties overblijvenden van een vlucht naar Canada. We krijgen het verhaal van de Nederlandse Mina die er vanuit Zundert eerder ongelukkig terecht komt, maar het geluk vindt als ze er de Belg Tony Verkest ontmoet. Maar erg gelukkig blijkt dat huwelijk niet, en dat kom je mondjesmaat te weten, onder andere door de ogen van dochter Elly.

Maar er is meer dan het ongelukkig huwelijk en een gebroken gezin, tegen de achtergrond van ontheemding en hele gemeenchappen die zwelgen in nostalgie naar het geboorteland; nostalgie in taalgebruik, eten en drinken, folklore zoals de duivensport en de wielerkoers, en feesten. Langzaam wordt je als lezer meegezogen naar de dieperik van gecompliceerde menselijke geesten en hun kronkels. Van Canada naar Geel en Oevel en weer terug. Langzaam verandert je morele perspectief, naarmate je meer plaatsen bezoekt waar de brandlucht overheerst. De zoektochten die mensen ondernemen naar de geheimen van vaders en de keuze van namen, die zelden iets anders opleveren dan ontregeling.

En elke nieuwe onthulling houdt een perspectiefwisseling in, en een bijstelling van eerdere morele oordelen of meningen. Zoals in ‘Stanny, Een Stil Leven’ toont Vlaminck levensecht aan dat niets absoluut of definitief is, dat achter elk verhaal een mens zit. Een verhaal dat soms is wat het werd door pijnlijk zwijgen.

Langzaam groeit ‘Brandlucht’ naar een ontknoping. Is het daarom een thriller? Op een bepaalde manier wel, maar mij maakte het niet uit, want ik heb van de eerste tot de laatste letter gesmuld, van de taal maar ook van het verhaal, van de onthullingen, de ontknopingen, en de menselijke verbijstering de Vlaminck zo treffend en meeslepend schetst. Getroffen was ik tot in mijn diepste ik, door dit fenomeen, Brandlucht.

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2012 – A Blog’s Retrospective

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for my Ullizee blog.

Crunchy numbers:

In 2012, there were 35 new posts, growing the total to 334 posts. There were 86 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 54 MB. That’s about 2 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was July 24th with 5,150 views. The most popular post that day was Holiday killer on the loose.

Note: this was due to the sad event of the shooting at the opening of the latest Batman movie, which ended up in lots of search requests pointing to my blog note. My blog note referred to a great comic on Batman, in which Batman is restored as the greatest detective on the planet in solving the murders by a killer, killing on holidays only.

Attractions:

  1. Holiday killer on the loose (Published: January 2010)
  2. Joy Division (Closer… to finality?) (Published: September 2009)
  3. The adoption of Agile: TALC vs. Hype Cycle (Published: September 2009)
  4. Een schitterend gebrek aan realiteit (Published: January 2009)
  5. Fixed Price bids. An open invitation to bribe, cajole, lie and cheat. (Published: October 2012)

Lots of staying power!

Top Referrers:

  1. scrum.org
  2. facebook.com
  3. twitter.com
  4. linkedin.com
  5. mypip.nl

Visitor Origins:

My blog’s being read in 142 countries!

Most visitors came from The United States. Belgium & Netherlands were not far behind.

Click here to see the complete report.