(moving houses, gardening, and new dimensions)
Early 2001. I decide to resign. My wife only asks me to pursue an occupation that keeps me challenged for more than two years. A reasonable request. After all, since graduating in 1992 I worked less than one year as a software engineer (on VAX), less than three years as a hardware and software engineer (C++ and micro-assembler), and we had a bookshop for about three years.
And, well, my two years with this start-up e-commerce were pretty turbulent too. An unaspired climb to ‘senior manager’ (layered titles are part of working with former McKinsey people). Bribed into a stock option plan (brilliantly devalued through the e-com bubble burst, draining the very little savings we had made since our bookshop days). Franticly favoring people over structures. Fourteen hours working days (commuting not included). IT and back-office manager (titles being what they are). In the end, endless disagreements with the manager-founders. Over which I quit (despite my emotional investments). To be pulled back by the investors, and end up as a dehumanized puppet in strategic schemes. Once our company survival plan takes shape, I leave anyway, disgusted by the offer of IT Directorship.
I enter the unknown territory of consulting to spend six years at one company (a world record, truly), only to discover true joy again (almost at the level of the bookshop) through eXtreme Programming and Scrum in 2003. I grow my small 10-person company within the company, a chapter ending with a top-down inspired mutiny early 2007. Before the mutineers are struck down by depressions and other forms of nervous breakdowns I had set sail again. Recover, move on.
After two adventures of less than three years I leave consulting in 2013. I had just been upgraded to ‘principal consultant’ (titles, again, not work). I had put my heart, soul and passion in Scrum at these companies. It dropped dead. I felt highly miserable over that. Until people pointed out how it had influenced many, many individuals, and inspired a few enterprises. Just not the consulting company’s structures.
Having intensely collaborated for some years, mostly as a Professional Scrum Trainer, I move to the home of Scrum to join Scrum.org and partner with Ken Schwaber in 2013.
Spring 2015. These past two years Scrum has been the focal point of whatever it is I do. I even wrote a book on it, which seems to be well received by those who read it. I realize I have traveled. Happy not getting anywhere. Traveling is what we do, still.
Our horizon expanded from the smallest thinkable village in Belgium to Belgium itself, to the Netherlands and Europe, to working with people around the planet. An enlightening and humbling journey. Full of things that take time. Beauty. Growing flowers. Becoming what I didn’t know I wanted to be. Unlearning. Mastery.
I remain in doubt. A constant state. I am good at searching. I am terrible at finding. But gradually I grow less ashamed.
My family is my stability. We lost people (some dear, some not). We gained liberty. We have three kids (two have disabilities). We cope. We prosper. We bought a house we didn’t know we wanted. We are close. We travel. Too.
I have found I have personal values. They have served me well on my traveling. They helped me decide to resign. They help me look beyond a career, beyond scoring off other people, beyond lies, beyond backstabbing.
I am writing this to share. There is nothing but the world to share it with. I am cleaning the house. I am writing this to find out. Maybe I will stop reading mails for a year and 3 days. I am good at trying. I won’t succeed. That’s fine. That is beauty. I am grateful. I discover. Serendipity.
The wheel chair made us realize that our house in the future would require more adaptations than we had already made for our son. We didn’t like that. What manifested suddenly was a partial elucidation on our overall feeling of being locked in. It explained how we made many considerations over the past years on our house, plans that were never made real. That was only re-inforced by looking beyond today and beyond tomorrow, into the future where both our sons, one with DMD and the other with Down Syndrome, might just stay at home always given their disabilities.
We discovered a beautiful house, built in 1975, having the amount of ground floor we were looking for (thinking of our son’s immobility), the space we were looking for (thinking of the long-term future). It had character and style, a rural look that we immediately fell in love with. It was not too far from where we lived. But… way beyond our budget. Or so we assumed. We went to visit the house, discovered it was more of a project than a house, but our minds were stuck on it. We discovered that rate of interests are historically low (a ‘positive’ effect of the banking crisis), and that the sellers of the house were willing to give in on their asking price. The smell of opportunity.
But we made it. On Monday December 22nd we moved over all large furniture and spent our first night in our new, little cottage.
