“I have an existential map. It has ‘You are here’ written all over it.” -Steven Wright I happened to be in a cabin one evening after a long day of hunting. The wood stove was blazing and we were all chilling after dinner. The guides were off to one side hanging out together sharing their experiences from the day. It was fun to watch them as they described where they had been and what they had seen. The dialog would go something like this: “We were down trail X off of the old

I was out racing for the first time in a long time this weekend. I was rusty and sailing on a boat that I was unfamiliar with. Furthermore, I didn’t know anyone on the crew. So I started doing what I like to see others do when racing: I just started talking about what I was seeing happening around me. “Do you see that boat over there?” “Hey, look, there’s a puff of wind over there.” “It looks like the breeze might be filling in from over there.” I kept that little monologue u

In the Agile world we do a lot of things to try and create transparency within our organizations. We put up information radiators like burn down charts, task boards, and cumulative flow diagrams. We put information up on the walls with sticky notes everywhere you turn. We have team synchronization meetings every day. There’s a lot of information flowing around, so is it even possible that transparency can be misused? Is it possible for transparency to go wrong? In most cases,

In the agile development community, we are all hip to the notion of two way communication. It can be via any mechanism you choose: email, instant messaging, smoke signals or the hands-down, all-time winner – face to face. That’s fantastic, but there is another form of communication that we can develop: one-way communication. What’s the value of that, you ask? Isn’t two way communication a lot better? The answer is yes, two way communication is great and has it’s place, but on

I was watching a movie with my brother the other day and the rating warning came up, “Rated PG-13 for Pervasive Language”. I found myself scratching my head and wondering: what the hell is pervasive language? Maybe the people in the movie are going to talk a lot? Perhaps it’s just two guys talking to each other like in “Dinner at Andre’s”? I couldn’t help thinking, “This is going to be really boring…” Actually I’m kind of an expert when it comes pervasive language. You see I’

The new school year is beginning and my daughter is starting first grade. I had an opportunity to go to her elementary school open house the other day. A word to the wise: never let an Agile development geek into a first grade classroom. I thought I had died and gone to information heaven. I took a camera with me and took some pictures of the kinds of information that they put on the walls in a children’s classroom. It was amazing! In the meantime, my wife fervently denied th