03. Taking The Blue Pill Back To Sesame Street

Brian Robertson on Being Human, Thomas Perry on Greater Than Code, Jeff Patton on Engineering Culture by InfoQ, story-telling on The Meta-Cast, and David Bland on Agile Amped. I'd love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email [email protected]. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting January 21, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the week when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. BRIAN ROBERTSON ON BEING HUMAN The Being Human podcast featured Brian Robertson with host Richard Atherton. Brian and Richard talked about the notion of Holacracy, what it takes to become a Holacracy, and they examined examples of holacracy in Medium and Zappos. I particularly liked what Brian had to say about empowerment. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/41-holacracy-strikes-back-with-brian-robertson/id1369745673?i=1000426987015&mt=2 Website link: http://www.firsthuman.com/podcast/41-holacracy-strikes-back-with-brian-robertson/ THOMAS PERRY ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Thomas Perry with hosts John K Sawers, Janelle Klein, Rein Henrichs, and Jessica Kerr. I found myself nodding my head to much of what Thomas was saying, and I particularly liked his comparison of a well-functioning standup, emotionally, to a fistfight. I have seen enough disengaged teams and their standup meetings to appreciate those rare times when I witnessed the kind of emotionally engaged standup meetings that Thomas describes. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/111-thermodynamics-of-emotion-with-thomas-perry/id1163023878?i=1000426851393&mt=2 Website link: https://www.greaterthancode.com/2019/01/02/111-thermodynamics-of-emotion-with-thomas-perry/ JEFF PATTON ON ENGINEERING CULTURE BY INFOQ The Engineering Culture by InfoQ podcast featured Jeff Patton with host Shane Hastie in an episode recorded at the Agile 2018 conference. They talked about the difference between products and projects and the client-vendor anti-pattern in which “IT” focuses on satisfying “the business” rather than satisfying the ultimate customer. Shane asked whether the concept of “product owner” fixes this problem and Jeff responded that he recently figured out why he has always bristled at the term product owner and it is because it steals ownership of the product from the team. Jeff generalized this to the anti-pattern of separating deciders from executers, talked about how the earliest Scrum papers had no concept of product owner, and suggested that we should instead think about the cross-functional teaming that the Balanced Team movement promotes. Jeff talked about the VC-funded tech startup failure rate after two years being eighty percent and how successful companies measure outcomes and test their ideas. I liked Jeff’s The Matrix metaphor of how most of us, once exposed to measuring whether our product is actually working in the market, want to take the blue pill and go back to the simplicity of optimizing only for time, cost, and scope. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/jeff-patton-on-noprojects-and-product-management/id1161431874?i=1000427159460&mt=2 Website link: https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/noprojects-product-management STORYTELLING ON THE META-CAST In a recent episode of the Meta-Cast podcast,  hosts Bob Galen and Josh Anderson talked about storytelling in response to a question from a member of the kazi.io Twitch/Discord audience. Bob talked about the power of making your stories personal, citing Steve Jobs’ commencement speech and contrasting this with the speeches of pompous speakers. Josh spoke about his own experience as a father of small children in seeing how almost everything communicated to children takes the form of stories. Bob pointed out that storytelling is a skill that improves with practice and becoming a more effective communicator involves practicing the art of storytelling. Josh cited two examples of where he learned to improve his storytelling: reading Stephen King’s book On Writing (which itself is written as a story), and giving a conference talk in which an experienced ToastMaster had Josh rewrite it to tell a story. Bob talked about mining for stories by paying attention to all the interesting events going on around you in the workplace as a source of stories. Bob tied this all back to what user stories are supposed to be and how, when he teaches that in workshops, he sees the group’s energy level go up. In the end, they decided that they need to do a future episode on stories presented in the form of a story. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-140-storytelling-in-agile/id356489089?i=1000427251983&mt=2 Website link: https://www.meta-cast.com/2019/01/episode-140-storytelling-in-agile.html DAVID BLAND ON AGILE AMPED The Agile Amped podcast featured David Bland with host Howard Sublett. David talked about how he is interested in how teams fold discovery work into delivery work and how to develop in them a healthy skepticism of their backlogs. He described his love for the framing of desirability, viability, and feasibility and how most teams he encounters think exclusively about feasibility. He also examined the exhausting nature of regularly validating ideas with customers only to have them reject most of them, which recalls Jeff Patton’s comment above about wanting to take the blue pill. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/lean-experiments-and-design-thinking-for-your-backlog/id992128516?i=1000426931640&mt=2 Website link: https://solutionsiq.podbean.com/e/lean-experiments-and-design-thinking-for-your-backlog/ FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing [email protected]. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website: https://www.thekguy.com/ Intro/outro music: "waste time" by Vincent Augustus