01. Paradigm Shifts and Falling In Love (With Your Customer's Problem)

Clare Sudbery on Agile Amped, Dennis Stevens on Leading Agile, Howard H White on Coaching For Leaders, Mike Burrows on Being Human, and Dominic Price on Engineering Culture by InfoQ. 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 December 24, 2018. 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. CLARE SUDBERY ON AGILE AMPED The Agile Amped podcast featured Clare Sudbery with host Chris Murman. Clare talked about leaving the IT industry due to boredom and taking up a career teaching mathematics and described how she regained an interest in IT and became a lead consultant developer at ThoughtWorks. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/lets-stop-making-people-feel-stupid/id992128516?i=1000423906096&mt=2 Website link: https://www.solutionsiq.com/resource/agile-amped-podcast/lets-stop-making-people-feel-stupid/ DENNIS STEVENS ON LEADING AGILE The Leading Agile podcast featured Dennis Stevens with host Dave Prior. Dennis talked about how to connect strategy to execution in an organization. Dennis then spoke about optionality and had a great quote about how organizations get into situations where responding to change becomes difficult: "An interesting phenomenon that you see in organizations is everybody wants to start their projects on day one because they want to get their money starting to be spent before their stuff gets de-prioritized. Once you've started spending it, it's really hard for organizations to stop projects. The net result of this is everything is being worked on all at the same time and there's no stopping point in the middle for somebody to come in and go, "Hey, wait! We've learned something; we want to change," because we're not sequencing the work. We're not flowing the work through the system in a way that we can adapt. So there's no optionality. How do we break work down so we can finish stuff? Even if it's not the most important thing, you're still actually better off, from an optionality and adaptability standpoint and from a risk and a quality standpoint, finishing one thing before you start the second." iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/designing-feedback-driven-strategic-execution-model/id995790407?i=1000425277842&mt=2 Website link: https://www.leadingagile.com/podcast/designing-a-feedback-driven-strategic-execution-model-w-dennis-stevens/ HOWARD H WHITE ON COACHING FOR LEADERS The Coaching For Leaders podcast featuring Howard H White with host Dave Stachowiak. This is probably my favorite interview in quite some time. Howard tells the story of transferring schools in junior high so that he could go to school with a girl he fancied, only to end up at the new school all alone, knowing nobody and being the only black kid in ninth grade. After being inspired by a conversation with the new school's basketball coach, he takes up basketball, begins to excel at it, becomes class president, gets injured, but then pivots into a job at Nike. He then tells the story of how he convinced the co-founder of Nike to let him establish the Jordan brand even though Michael Jordan had retired. This is a must-listen. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/384-your-attitude-defines-your-altitude/id458827716?i=1000425474718&mt=2 Website link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/384/ MIKE BURROWS ON BEING HUMAN The Being Human podcast featured Mike Burrows with host Richard Atherton. Mike talked about his career path, what led him to Agile, Lean, and Kanban, and he told a story of an organization that had more projects in progress than people in the company. He talked about how the use of pair-programming brought the work-in-progress down below the number of programmers on his team. Richard asked him why he thought pair-programming helped so much with this and Mike talked about how pairs are more likely than individuals to ask for help when they get stuck rather than picking up a new task and increasing the work-in-progress. Mike talked about working with David Anderson on a project in South Africa where they encountered engineers who had gotten into their mid-twenties without ever having seen a project get completed. He talked about how a generation of managers were taught that Waterfall was the proper way to develop software and he believes that there is still an industry that supports that worldview. He says he refuses to describe Agile now from left-to-right by starting with backlogs and only describes it from right-to-left by starting with outcomes. Everything else, as in the quote above, he sees as pandering to those who still have the Waterfall mindset. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/38-start-with-the-end-in-mind-with-mike-burrows/id1369745673?i=1000425784892&mt=2 Website link: http://shoutengine.com/BeingHuman/38-start-with-the-end-in-mind-with-mike-burrows-70596 DOMINIC PRICE ON ENGINEERING CULTURE BY INFOQ The Engineering Culture by InfoQ podcast featured Dominic Price with host Shane Hastie. Dominic talked about what led him to be a keynote speaker at Agile 2018 in which he spoke about how many agile "transformations" focus on becoming Agile through the following of rituals rather than focusing on moving to new ways of working. He criticized the focus on Agile as an end state instead of continuous evolution. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/dominic-price-on-why-agile-is-not-always-the-answer/id1161431874?i=1000424791583&mt=2 Website link: https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/agile-is-not-always-the-answer 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