The Pask Committee have given the Gordon Pask award to me this year for deepening existing ideas and coming up with some pretty crazy ones of my own.
I can only do this because of the fortune I have in my communities, including some great coaches on either side of the pond, the Extreme Tuesday Club, Thoughtworkers and alumni, and the wonderful online communities in Lean and BDD.
My communities give me a safe place in which to play and get feedback. I am a member of a community of thinkers, and if I should happen to be a catalyst more than others, I consider that to be a tribute to those who have inspired me. This is as much a measure of your success as of mine. Thank you all.
My Grandad
My Grandad looked like Merlin. He had white hair down to his shoulders, steel-blue eyes that sparkled when he grinned, and half his teeth.
My Grandad worked as an engineer during the war. He used to talk about the bombers, who always claimed they were able to hit a target, even though my Grandad pointed out that the practice “bombs” they were dropping hadn’t actually fallen into the nets he’d put in the targets. It was, he said, the only way to test whether they were telling the truth. He was a keen physicist, mathematician and astronomer, and had a marvellous fascination with history and pretty nurses.
In the last few years his memory, and his body, started to fade. He stopped being able to hold on to conversations, but still enjoyed doing the crossword. He read books and papers. He loved to drink whisky and eat sweets. The last time I saw him, we brought him some jellied fruit. “No thanks, Grandad,” I said. “You have them.”
“Oh, good,” he grinned, and hid the box. I never saw a smile on his face that wasn’t a grin – cheeky, half-mocking, and often poking gentle fun at my ever-patient mother. That’s how I’ll remember him; by that smile, and the sparkle in his eyes.
My Grandad passed away in his sleep last night. He would have been 98 next month.
Sleep well, Grandad. I love you. Thank you for making my world a better place.
Rob Bowley has set up a petition to ask the government to review the way in which IT projects are done.
I don’t know about you, but I’m fed up of hearing tales of Government IT failure. I even heard one story of a company asked to triple its bid so that a council department could spend, and therefore retain, its budget.
I hereby release these blog posts under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0. If you want to do anything different to this, please ask.
I’ve finally got around to installing wordpress on my professional services site and upgrading to 2.8.3 on this blog.
Then, this morning, I noticed that a link from Wikipedia’s BDD page to one of my old posts was broken. Further investigation showed that several other posts were also missing.
Before I upgraded on my virtual Red Hat server, I dumped the database, imported it into my Windows MySql, and tried the upgrade there. The posts were still fine on the Windows version. I tried reimporting the dump, and ran into the same problem. I can see my missing posts in the SQL file, but they’re not being restored. Still haven’t quite worked out why this happened, or why the upgrade had the same effect as the dodgy restore. I’ll do some more investigation when I have more time.
To cut a long story short, I created a new database, dumped directly from my Windows database to the one on the linux server, then blatted the wordpress options with the ones from the old database so that I didn’t have to go through the hassle of setting up my theme again.
This seems to have worked. If you find any problems, please do let me know.
This blog’s been up and down the last couple of days while we uploaded my new site, lunivore.com. It’s not finished yet – there are a couple of empty pages, the Game of Life implementation still has a couple of bugs, there’s still more material to go up and I’m not completely convinced that my CSS is the best. However, in the interests of Agility and getting it into production as soon as possible, it’s up there.
Lunivore Limited is the company through which I’m offering my services, and lunivore.com is the website which describes those services: software, coaching, training, writing.
Many thanks to Andy Palmer for his Apache expertise and struggling with cpanel’s weirdness! If either site goes down, it’s cpanel doing something strange that we haven’t pinned down yet; I’m home from the wonderful #acguk and will be on it.
I was warned that there would come a point when the few spam posts I was getting would suddenly multiply to the point where I couldn’t keep up with them, but I didn’t listen. That point just came today.
I’ve deleted over 100 spam posts this morning, and installed a filter. If you made a comment that hasn’t appeared, or has mysteriously disappeared, I apologise – please feel free to repost. It should hopefully make it through the noise this time!
GROW stands for Goal, Reality, Options, Way forward.
As a coach, I frequently use GROW as a method of helping people move forward. Find the Goal, examine the Reality and all the resources available, look at Options for getting closer then pick one or more as a Way Forward.
As part of this, I encourage coaches and participants to think of how they’ll know they’ve achieved the goal. What are you going to see? If I reach that goal in a different way, will it achieve your aims, or is there another context that we haven’t considered yet? (Anyone into BDD, ATDD or acceptance criteria generally will find this familiar!)
I also use this technique on myself, to help me achieve the things I want to. And, for ever such a long time, I’ve wanted to write a novel. November is National Novel Writing month; it seems an appropriate time to kick-start this. Also, I just ran a coaching session in which I encouraged others to go for their dreams. It seems a little hypocritical not to have a go myself!
So, I’m going to try and use the GROW framework on myself, as well as some other techniques I’ve picked up from IT, and see if I can apply it successfully to writing a book.
First step: Work out what my goal looks like once I’ve achieved it
I already have a couple of chapters which I originally wrote as short stories, and which turn out to have some threads of a larger story running through them, so I’m a little bit ahead of the game. That’s a good thing, since NaNoWriMo value “quantity over quality”, and that’s not enough for me.
I don’t just want to write a novel. I want it published. And I don’t want to have to pay some vanity publisher either. I want someone else to find my novel so wonderful that they’re prepared to pay me to publish it. There’s my Goal – my first paycheck as a writer!
Next: Examine my reality as objectively as possible
I can look at my reality with limited objectivity. I’m a poet. People have paid me for my poetry, and the last time I sent a book off I got some excellent feedback. So I have good writing skills, and particularly I know how to impart an emotional context into a scene in a vivid, descriptive way, thanks to all the practice I’ve had with haiku.
Now for the downside of my reality. What do the best fantasy novels have?
- A great plot
- Detailed, vivd descriptions
- Believable characters
- An unexpected ending.
I’ve got the characters and the vivid descriptions. I’m just missing the plot and the ending – all I have are the first two short stories. So I’m going to do what all the best writers do – steal someone else’s plot!
This won’t be a problem, since the plot won’t be recognisable once I’ve adapted it to my characters and world, and also because experience tells me the characters rarely like to stick to the details of a plot, given half a chance to escape. It will, however, get me writing, which one Way Forward.
True objectivity is of course impossible
There are plenty of books out there which teach us that we’re blind to our own reality. Probably I think I’m a better writer than I actually am. The subjects I’m writing about might not be enthusiastically embraced by a traditional fantasy fiction audience. Indeed, the stuff in my head may be completely incomprehensible to other people.
Systems Thinking tells us to get balancing feedback
Another book tells me that my mental model is distorted. I like to be told I’m good at what I do. This is called reinforcing feedback. This will make me feel better, and help me to justify all the strange and inexplicable things which keep me from being successful. It will also stop me from actually being successful!
I can get balancing feedback in an Agile way – deliver iteratively to someone, preferably more than one, and see what they think. Amongst my resources are a number of friends who enjoy fantasy fiction. I’ll try and corner one or two of them at the party I’m going to this weekend. It would be useful for me to have the first two chapters printed out so I can take advantage of any good will coming my way. There’s my second Way Forward.
This approach won’t automatically make me successful…
…but hopefully it will help me fail faster, if I’m going to. Will let you know how it works out!
… that my blog has moved.
This is so that I can keep things like code samples, etc., connected to my blog, and so that it isn’t blocked by corporate filters that don’t like LiveJournal.
I will still be crossposting for anyone who prefers LJ, or has the old blog on their LJ friends list.
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