Many people have difficulty when they first encounter haiku in crafting a poem that’s aesthetically pleasing, with as few syllables as a haiku permits. (In Japanese, the “5-7-5″ pattern is used, but in English some of us find that the haiku moment works best in about 12-13 syllables).
So, I thought I would give you some simple techniques for writing haiku, which should be well-aligned with your methodology of choice.
Scrum haiku
Start with a poem.
Remove the least important words, until the result appears pleasing. There is your haiku.
Kanban haiku
Start with nothing.
Add words carefully until the result is pleasing, then move on to the next haiku.
XP haiku
Start with a poem.
Halve it. Keep halving it until it is no longer pleasing. That was your haiku.
My first ever article, “Pulling Power: a new Software Lifespan” is up on InfoQ. BDD, Feature Injection, Lean and Kanban playing nice together!
Big thanks to Dan North, Chris Matts, David Anderson, Amr Elssamadisy and the amalgam of developers who make up “Jerry”; also to the Thoughtworkers who reviewed my article and gave me advice, and the Kanbanjins like Eric Willeke who patiently talked me through Lean and Kanban. Several times. Anything I still haven’t understood is my error, not theirs.
I wish I could have put in everything I’ve learnt about Kanban, which is far larger than this article allows. It strikes me as a lovely, simple, high-discipline, least-wasteful way to deliver software, and it matches my feeling that you should fit your process to reality, not reality to your process.
My experiments with Kanban boards so far have been highly successful. Now I want to know about the problems, too. Have you tried Kanban? What happened? Did you try to introduce it? Did that work out? If not, why not? Did you think about introducing it, but decide not to? Tell me your stories!
Today is my last day with ThoughtWorks.
It feels strange to be leaving a job I love with the most amazing company in the world, at a time when I should rightly be thankful for having a job in the first place. So, let me explain why I’m going.
Remember this post, back in November? I decided to actually do some work on the novel which has been hanging around my head for some years. Remember all the follow-up posts in which I told you how I was getting on?
No, neither do I.
The truth is that my day-to-day work – coaching, development, and learning about how brilliant, technical people think – has been taking up huge amounts of my life, time and creativity. I have no regrets about the energy I’ve put into it; watching teams and individuals learn and grow, knowing that I’ve been part of that, gives me pride and hope for the world. Learning how to help them better, and having them teach me, is fun and uplifting. It’s also incredibly draining on my creative energy. Looking back, I’ve hardly written any haiku in the last six months, and I’ve had no poetry published in two years. Nor have I made much progress with the novel.
So I’m going to leave ThoughtWorks and strike out part-time as an independent consultant. (I’m ideally looking for about three days a week leading or helping with Agile transformations, and will be flexible.)
The rest of my time will be going into ongoing training and development – giving my brain the space it needs to learn properly, to create the workshops and training courses which will be most effective – and, of course, writing my book. Maybe more than one of them.
So, from one world to others. I’ll be spending the next month or so in the diverse company of Grey the cat, Susan, Susan’s chair-dragon, Pigeon, Koley, Aquila, the Lunivore and the dryad of Islington Green.
They’re wonderful to be with, but I’ll still miss you.
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!
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