smart swarm

is an excellent book by Peter Miller (isbn 978-0-00-738297-2). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

As successful foragers return to the nest with seeds, they're met at the nest entrace by foragers waiting in reserve. This contact stimulates the inactive ants to go out. Foragers normally don't come back until they find something. So the faster the foragers return, the faster other ants go out, enabling the colony to tune its work force to the probability of finding food.

Instead of attempting to outsmart the desert environment, the ants, in a sense, were matching its complexity with their own.

Instead of trying to keep fine-tuning a system so it will work better and better, maybe what we really ought to be looking for is a rigourous way of saying, okay, that's good enough. [Deborah Gordon]

If a scout bee was impressed by another scout's dance, she might fly to the box being advertised and conduct her own inspection, which could last as long as an hour. But she would never blindly follow another scout's opinion by dancing for a site she hadn't visited.

J. Scott Turner considers the mound's function as a respiratory system so essential that the termites couldn't live without it. In a sense, he argues, the mound is almost a living part of the colony.

If individuals in a group are prompted to make small changes to a shared structure that inspires others to improve it even further, the structure becomes an active player in the creative process.

Unlike our systems, which are tuned for efficiency, the termites' systems have been tuned for robustness, which they demonstrate by building mounds that are constantly self-healing.

What really made the lights go on was the realization that termites don't pay attention to the environment itself but to changes in the environment.

Not only does this complicated structure represent an indirect collaboration among millions of individuals, it also embodies a kind of ongoing conversation between the colony and the world outside. The mound might look like a structure, but it's better thought of as a process.

We should think of it [the termite mound] as a dynamic system that balances forces both inside and outside its walls to create the right environment for the termites.

When you feel like you belong to something, it gives you so much more freedom and so much more energy that might otherwise be used up in anxiety, to do other things.

On January 12, 2006, several hundred thousand pilgrims had gathered in a dusty tent city at Mina, three miles east of Mecca...
By noon... about a half-million or more pilgrims filled the Jamarat plaza in front of the bridge... The pressure inside the crowd was crushing... More than an hour later, victims were piled up seven layers deep: 363 men and women were dead.
"Those in charge need to remember the root cause of the problem: too many people trying to get through too small a space. The ingress rate at the bridge was 135,000 per hour. The thoughput rate of the pillars was only 100,000 an hour. You can't put a pint into a half-pint jug." [Keith Still]

Andy and the crusty cobs

My friend Andy works on the railways. He used to work as a master baker at one of the big supermarkets. One of the items he baked was Crusty Cobs.

Clearly customers can only buy Crusty Cobs if there are some Crusty Cobs actually on the shelves. So the supermarket also employed a bakery supervisor to check Crusty Cob availability. (Naturally the supervisor was paid more than Andy. After all he was the supervisor.) Every day, at 4pm, the bakery supervisor arrived, clutching his clipboard, and counted the Crusty Cobs on the shelves; one, two, three, four, five, six, seven... Andy got praised if there was good Crusty Cob availability and chastised if there wasn't.

So Andy adapted. He baked extra batches of Crusty Cobs but waited to put them on the shelves until shortly before 4pm. Crusty Cob availability, as recorded by the supervisor, was very good. Customers wanting Crusty Cobs before 4pm were often disappointed.

A short while later as well as counting the Crusty Cobs on the shelves (always at 4pm), the supermarket also started counting the number of Crusty Cobs actually sold at the tills during the day. Now Andy also got praised if lots of Crusty Cobs were sold.

So Andy adapted. As well as sticking the Crusty Cob labels on the Crusty Cobs, he also printed extra Crusty Cob labels and stuck them on some Soft Rolls (same price). After all, who looks at the labels? So Crusty Cob sales, as recorded at the tills, were always very good. The number of Crusty Cobs actually bought by customers was somewhat less.

Not long after, the supermarket noticed a drop in the sales of Soft Rolls. They asked Andy not to bake so many Soft Rolls.

So Andy adapted. He baked less Soft Rolls, labelled them correctly, and put the extra Crusty Cob labels on the French Sticks. Customers wanting Soft Rolls, at any time, were often disappointed.

Goodhart's Law states:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Or, more colloquially:

Targets are where measures go to die.

Dancing with elves

subtitled Parenting as a Perfoming Art, is an excellent book by John Gall (isbn 978-0-9618251-4-0). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

No one can avoid influencing others. The only question is whether we are going to do it knowingly or unknowingly. Our position is that knowledge is better than ignorance.

Command-and-control tries to get 100% compliance - an impossible goal. In the name of discipline, it teaches rigidity.

The mother bird repeats the sequence over and over, with endless patience, until the children learn. You never see a mother bird attack her offspring; you never see her punish her baby for failure to learn the lesson. When the adult animal teaches their offspring, it is done by one method and that is by modelling over and over the desired behaviour.

Talking about your own experiences causes others to access their own similar experiences. I wish I could get across to you how powerful this effect is and how silently it operates.

Words have this incredible power to call up experience.

What a momentous thing you are doing when you speak words to your child or to your spouse or to any other person. You have the power to create their experience, you have the power to shape it, to make it beautiful. You can give them the experience of competence, of comfort, of success.

Somewhere between the first week of life and age forty or fifty, something rather serious happens. We stop using our feedback. We're carefully taught to pay attention to the program inside our head, instead of what's happening in the real world.

When you speak to someone, they split into two pieces. This happens all the time, to everybody. There's a part that wants to go along with what you say, and then there's a part that wants to defend their individuality, they're not going along. There's the part that agrees, and a part that disagrees, simultaneously.

It obviously doesn't make sense to demand impulse control from a little person that doesn't have it.

If you see "stubbornness" then you're naturally going to expect certain things. You're going to act in certain ways, you're going to get an interaction started that assumes this.

What does it mean when you say a person is "just lazy?" or "just stubborn?". It really means that you have tried out some of your repertoire of behavioural interventions in order to elicit a desired piece of behaviour from the other person and you have failed, because your repertoire was too limited.

smell-driven development

After much research by our scientists I can finally report a major advance in software methodology - smell driven development.

Our scientists have perfected a set of software metrics which accurately monitor the health of your software. These metrics are gathered in real time by our patented custom SmellWare servers. Each SmellWare server (prices to be announced shortly) is connected via USB to three glass vials and a sophisticated spray-atomizer.

• When the metrics read by the SmellWare server indicate your software is in a poor state, the atomizer will spray scent from the first glass vial.
• When the metrics indicate a further deterioration, the atomizer will spray scent from the second glass vial.
• When the metrics indicate a really disgusting codebase, the atomizer will spray scent from the third glass vial.

By choosing smells with an increasing tendency to get on the developers' olfactory nerves you can "visualize" the state of your codebase in a way that cannot be ignored!

The genius of this approach is that smell, being the oldest sense, has had the longest to evolve. The olfactory sense is, at the same time, both the most primitive sense and the most sophisticated. Even in humans about 1 in 50 genes is devoted to smell-related protein receptors!

Our odour scientists have studied the four aspects of threshold and tolerance; odour concentration, odour intensity, odour quality, and hedonic tone, and after extensive field testing the first (cheese based) vials are ready.

• Vial 1 (Yellow) is based on Pong-Leveque (Normandy) and is ranked "distinct, strong, and unpleasant" on the Odour Awareness scale.
• Vial 2 (Amber) is based on Epoisses de Pieds (Southern Italy) and is ranked "very strong, liable to cause rashes and sore eyes". (Epoisses de Pieds is banned from public transport in Italy).
• Vial 3 (Red) is based on Peixe-Podre et Meia (Northern Portugal) and is ranked "intolerable, liable to cause vomiting, diahorrea, and heart attacks". (Peixe-Podre et Meia is based on Blue-vein Smegma which had a 97% mortality rate before the EU made its manufacture a federal offense punishable by 25 years imprisonment.)

Believe us when we tell you that once your developers have experienced Peixe-Podre et Meia (Red) they will never again sit idly by while your codebase is merely in Epoisses de Pieds (Amber) state!

hunger is the best source

I've previously blogged about being taught ITA spelling at primary school. About how it causes me spelling problems. I was reminded of this when speaking to Geir Amdal at the excellent Agile Coach Camp in Oslo. Geir showed me this wonderful blog post with lovely twist on the famous quote:

Knowledge is power.
Francis Bacon

It reminded me of something my Mum used to say to me when I was little:

Hunger is the best source.

For many many years I didn't understand what she was saying. I was seeing the word sauce as source. She was actually saying:

Hunger is the best sauce.

Food tastes better when you're hungry. Reflecting on my confusion I realize I'm actually quite proud of this mistake. This was a long time ago remember. I was a small boy at the time. Even then, it seems, software was calling me.

Smoking cigarettes, eating sweets, dropping litter, and drinking coffee

I was speaking to Olaf Lewitz at the awesome Oslo coach camp last week. We were discussing why drinking coffee doesn't create the same social dynamic as smoking cigarettes. I chatted with Geir Amdal too and quite by chance he mentioned he's given up smoking. And how approaching a work colleague and asking if they want to go outside for a smoke is not the same as asking if they want to go outside for a talk.

Then I remembered something Olve Maudal said to me recently. He said that kids being allowed to eat sweets on Sundays was not really about kids being allowed to eat sweets on Sundays at all. It was really about kids not being allowed to eat sweets on any day except Sunday. Similarly, apparently in the USA when you're driving along you sometimes see a big sign at the side of the road saying "Litter here" and then another sign a mile or so later saying "Stop littering". These signs are also not really about littering. They're about not littering in the places outside the designated littering zones.

There's a crucial difference between smoking and drinking coffee. Smokers tend to smoke in groups in designated areas because smoking is not allowed except in those areas. Coffee is different. Drinking coffee is, by default, allowed everywhere. When you want a coffee you walk to the coffee machine and make a cup of coffee. There's often no one else at the coffee machine so you take your cup of coffee back to your work desk. It is precisely this take-it-back-to-your-desk default which is why there is only rarely someone else at the coffee machine. It is a self-fulfilling dynamic.

If you want to encourage more social interaction between your team members here's what you might do:

• Buy machines that make really good coffee.
• Put them in a nice area with lots of space to congregate in.
• Ban drinking coffee at work-desks.

The third step might seem a bit draconian. But it's vital. You could justify it on the grounds that spilling coffee onto expensive computers will waste money. But the real reason it to encourage developers to drink their coffee near the coffee machine. Together. To encourage communication.

my kindle book-case

Here's a photo of the kindle I bought myself for Xmas.



When I bought my kindle I forgot to get a case to protect it. I searched around on a few sites looking for a case but didn't find anything I particularly liked. Before I knew it, it was time to head off to the awesome Agile Coach Camp Norway 2012. I wanted to take my kindle but needed a case to protect it. It was too late too order a case via the internet. But I had an idea. I could use a book! A regular old-fashioned hardback book.



I simply cut out a kindle-sized panel from the middle of about 100 pages and then glued the holed pages all together:



Viola, I have a case for my kindle. A book-case you might say.



I showed off my new book-case at the coach camp. It was a hit. At dinner one evening Marc Johnson mentioned he too has a kindle and loves it but misses the social aspect of a real book. The simple fact that most real books display the book's title on its front cover. People can see what you're reading. I sat next to a really interesting man on a plane once. He noticed I was reading Jerry Weinberg's Quality Software Management, vol 2, First-Order Measurement and asked me about it. We chatted away the whole flight.

My kindle book-case allows me to regain this missing social aspect. I can simply print the cover the publishers use for the real book and stick it to the front. So now I have something close to my ideal kindle case. It just needs a clear front cover sleeve so I can easily slide a cover in. And some kind of clasp. As a final bonus, I can pay homage to one of my favourite films:

Test-gunpowder-pudding driven development

I was rereading chapter 3, Systems and Illusion in Jerry Weinberg's excellent An Introduction to General Systems Thinking yesterday. On page 56-57 Jerry writes:

If I say: "The exception proves the rule" in front of a large class, there will be a division in understanding... Some will believe I have uttered nonsense, while others will understand "The exception puts the rule to the test"

I've read the book four times. I'm a slow learner but this time something clicked and I immediately understood the earlier passage:

...the exception does not prove the rule, it teaches it.

Jerry goes on:

"Proof" in its original sense was "a test applied to substances to determine if they are of satisfactory quality."

I was struck by two thoughts when I read this. One was the parallel with testing. Of a test as a "proof". The other was the word original. I realized that when I hear the word "proof" I have a strong association with its noun meaning rather than its verb meaning. I tend to think of a proof as a finished proof that completely proves something. It's the noun-verb thing I've blogged about before. I wondered if there were any old dictionaries online so I could get a feel for how the generally accepted meaning of the word proof might have changed over time. There is. http://machaut.uchicago.edu/websters has two Webster's dictionaries. The 1828 dictionary came back with:

Proof [noun] 1. Trial; essay; experiment; any effort, process or operation that ascertains truth or fact. Thus the quality of spirit is ascertained by proof; the strength of gun-powder, ...

The 1913 one came back with:

Proof [noun] 1. Any effort, process, or operation designed to establish or discover a fact or truth; an act of testing; a test; a trial.

and a modern dictionary http://www.thefreedictionary.com/proof said:

Proof [noun]. 1. The evidence or argument that compels the mind to accept an assertion as true.

I find the difference fascinating. The 1828 and the 1913 definitions define the noun as the process whereas the modern one defines the noun as the evidence resulting from the process.

Jerry continues:

We retain this meaning in the "proofs" of printing and photography, in the "proof" of whiskey, and in "the proof of the pudding." Over the centuries, the meaning of the word "prove" began to shift, eliminating the negative possibilities to take on an additional sense: "To establish, to demonstrate, or to show truth or genuineness."

At first I didn't understand the bit about "eliminating the negative possibilities". I think it's partly to do with my ITA spelling at school. But I am persistant. Slowly it came to me. The word that did it for me in...

"Proof" in its original sense was "a test applied to substances to determine if they are of satisfactory quality."

...was the word if. To determine if they are of satisfactory quality. The proof was an act. There was the possibility of failure.

I started thinking about the word proof a bit more. I googled the phrase "the proof of the pudding". If you think this phrase is pretty meaningless then you're right - it's a shortened version of:

The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Again it's about the possibility of failure. It reminds me of the scene in the film The Cat in the Hat (another film Patrick and I love watching) where the Cat has just made some cupcakes (with the amazing kupcake-inator). He tries one and says:

"Yeuch. They're horrible. Who want's some?"

I love that line. I also googled the word proof as related to alcohol content. The history behind the phrase is just wonderful. In the 18th century spirits were graded with gunpowder. Imagine you're buying some spirits. How would you know if an unscrupulous merchant had watered it down? You couldn't tell just by looking. What they did was pour a sample of the solution onto a pinch of gunpowder. If the wet gunpowder could still be ignited then the solution had proved itself. Don't you just love that?

So let's hear it for pudding and for spirits and for gunpowder and for tests. And for the possibility of failure.

Tao Te Ching

is an excellent book translated by R.L.Wing (isbn 0-7225-3491-4). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages

In trying to understand a work like the Tao Te Ching, it is important to keep in mind that Chinese characters are not so much representations of words as they are symbols of ideas.

Because of its idea-embedded nature, the Tao Te Ching is a work that brings truth to the adage: It is better to read one book one-hundred times than one-hundred books one time.

True power is the ability to influence and change the world while living a simple, intelligent, and experientially rich existence.

Simplicity in conduct, in beliefs, and in environment brings an individual very close to the truth of reality.

When expectations are dropped, the mind expands, and reality expands along with the mind.

Nothing exists without the presence of its opposite.

Practice non-interference.

A house filled with riches cannot be defended.

Individuals who master themselves become less egocentric

Evolved Individuals strive to be intuitive, spontaneous, and simple.

Never fall completely into step with current society.

How do you make toast?

I'm doing two days consultancy in Cornwall. Yesterday for the folks at Research Instruments in Falmouth and today for the folks at Absolute Software in Redruth. Both are really great places to work and it's a joy visiting them.

I'm staying at the Penventon hotel. My usual breakfast routine is tea, porridge, and toast. They have a big silver toaster. You put your slices of bread into the front, it pulls them in slowly, applies a lot of heat, and then drops them down a shute.

Yesterday they came out mostly black.

I tried scraping them with a knife. I won't bother next time. They never taste good when you do that. All I did was create black dust for someone to waste time cleaning up. They didn't taste good. I didn't eat them.

I was reminded of the joke:

How do you make toast?

You burn bread and scrape the burn off.

Today I put my toast in the same as before. The toaster slowly pulled them in, applied heat, and dropped them down the chute. The slices were under toasted this time. So I put the slices in again. The toaster pulled them in again, applied heat again, and dropped them down the chute again. Just right. No knives. No scraping. No black dust. No cleaning up. I added marmalade. I ate them. Lovely.

courage

I've been thinking about courage. Scott Peck writes:

The absence of fear is not courage; the absence of fear is some kind of brain damage. Courage is the capacity to go ahead in spite of fear, or in spite of pain.

Courage is one of the 4 values of eXtreme Programming. I was struck by how every mention of courage in Kent's book, and also during a short googling session, has a technical rather than a social slant to it:

• Communication supports courage because it opens the possibility for more high-risk, high-reward experiments...
• Simplicity supports courage because you can afford to be much more courageous with a simple system...
• Concrete feedback supports courage because you feel much safer trying radical surgery on the code if you can push a button and see tests turn green at the end (or not, in which case you can throw the code away).

It's sometimes said that Scrum is very good at surfacing problems, making problems visible, and that if we don't deal with these problems it's not Scrum that's failed it's us. Moments of social tension are exactly like that. Tension surfaces, is felt, but isn't held and openly dealt with, and so slowly sinks out of view.

Problems in software are always a mixture of the technical and the social. I think many developers find it relatively easy to be technically courageous but not so easy to be socially courageous. Being technically courageous but not socially courageous is solving the symptoms but not the root-causes. In every case, if you fail to deal with the underlying causes you create a bad self-fulfilling dynamic.

Courage relates to trust. Holding the issue and not letting it sink away feels risky. But if you never take any risks you're not likely to create any trust. Acting when you feel a little scared is what courage is.

Courage relates to congruence. Congruence is about alignment. If you feel X, it's ok to say that you feel X, to sound like you feel X, and to look like you feel X.

Moments of fear can be precious moments. They can become moments of courage.

Wooden on Leadership

is an excellent book by John Wooden and Steve Jamison (isbn 978-0-07-145339-4). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Effort is the ultimate measure of your success.

I believe leadership itself is largely learned.

In the end, the choice you make makes you.

Genius is nothing but a greater aptitude for patience. [Benjamin Franklin]

Sometimes during practice he would have the guards switch positions with the forwards - have us do the other guy's job. He wanted everybody to understand the requirements of the players in the other position… I was so impressed by the control of his practice. [Gail Goodrich]

There are no big things, only an accumulation of many little things.

What happened is a good lesson in how we can limit ourselves and our organisations without even knowing it - how we can say "no" when we should be asking "how?"

Success breeds satisfaction; satisfaction breeds failure.

Lots of repetition. You can't believe the repetition. [Gary Cunningham]

Things turn out best for those who make the best of how things turn out.

I rarely assigned one player to a basket. Basketball is a team sport, and I felt it was unwise to allow players to practice by themselves. Always I wanted them to be interacting with their teammates.

How you practice is how you "play"… It's only natural for those under your leadership - perhaps even you - to focus on the end result rather than learning and doing what it takes to get there. I attempted to solve this particular problem at UCLA by occasionally removing the siren song; specifically, I made them practice and play basketball without the ball.

A good leader always seeks improvement - always.

Utility surprises

One of these photos is of the cutlery drawer. I know exactly what it contains: knives, forks, and spoons. Its the cutlery drawer. It's name tells you what to expect when you open it.

The other photo is of.... well it doesn't really have a name in our house - it's just "the drawer" - but it's what Michael McInyre hilariously calls the man-drawer (start at 1 minute 30 seconds). I thought it would be interesting to see what's in it:

• keys, 15, of which only 4 have a known current use
• plastic coin bank bags, 5, all empty
• glue, 4 x super-glue, 2 x glue-stick, 1 x bostik, 3 still usable
• pens, 4 black, 1 grey, 1 red, a few still usable
• spanners, 1 x 7/16", 1 x 10mm
• chalk, 1, yellow, an escapee, we have a chalk box elsewhere
• radiator bleeding keys, 1 yellow, 1 red, 1 black
• drill chuck key, so that's where it is!
• drill bits, 3, I never knew they were there
• tape, 1 x sellotape, 1 x black electricians - aha, useful, pilfered for fishing
• paper clips, about 50, loose, box-escapees
• drawing pins, about 100, loose, box-escapees, be careful when rummaging
• string, ah yes, would have been handy a few days ago
• screwdrivers, 1 x 7" blue thin phillips, 3 x 4" watchmakers, plus 3 x 2" from an xmas cracker - never used, put in the drawer simply to keep the other screwdrivers company
• screws, a few, loose, also keeping the screwdrivers company
• tape measures, 1 x blue plastic non retractable, 2 x orange metal retractable, 1 x yellow metal retractable, clearly excess tape measures have been purchased when existing ones were temporarily lost
• matchbox, large, half full
• electrical lead, black, unknown use

Once you start a "utility" drawer it has an unstoppable force. All things can then be classified as being possibly of utility. It becomes a magnet for all things. If utility-drawers could expand infinitely they would turn into black-holes and consume everything in the known universe.

If you have a utility-drawer, unless it was born very recently in a house you've just moved into, it's almost certain to be completely full. Frequently you can't even close the utility-drawer because it's so full. When this happens a second immutable law kicks in - taking anything out of the utility-drawer is strictly forbidden. Possible work-arounds include brute-force drawer closure, crushing items flat, and jiggling the whole utility-drawer in a kind of simulated-annealing fashion in a vain attempt to get everything to settle down a bit.

Once your utility-drawer is full it will bud out into new forms. For example, I also have a utility-tin (batteries of indeterminate age live here), a utility-folder (instructions for 10 year old appliances live here), and a utility-cabinet (coins from out of circulation currencies live here). Michael would be proud.

The Label Law

The Label Law is one of Jerry Weinberg's laws from The Secrets of Consulting

The name of the thing is not the thing.
...our tendency to attach a name - a label - to every new thing we see, and then to treat that thing as if the label were a true and total description...
Once the stereotyped label is attached, the problem becomes much harder to solve.

I was reminded of the Label Law recently when watching, you've guessed it, The Princess Bride (one of my favourite films) with my son Patrick. There's a scene where the Man in Black (aka Westley) explains to Buttercup how he has become the Dread Pirate Roberts:

The name was the important thing for inspiring the necessary fear. You see, no one would surrender to the Dread Pirate Westley.

The Label Law also reminds me of the apocryphal story of the man who, lacking any cheese, baited his mousetrap with a picture of some cheese, only to find the next day he had caught a picture of a mouse.

Richard Feynman knew the difference between something and its name. In his book the pleasure of finding things out he recalls spending time with his Dad in the woods:

Looking at the bird he says, "Do you know what that bird is? It's a brown throated thrush; but in Portuguese it's a … in Italian a …, " he says "in Chinese it's a …, in Japanese a …," etcetera. "Now," he says, "you know in all the languages you want to know what the name of the bird is and when you've finished with all that," he says, "you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You only know about humans in different places and what they call the bird. Now," he says, "let's look at the bird."

If you like The Label Law you might also like:

• The Options Trap
• Bill Bailey's Law

The Options Trap

one option is a trap,
two options is a dilemma,
three options is a choice.

I recall Jerry Weinberg saying this (or something very similar) during either an AYE conference or his Problem Solving Leadership course. I'm think I've also read it in one of Jerry's books, or was it Virginia Satir, but despite a reasonably thorough search I can't put my finger on it. (If you can locate the source in one of his books I'd appreciate an email).

I think software developers are prone to falling into options traps. If someone presents me with a choice between A and B I can easily be unknowingly coerced into thinking the only choices are A or B. And of course that's not true. I can choose A and B. Or maybe C. Or D. Or maybe make no choice at all. And of course, I often fall into the trap when presenting the options myself.

I was reminded of the options trap when watching The Princess Bride with my son Patrick the other day. There is a superb scene where the Man in Black arranges a battle of wits (to the death) with Vizzini. He shows Vizzini some iocane powder (iocane is odourless, tasteless, dissolves instantly in liquid, and is among the more deadly poisons known to man - in other words it's invisible just like software is, well except for the dissolving in liquid bit). But I digress. The Man in Black takes two goblets of wine and a full packet of iocane powder and turns his back on Vizinni. A moment later, he turns to face Vizzini again and the packet of iocane powder is empty. He says to Vizzini

All right: where is the poison? The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you decide and we both drink, and find out who is right and who is dead.

The Man in Black never explicitly says it (the wording is very precise), but Vizzini is unknowingly led (and so are you when you watch the film the first time) to believe that there are only two options; either the iocane powder is in Vizzini's goblet of wine, or the iocane powder is in the Man in Black's goblet of wine. If you've watched the film you know that there is a third option. I won't spoil the scene for you by telling you what the third option is - if you want to know I suggest googling Mithridates VI of Pontus. Or watching the film!

One month next Wednesday

I was speaking to Andy Longshaw at the SkillsMatter Agile and Lean eXChange conference. He told me a great story. There are two guys at a train station in India. It's hot and they're having a cold beer. The train pulls into the station. In no time at all its absolutely jam packed with people. Despite being "full" people continue to get on. People hang onto the side. People hang onto the front! People climb onto the roof! The guys decide to have one more cold beer. They miss the train. They ask a guard "when is the next train" and the guard replies "one month next Wednesday!"

There is a wonderful underlying dynamic to this story. It's because there is only one train a month that it's so overcrowded. If the train ran more frequently it wouldn't be so full because passengers would know it ran more frequently. Perhaps in the past there were two trains and they ran twice as often. But maybe one broke down and for whatever reason never got fixed. So now there is just one a month. And every time it runs it's dangerously overloaded. Because it's overloaded it's more likely to break down...

If you release every 12 months and a feature doesn't make it into the next release you'll have to wait at least another whole year for it. So there's pressure to add loads of features into the next release. And everyone knows that 12 months is optimistic anyway. So there's even more pressure to add even more features into the next release. The release train gets full. And the more overloaded it gets the more likely it is to slip. And the more it slips the greater the pressure to add more features into the next release...

kanban 1's game

NB: Heres a more recent slide-deck

I ran my Kanban 1's Game as an open space session at both the xpday conference and also at the Lean, Agile eXchange conference. It proved quite popular so here is how to play it if you're interested. Kanban1sGameRules

Some notes on new game variations/updates

Thank you to Kevlin Henney and Liz Keogh who helped to improve the game.

Air-luggage

I went to the excellent Agile Cambridge conference recently. At breakfast one morning I was chatting to Julian Fitzell and Jason Ayers and we got to discussing luggage when flying. I always take nothing but hand-luggage. However, it's true that checking luggage into the hold does have some advantages. I think you're viewed with increased suspicion if you fly long haul with only hand-luggage. That's certainly the impression I sometimes get when flying with just hand-luggage to Melbourne say. And for another the airline has a much greater incentive to ensure you make your flight if you've checked luggage into the hold. Otherwise they have to resort to a round of luggage-rummage to remove your bags.

We had a lot fun designing a potential solution. Simply check in an empty suitcase! But it would be very inconvenient carrying an empty suitcase just to check it in. So how about an inflatable suitcase! A self blow-up suitcase would be too inconvenient so it would have to contain a cartridge which you cracked open, mixing two chemicals and causing an expansion of gases. It could double as something to sit on too.

Airline companies have limits on the heaviness of luggage but we can't imagine they have limits on its lightness. But lightness could cause problems. We wouldn't want an unsuspecting luggage-handler falling over backwards trying to lift super-light air-luggage imagining it was normal heaviness. So we might have to put on stickers "Warning: Very Light". If the airlines introduced a minimum weight we might have to add weights pre-sealed inside the air-luggage. We could add words cast in metal to give the x-ray machine handlers something to read!

As well as a basic air-suitcase we can imagine some deluxe versions along with several spin off products. An executive version which, when inflated, includes a non-retractable carrying handle and non-wheeling wheels. And a selection of self-attach stickers naming various exotic foreign destinations such as Hawaii, Alaska, and Antarctica. And of course, there is huge potential for air luggage in shapes other than plain suitcases. A guitar for example. A true air-guitar.

Naturally the air-luggage would come pre-manufactured with a fake luggage tag. The address on all the tags would be the same - the factory where the air-luggage was made. That way we could reuse and recycle, reducing our costs and increasing our profits.

As a bonus we would actively look into ways of increasing the chance the airline lost your air-luggage. Each piece of air-luggage would come with lost-luggage claims-forms for all major airlines. These would be pre-filled-in by a sophisticated computer program enabling you to make a claim for all the lost air-items your air-luggage contained.

Acting and thinking

I while ago I was waiting for the Reading to Heathrow bus and I got chatting to a very interesting lady called Suzanne from Germany whose son also has Aspergers Syndrome. For some reason I mentioned the Buckminster Fuller quote which goes something like:

It is is easier to act your way into thinking differently than to think your way into acting differently.

She said that thinking is a frontal cortex activity which is a relatively recent part of our brain, and that acting is done by much older parts of the brain. She also said that when there is fear the frontal cortex shuts down - we act using the older parts of our brain.

an interview with Jerry Weinberg

Jon
If you were stranded on a desert island with five books which books would you choose and why? Please don’t pick more than one of your own!
Jerry

• An empty notebook with as many square feet of blank paper possible, for keeping my journal of this desert island adventure.
• The complete Oxford English Dictionary, so I can study the English language in depth for the future when I might be rescued.
• Frazer's Golden Bough, so I can immerse myself in the vastness of human culture.
• Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice (Lewis Carroll's Alice books, annotated by Martin Gardner) so I could read for wisdom and humor at the same time. (I've used this book as a text in s/w development.)
• If a Kindle counts as one book, I'd take that. Otherwise, Wilderness Medicine, Beyond First Aid, 5th Edition by William Forgey (I'd like to research this one, because I haven't read this, but I would need the best such book.)

I don't have any computer books on the list because I'm assuming I wouldn't have a computer. If there were such a book, I'd probably want *How to Build a Two-Way Radio Out of Coconut Shells*.

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Jon
Which books would you change and to what if you did have a computer?
Jerry

• I would not need the empty notebook, as I could keep my journal on-line. Instead, I'd want a complete service manual for the computer equipment.
• I would not need the OED, for the same reason — an on-line OED. Instead, I would take Don Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming. I assume we count all published volumes as one "book."

The rest I would keep the same.

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Jon
What do you consider your biggest contribution to the software world.
Jerry
That's easy. I answered that some years ago, and my answer hasn't changed. My biggest contribution to the software world is that I never invented yet another programming language.

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Jon
What would you still like to achieve?
Jerry
I'd like to persuade more computer people to work on the unsolved problems of our profession, rather than the (pretty much) solved ones such as compiler writing.

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Jon
Could you give some examples of what you consider to be the important unsolved problems of our profession
Jerry

• requirements: finding out what will really make people happy
• doing the things we know we ought to do
• not doing things we know we ought not do
• conservation of knowledge from one generation to the next
• developing some sense of standard practice (can be more than one, but not too many) that will be followed around the world

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Jon
You’ve written that you get a lot of inspiration from nature. Could you give some examples - of both the inspiration and nature that inspired it.
Jerry

• Systems grow, and when they grow, they change. I've learned a lot about growing systems from natural systems and how they grow. For instance, there's D'Arcy Thomson's book, On Growth and Form, and a lovely little book, The Adaptive Geometry of Trees.
• Systems adapt. Way back, I wrote Natural Selection as Applied to Computers and Programs, inspired by such works as Fisher's The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection.
• Many of my insights from nature, along with references, can be found in my books on Systems Theory, such as An Introduction to General Systems Theory and General Principles of System Design.

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Jon
If you had a one-time-only time machine how would you use it?
Jerry
I wouldn't. I have a rule: Don't mess with time.

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Jon
Suppose you used it to visit your younger self what advice would you give yourself?
Jerry
When someone offers advice, you ought to taste it, but you don't have to swallow it.

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Jon
In question one you mentioned Martin Gardener’s book, The Annotated Alice. Could you expand on how you used this as a text in s/w development.
Jerry
Alice's trip across the chessboard to become promoted quite nicely parallels a typical development process. It's no coincidence that Lewis Carroll (Dodgson) was a mathematical logician. He was able to do logic, and to make memorable the instances of illogic. For example, the Red Queen's behavior is that of many bad development managers ("Off with their heads.") The students were invited to find other parallels in the book, which hopefully set their minds to work.

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Jon
What is the biggest change you'd like to see in the software world?
Jerry
Slowing down in order to do things right.

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Jon
What would it take to make this happen?
Jerry
Hell would have to freeze.

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Jon
What question would you ask yourself?
Jerry
What question would you ask yourself?

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Jon
And what is your answer?
Jerry
What question would you ask yourself? Just kidding. That was a fun recursion.
Jerry
[this is the real question Jerry would ask himself] Why are you writing novels these days?
Jerry
[and this is his real answer] Like any life-changing decision, the switch to fiction has many reasons, all intertwingled. What follows are some of the reasons I have been able to disentangle.

• All my life, I've dedicated myself to helping smart, talented people be happy and productive. You can see that theme in my books, I think, and it's the theme I've continued in my novels (see list below).
• But not all my work has been through writing. Dani and I have also spent our careers training these smart, talented people through the use of experiential workshops — Problem Solving Leadership Workshop (PSL) Organization Change Shop (OCS), Systems Engineering Management (SEM), and the Amplifying Your Effectiveness Conference (AYE). We use experiential training methods because they are effective. They reach many people, and much more deeply, than your typical lecture class with PowerPoint slides.
• In many ways, reading a non-fiction book can be much like one of those PowerPoint lectures, so whenever possible, I have used stories to bring my non-fiction works to life. Stories have always been powerful for learning, going back thousands of years. Why? Because a good story arouses the readers feelings of participating in the experience the story describes.
• A great deal of the popularity of my books (and other non-fiction writers like Tom DeMarco) is in the stories. They make for lighter reading, which some people love and some people find objectionable, but overall, I have managed to present lots of hard stuff effectively through these stories.
• Some of my books have been directed specifically at Information Technology (IT) people. Some have not. Generally, the ones that have sold best and longest have been the ones not so specifically directed at IT people — books such as
  • An Introduction to General Systems Thinking
  • The Secrets of Consulting
  • Are Your Lights On?
  • What Did You Say?
  • Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method
  These readers tell me they like the stories, even those that have some technical content. In fact, they often learn technical concepts and details as a byproduct of reading and enjoying the stories. I like that, because it says I have reached many smart, talented people who don't happen to be IT folk. The novels do that even better. I hope more people try them.

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Jon
Could you briefly mention some of your favourite music and films.
Jerry
Music: Almost anything Baroque. Any of Mozart (I have the complete recordings of his works, which should tell you something). Most music prior to 1850; almost nothing after that except Sousa, Gilbert & Sullivan, and Scott Joplin.
Films: (I'm probably missing some, but all these are favorites that I can see again at any time, with no hesitation.)

• The African Queen (1951)
• Bringing Up Baby (1938)
• Casablanca (1942)
• City Lights (1931)
• Duck Soup (1933)
• Fantasia (1940)
• The Gold Rush (1925)
• High Noon (1952)
• It's A Wonderful Life (1946)
• Modern Times (1936)
• A Night At The Opera (1935)
• Paths of Glory (1957)
• Singin' In The Rain (1952)
• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
• The Wizard of Oz (1939)

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Jon
Could you expand a little on your rule "not messing with time"? Does it relate to "Slowing down in order to do things right?"
Jerry
Yes. Things take the time they take, not the time you hope they will take. Pushing for half-time produces half-baked.

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Jon
At your Problem Solving Leadership course I noticed you sometimes answered a question "obliquely". For example when discussing cancer treatments you told the story of the Aspen mountain passes and how none of them are really much good. Could you explain why you sometimes choose to answer a question in this manner.
Jerry
What you call oblique, I call powerful. Take your example. Few of my listeners have had cancer, but many of them have the experience of hiking on difficult trails. Thus, the lesson is more likely to stick, as it has with you.

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Jon
You’ve said learning a new language (a human language, such as Spanish) really helped your ability to think in a Systems Thinking way. Could you expand on that?
Jerry
In my case, it was French, learned while living in Geneva for a number of years. After a while, I found myself thinking in French when my ordinary thinking wasn't solving a problem. For instance, in English we say things like, "I took an aspirin for my headache." In French, the expression would be "against my headache." To me, that seems to imply something different from the English expression — a different way of thinking about disease and cure.
So, in effect, after learning French, I have a second way of addressing problems — and once I have a second way, it's easy to see that there may be a third way, and a fourth way, and so on. Being able to see a situation in multiple ways is a key concept in systems thinking, and learning a new language favors that concept.
The same phenomenon occurs in so-called programming languages. Someone who can work in only one such "language" cannot truly be considered a real programmer, in my opinion. That's why in school, I always insisted that programming homework be done in at least two languages — along with a written analysis of how each language affected the way the student approached the problem.

Many thanks to Jerry for agreeing to be interviewed by me. Fiona Charles took the excellent photo of me and Jerry. If you're a fan of Jerry you should check out her excellent book The Gift of Time. This interview also appeared in CVu, a publication of the ACCU, an organisation of programmers who care about professionalism in programming and are dedicated to raising the standard of programming.