Month: December 2011

Because it's Friday: 2011 in 100 words

Following on from a friend of mine, here’s 100 words for 2011. The idea is that you write out 100 words that characterise your year right off the top of your head, without any editing.

Here’s mine:

  • The Far North WestLibya Liberation
  • Arab Spring
  • Japan Tsunami
  • Celebrate Recovery
  • Osama Executed
  • Dianne and Billie’s Wedding
  • New contract, job change
  • Summer river swimming
  • Great North Swim completed
  • Cold Buttermere swimming
  • Durness beach
  • Inverness dolphins
  • Derwentwater canoeing
  • Bible in a year
  • The Power of a Whisper
  • Tension headaches journey
  • Axioms
  • Watendlath evening
  • Blessings
  • Rich Pictures
  • Early morning Derwentwater swimming
  • Cycling to work
  • Because it’s Friday
  • Oban fish and chips
  • Strathfillan wigwam
  • Warm Buttermere swimming
  • My lovely family

Try it, you might be surprised by what comes to mind, I was surprised by how much swimming appeared in mine.

Blessings #174 – Vulnerable Places

For most of my life I have tried my hardest to be in control. It’s a feeling that most of us have; the need to be in control. Without control we feel exposed and vulnerable.

Striding EdgeI hate to imagine how many night’s sleep I have lost because I have been facing a situation that I wasn’t in control of. I was reminded of this the other week as I lay in my bed looking into the darkness and turned over and over a situation that was going to face me the next day. This wasn’t even a very important situation, but it had got under my skin.

Over recent years I’ve tried to change this as I’ve become increasingly aware of two things. The first is an obvious one – I’m never going to be in control of everything. The second is not so obvious, but is more profound – control pushes people away and puts me into a cage of isolation.

If I’m going to be someone who lives a life that is connected with other people, truly connected, I need to drop the control, be open and as a result be vulnerable.

In a study of what makes people wholehearted Brene Brown made this observation: "In order for connection to happen we need to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen". Brene has some really profound insight into what it means to be vulnerable and open and wholehearted, a video of here presentation at TED is at the end of this post.

She also makes the observation when talking about how we numb our vulnerability "We make everything that is uncertain certain. Religion has gone from a belief in faith and mystery to certainty – you’re wrong I’m right." I’ve definitely been guilty of that in the past, and probably will be again, but I’m trying not to. I’m trying to be someone who embraces the vulnerability of the journey of faith that I’m on.

Jesus never asked us to have all of the answers, he did ask us to journey together. I’m trying to embrace the unknown alongside the known. I’m trying to let my relationship with Jesus grow in the weakness.

Part of this journey of vulnerability has been to create a few places where I can be open and exposed in safety – places of vulnerability. One of these places takes place on a Thursday morning as myself and two other men get together for breakfast and to chat. Most of the time we talk about things that others might regard as trivial, but they are things that are close to each one of us. They are things that we feel the need to share, in vulnerability, with the others. We don’t even have the answers most of the time, that’s not the point either. Our aim is to allow ourselves "to be seen, really seen".

I’m sure that part of Jesus statement "Unless you accept God’s kingdom in the simplicity of a child, you’ll never get in" Mark 10:15 is that children have a wonderful ability to make themselves vulnerable without condition.

We cannot live a life completely in control, it would be madness to try, but we can try to live a life of hiding. Jesus us asks us to come out of the hiding and to make ourselves visible, exposed and vulnerable.

Brene Brown

Use those 60 seconds wisely

For many of you the next few days represent an opportunity to do something different with your minutes.

You have a choice what you do with those blocks of 60 seconds.

The worlds is busy doing all sorts of things, but what are you going to do?

60 Seconds - Things That Happen Every Sixty Seconds

As for me, no I’m not writing blog posts, I scheduled this one before the Christmas break. I’ll be following my usual holiday pattern and turning down the volume on my online interactions. I have the title music of a TV programme from my childhood ringing in my ears now “why don’t you…?”

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Targeting Communications

We have so many choices for communication that it’s easy for us to communicate in the wrong way, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

Strange GrafitiI doubt I’m unique in the variety of places that I interact. When I write something I try to think about the different groups that I’m wanting to communicate with and to hone my message to fit that group.

At a high level the groups fit a bit like this:

I think that’s most of it, but if you want to know more my about.me is a reasonable place to keep up to speed with what I’m contributing to.

I wondered whether other saw things in a similar way so I’ve talked to a number of people and many of them seem to be seeing themselves having similar persona to these.

With these broad collections in mind I’ll target different places based on what it is I am writing.

I also make assessments on the length of what it is I am going to write. This isn’t very elaborate, most of the time it’s a simple question – short or long? If it’s short I’ll try and constrain it down to the 140 characters of twitter, if it’s long it goes here on this blog. That is, unless it’s really one-to-one communication and that’s what I use email for, still. I don’t see that we have a suitable alternative to email for this type of communication just yet.

Communication is such an important thing that we do I think it’s vitally important that we do our best to communicate in the best possible way.

I seem to have written a lot about communications recently:

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – Announcement Trailer

I am really looking forward to this coming out – unfortunately it’s December 2012:

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – Announcement Trailer

Perhaps I should read the book this Christmas instead?

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Seasonal Gratitude

It’s been a great year for infographics, almost too good (they’re starting to become a bit formulaic). At this seasonal time I thought I would highlight one to make us grateful:

image

(I’d link back to original, but I don’t know where it came from originally. I got it from here)

Giving up on a goal: 1000 posts

Back in September I set out on a process of writing less to write more. It looked then like there was just a possibility that I could get the end of the year and have written 1000 posts on this blog.

Castle CragI need to set myself personal goals otherwise I get nothing done, it’s my way of focussing.

This is post number 907 and I’m clearly nowhere near the 1000 number. So I’ve decided to put the 1000 goal to one side. I’d rather focus on quality over quantity anyway, but sometimes it’s nice to have a target and quality targets are more difficult to set.

I like to reach a summit, but not at the expense of the view on the journey.

I also thought about adding up all of the other contributions that I’ve made on Twitter, Flickr, etc to come up with a view of my overall output this year. That got too scary so I decided to leave that one under the carpet.

Think About the Story

It’s a simple question: "What is this document trying to say and to whom?"

Fell Foot Tree HousesI regularly ask this question to myself as I’m reviewing documents.

Most of these documents have followed a template which has been defined through a methodology. Much of the time people have written a document that fulfils what the methodology requires, but fails to communicate the story.

They’ve missed that the fundamental part of any decent methodology is that the document template is there to assist in telling you what the framework of the story needs to be. the methodology is rarely any good at telling you what the story is.

We should all regard ourselves as story tellers.

Without the story we aren’t communicating, if we aren’t communicating then we aren’t adding and value, if we aren’t adding any value then we ought to change so that we are.

(This is also one of the reasons why I dislike long lists of things in tables. They might be full of information, but they don’t tell a story)

Because it's Friday: Extreme Freeborders

I’ve always been slightly jealous of people who can skateboard. It was something all of the cool kids could do when I was at school, but I never quite got the hang of it.

So imagine my ire when I came across this group for freeborders who can look so utterly in control while flying down the extreme roads of the Alps:

CHoE Tapes 2011 – BSV 2011 from CHoE on Vimeo.

Southern Alps Session from CHoE on Vimeo.

While we are on the subject of extreme speed, how about this one:

Axiom: The 10X Employee

One of the characteristics of an axiom is that it’s obviously true and as such you rarely question it.

San FranciscoI’ve subscribed to the view that some people are 10 times more productive than others for a long time – it has been obviously true.

As I look around the place where I work I can see that some people produce wildly more than others.

I’ve also worked on many projects where I’ve seen people who can clear the workload at an astonishing pace, they are obviously, noticeably more productive.

I was reminded of this axiom recently while reading a couple of articles by Venkatesh Raso on Developeronomics:

At the centre of the debate being had here is the idea of the 10x engineer:

The thing is, software talent is extraordinarily nonlinear. It even has a name: the 10x engineer (the colloquial idea, originally due to Frederick Brooks, that a good programmer isn’t just marginally more productive than an average one, but an order of magnitude more productive). In software, leverage increases exponentially with expertise due to the very nature of the technology.

While other domains exhibit 10x dynamics, nowhere is it as dominant as in software. What’s more, while other industries have come up with systems to (say) systematically use mediocre chemists or accountants in highly leveraged ways, the software industry hasn’t. It’s still a kind of black magic.

One of the reactions comes from Larry O’Brien knowing.net describing the 10X engineer like this:

This is folklore, not science, and it is not the view of people who actually study the industry.

Professional talent does vary, but there is not a shred of evidence that the best professional developers are an order of magnitude more productive than median developers at any timescale, much less on a meaningful timescale such as that of a product release cycle. There is abundant evidence that this is not the case: the most obvious being that there are no companies, at any scale, that demonstrate order-of-magnitude better-than-median productivity in delivering software products. There are companies that deliver updates at a higher cadence and of a higher quality than their competitors, but not 10x median. The competitive benefits of such productivity would be overwhelming in any industry where software was important (i.e., any industry); there is virtually no chance that such an astonishing achievement would go unremarked and unexamined.

In another article from 2008 Larry O’Brien gets into the specifics of programmer productivity:

That incompetents manage to stay in the profession is a lot less fun than a secret society of magical programmers, but the (sparse) data seem consistent in saying that while individuals vary significantly, the “average above-average” programmer will be only a small multiple (perhaps around three times) faster than the “average below-average” developer (see, for instance, Lutz Prechelt’s work at citeseer.ist.psu.edu/265148.html).

So, it would appear, there seems to be some disagreement on this axiom which is precisely why I started this series – how many of my axioms are really just nice ideas?

One of the problems with axioms is working out where I first came across them, this one is proving difficult to remember. I suspect that it comes from my old friends Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister writing in Peopleware:

Three rules of thumb seem to apply whenever you measure variations in performance over a sample of individuals:

  • Count on the best people outperforming the worst by about 10:1.
  • Count on the best performer being about 2.5 times better than the median performer.
  • Count on the half that are better-than-median performers out-doing the other half by more than 2:1.

Peopleware: Individual Differences

But where did this come from: "[this diagram], for example, is a composite of the findings from three different sources on the extent of variations among individuals". So it comes from research undertaken around 1984 on software programmers.

You may have notice that I was vague at the beginning of the post about who the 10X people were being compared with – the median, the worst? It was deliberate, because I didn’t know, the axiom had become degraded over time and I couldn’t be specific. I was confused, and after doing some digging, I don’t think I’m the only one.

DeMarco and Lister point to and reference some real research for 10X being between worst and best which seems like a safe place to be. Everyone seems to agree that there is an order of magnitude difference between median and worst so that seems like a safe place to be too.

I feel like I’m having to constrain my curiosity a bit because there would appear to be so much more to learn but my time is limited. So I’m sticking to the safe areas.

Whatever the true axiom, we all need to understand that there is a significant difference in people’s productivity (however you might be measuring productivity) which makes it’s vitally important that we get the right people doing the right things. But it’s also important that we understand what our 10X place is and seek to optimise our time there and try to remove the constraints that are keeping us from getting there (he writes after a day of endless interruptions and chats resulting in very little personal productivity Smile ).