The snow arrived in London several hours later than predicted and by bedtime last night, many of the suburban roads were covered, including some sleeping policemen. The good news is that London has been transformed, yet again, into a place of beauty, with all its carbuncles and pimples smoothed over by Nature’s white collagen.

London’s Learning

The better news is that London’s learning. This second time around we managed to stock up enough grit, mobilised the various gritting units in time and by early evening last night, most of the roads were gritted, to the relief of drivers and pedestrians alike. There’s also enough food in my cupboard in case of a snow-in.

Prepare to Enjoy!

The result? We can enjoy the snow this time around instead of seeing it as an impediment or disaster. A classic example of the Girl Scouts’ motto in action: ‘Be prepared!’ – intended to be an instruction, warning and wake-up call. By being prepared, we can turn obstacles into challenges, adversity into opportunity, strife into collaborative achievement. The trick is to train hard and ‘Be prepared!’ What do you do to keep your tools sharp and varied?

Do you love what you do?

Percy: Do you think it’s possible to do what you love and get paid for it?
Agile Coach: Of course.
Percy: But work’s just work. You show up then you go home.
Agile Coach: What do you do inbetween?
Percy: You get on with stuff. It’s madness to think people could do a job they love!
Agile Coach: I think it’s madness to do otherwise.

Worthwhile Work

I’m inspired by a vision of people making the most of their time at work. By this, I mean transforming the workplace into a place where people get excited about being there, are fully engaged and are thoroughly enjoying themselves. And, of course, we always strive to work a sustainable pace.

Why? Because we each of us spend around 75% of our waking hours doing something work-related or being at work. That’s a lot of time to simply fritter away. What an awful waste of life! Imagine all the other things you could be doing instead.

Now if you were to enjoy yourself during those hours, think of the things you and your team could achieve. Think of the possibilities! And since we spend the majority of our lives doing something work-related or being at work, it follows that a fulfilling work life leads to a happier life. This is my inner quest.

The light’s on, but is anybody home?

According to Lynda Gratton, author of Glow, Each of us can make a real difference through our behaviour, competencies and skills. Linda defines ‘Glow’ as people ‘radiating positive energy – [are] able to excite and ignite others and through their inspiration and innovation are able to create superior value and success in the workplace’.

People who Glow, according to Lynda’s research, are those who have mastered 3 distinct areas of their life:

• They Glow because they have built deeply trusting and cooperating relationships with others.
• They Glow because they have extended their networks beyond the obvious to encompass the unsual.
• They Glow because they are on an inner quest that ignites their own energy and that of others.

People who Glow also understand what they have to do in 3 different contexts: as an individual, as a team member and as a member of an organisation that encourages them to Glow.

Now that you’ve packed away the Christmas lights, isn’t it your time to Glow?

I feel under the weather. May be it’s just a passing chill I’ve caught. Truth be told, I’ve not been feeling my usual cheery self of late. I just don’t feel right.

But that’s enough about me. How have you been? How are you feeling? May be you’re a bit fed up with it all. Are there times when you wish you had more money? Or may be you dream of being revered by the masses? Perhaps you wish you could hide the signs of ageing? If your answer is ‘Yes’ to at least one of these 3 questions, then I have some bad news. You may have contracted Affluenza, the nastiest of viruses to be sweeping the English-speaking world. Don’t worry though. We have plenty for company.

A Society Under the Weather?

According to Oliver James, author of Affluenza, the Affluenza virus is defined by a pre-occupation with money. The Affluenza virus values consist of Money, Possession, Physical and Social Appearances and Fame. The virus is the product ‘Selfish Capitalism’ and leads to emotional distress such as anxiety and depression. This emotional distress, in true consumerism ‘Compete-by-Eating-Your-Own-Convenience’ style, further feeds your hunger for Selfish Capitalism. Selfish Capitalism, in turn, magnifies your preoccupation with the virus values. And hey presto! That’s how this vicious cycle keeps going and growing.

But wait! Before you despair because you’ve been lying awake at night wondering why you’ve been feeling so glum about life as you know it, there’s Hope.

Be Brave, Be Bold

Hope comes in the form of returning to the basics. It’s about addressing everyman’s fundamental needs to lead a fulfilling life.

• Feel secure. About who you are and what you have.
• Be authentic. Be yourself and be true to yourself.
• Be autonomous. Do what you love. And do more of it – even if it means you go solo.
• Feel competent. Have confidence in your own abilities. Get in the practice to help that confidence grow.
• Be part of a community. Participate and contribute. Have fun in great company.

Vaccines

Oliver James recommends the following:

1. Have positive volition (not ‘Think Positive’)
2. Replace Virus Motives (with intrinsic ones)
3. Be Beautiful (not attractive)
4. Consume what you need (not what the advertisers tell you)
5. Meet your children’s needs (not those of little adults)
6. Educate your children (don’t brainwash them)
7. Enjoy motherhood (not desperate housewifery/husbandry)
8. But authentic (not sincere), vivacious (not hyperactive) and playful (not game-playing)

Antidotes

If, like me, you’re one of the infected, you need to act fast. Get lots of fresh air. Do more physical exercise. Burn off as many calories as you consume. Do at least one thing you love every day. And, as a friend just reminded me, take stock of all that you have and be thankful for such riches.

How will you transform this winter’s discontent? What will you do to make yours a life less ordinary? Make 2010 a Happy New Year!

London has been one big ice rink since Monday. After lots of rain, a few rays of sunshine and even more rain, the lovely white snow is finally trickling away as muddy slush today. Lucky really, since a white Christmas would have led to many celebrating Christmas alone. Imagine the numerous Christmas presents that would have been left unopened! Think of the mounds of brussel sprouts left to go cold!

The Gift of the Present

Thanks to the adverse weather (snow in winter, who would have thought?), the usual sprawl of seasoned shoppers has been tranformed into units of special forces of gift givers. These gift givers are prepared to travel near and far to obtain gifts of value, ranging from socks and gadgets to timeless kitsch.

As I trundle through the snow and slush, I notice how everything moves in slow motion. The slowness gives me time to live in the moment, to take in the white landscape in spite of the damp and cold. Instead of hurrying and scurrying, I am Here. Instead of being dragged down by the Past or distracted by the Future, I am in the Present. Things are somehow easier and within moments I have accomplished what had seemed like Mission Impossible even in the best of weather: I have a sackful of valuable gifts for the ones I love.

This is the same experience my teams and I go through when we apply the principle of ‘If you’re rushing, slow down’. With baby steps, we move forward, placing one foot in front of the other. We deal with impediments as they come up, prioritising them and removing them one a time. Before you know it, we’re making good progress, better than we’ve ever done before. And that’s how we turn each Mission Impossible into Mission Most Possible.

Make the Most of Now

Be in the Present. Learn from the Past. Create the Future. That’s the advice from Spencer Johnson, author of ‘The Present‘. According to Spencer, by focusing on the task at hand, you become fully engaged in the present which leads to higher quality work which, in turn, leads to greater personal satisfaction and success. And there’s your virtuous cycle in motion.

So as the holiday season begins, slow down. Give the Gift of the Present. To you and your loved ones.

(In a team space near you)

Apprentice: My code is thoroughly tested.
Agile Coach: There are no unit tests.
Apprentice: I used my eyes.
Agile Coach: Always listen to your Agile Coach.
Apprentice: Yeah-But-No-But-Yeah-But.
Agile Coach: And always question your Agile Coach.

Do you care enough?

Agile is for people who care. People who care about what they do. People who care about quality. People who care about people. Agile makes me think. It forces me to listen without judgment. To really understand. After all, everyone adds value and we can only change ourselves.

‘Nothing is to be feared, it is only to be understood,’ said Marie Curie, ‘Now is the time to understand.’

A good coach lets you make mistakes. A good coach creates opportunities for you to learn. A good coach gives you room to grow.

Now is the time to understand.

Let the fun begin!

Games make learning fun instead of only growing pain. As children, we learn through play. And because play is so much fun, we play some more until a virtuous circle is formed where we play and learn to play to learn. In my experience, adults learn most effectively in the same way.

By learning through play, we pack in the practice at doing the things we enjoy and so we begin to achieve, getting a little (or, in some cases, a lot) better at what we do every day. Think ‘baby steps’. Little and often.

And when practice brings results, it gives us a sense of achievement and so we practice some more until doing what we do becomes a habit, becomes part of who we are.

By making practice a habit, we’re able to discover what we’re really good at and eventually, all those hours add up to make us proficient at doing the thing we enjoy doing most.

Add in the necessary ingredients of support, guidance and courage, and the moment you attain proficiency should collide just-in-time with opportunity. That’s when you suddenly realise you’re doing what you love or at least loving what you do. And getting paid for it. There’s your TADA! moment. And it feels like magic.

And because your Fun Flywheel is already spinning, that breakthrough will fuel your courage and desire to achieve even more, so you’ll continue to practice and, because you know the secret to practice is through play, you’ll never tire of training to become better every day.

The Enduring Memory of Play

Why turn work into play?

• Breaks down organisational boundaries – Such as when senior managers haggle with developers, as a team, over whether building a Mars station will bring in more business value than a Castle
• Connects people – Creates a shared experience that lasts way beyond a 90-minute gaming session into daily work
• Creates a sense of common purpose – Unites people from different teams and departments, sometimes for the first time, towards a common, tangible goal
• Increases understanding between colleagues – Clearly demonstrates how everyone has strengths and can use the strengths of others to overcome their own weaknesses by working as a team
• We can’t resist having fun – Opens our minds long enough to challenge what we think so we can grow

It is these kinds of mementoes that help form a team, so that when the going gets tough, we can help one another through the storms to become a high performance and happy team.

‘Everything is changeable. Only change is eternal.‘ – Truism

The Problem With Me

The thing I hate most about myself is that I don’t want to change. Truth be told, I resist change a lot more often than I’d like to admit. In my cool and contemplative moments, when I’m not preoccupied with resisting change, I’ve been able to identify the following reasons of why I resist:

• Fear of the Unknown – ‘Only fools rush in. Who knows what lies ahead?’
• Fear of consequences – ‘What if it all goes wrong? What happens then?’
• Fear of waste – ‘If things don’t work out, I’ll have wasted all that time and effort that I could have spent on something else.’
• Lack of confidence in my own ability – ‘Can I really achieve what I set out to do?’
• Fear of ridicule – ‘This might make me look like a right fool in front of others.’

That’s a lot of fear to deal with. Nonetheless, let’s imagine I manage to remain calm and collected. From my tight ball of nerves, self-doubt and indigestion, a simple thought emerges, like a pure drop of water from the French Alps. The root cause of all my fears is my fear of F-A-I-L-U-R-E.

Try and Do Your Best

The fact is, Resistance and Flow both require energy. Unlike Resistance which shuts down the thinking you and limits your options, Flow enables you to keep an open mind. Flow helps you focus on the present. Flow keeps you moving. Before you know it, you embrace and thrive on change instead of cloying into a tight ball of nerves, self-doubt and indigestion going nowhere.

Catch Yourself Doing Things Wrong to Do Them Right

I’ve learnt to manage the Resisting Me. Whenever something becomes difficult, ‘DING!’ goes the bell in my head, clear as a drop of water from the French Alps, and I ask myself: ‘Am I resisting? Why am I resisting? What can I do to flow?’

• Fear of the Unknown translates into ‘Let’s hear out your idea.‘
• Fear of consequences becomes ‘What are the risks and issues?‘
• Fear of waste translates into ‘If things don’t work out, I’ll have learnt something valuable.‘
• Lack of confidence in my own ability becomes ‘What does the situation remind me of? What did I do to make it work the last time around?‘
• Fear of ridicule translates into ‘She who dares grows.‘

Of course all of this only matters if you choose your attitude today. And the one you take to work tomorrow.

‘A crisis is too good an opportunity to waste‘
– Anon.

Meet the Purple Cow

‘Something remarkable is worth talking about. Worth noticing. Exceptional. New. Interesting. It’s a Purple Cow. Boring stuff is invisible. It’s a brown cow.’ (Seth)

Are you seeing purple?

When it comes to changing for the better, there’s no time like the present.  According to Seth Godin, the key to succeeding in an age with infinite choices, impossible-to-tell-before-you-buy quality and grossly limited time is to be remarkable. To be purple.

The 4-step guide to breeding Purple Cows

1. Come up with a remarkable idea: Invent a Purple Cow!
2. Milk the cow for everything it’s worth.
3. Have a Purple Cow succession strategy: Create an environment conducive to nurturing Purple Calves.
4. Rinse and repeat.

Advertising alone is not enough

• Be innovative – Stop advertising and start innovating!
• Appeal to early adopters – They’re the sneezers who’ll propel your idea or product among the slower adoption groups in Moore’s idea diffusion curve.
• Invest in talent and put in the hardwork – The Purple Cow requires talent and a lot of hardwork. A Purple Cow isn’t a quickfix.
• Differentiate your customers – Target and reward the sneezers. Focus on the sneezers.
• Measure, measure, measure – from your products to interactions. Respond to the feedback by adapting and changing for the better.

How now Purple Cow?

Here’s Seth’s takeaway in a nutshell. It’s got Agility built-in.

• Trust: Be authentic in what you say and do.
• Iterate: Iterate over the things you do.
• Incremental Change: Develop new ideas and implement them incrementally.
• Courage: Encourage new ideas and embrace change. Instead of saying, ‘That sounds like a good idea, but…’, try ‘Why not?’

Things to remember during your stay on Animal Farm

• Boring is risky and, according to Seth, always leads to failure.
• ‘The Purple Cow is so rare because people are afraid.’ (Seth)
• Wake up and smell the cheese! What would you do if you weren’t afraid?

‘Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you’re going to while away the years, it’s far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive than in a fog‘

– Haruki Murakami

Experience that counts

If you were to ask me: ‘How long have you been running?’ My reply would be: ‘I first started running four years ago. Since then I’ve run three races, two 5ks and one 10k, both for Cancer Research, raising around £1500 in total.’ If you were to ask me how much experience I have in running, my reply would be: ‘One month.’

That’s because I consider elapsed time and actual experience in doing something to be two different things. The figure of one month is the actual amount of learning and training I actually did if I were to condense all the time and effort spread over the four years.

Take for instance someone who says they’ve got over twenty years of experience in software delivery. What I would want to know is if it’s twenty years of concentrated learning and experience or if it’s the same year repeated twenty times. It’s important to distinguish between the two because they differ tremendously in value.

Running for your life

Since I’m aiming to run this year’s Cancer Research 10k in 55 minutes or less (a new personal best), I’ve decided to take things more seriously. I’ve been asking fellow runners for advice, reading runner magazines and have even undergone gait analysis (this involves running on a treadmill in a sports shop in full view of passersby looking bemused while sipping their lattés).

And, thanks to my newfound surge of seriousness, I stumble on Murakmi’s novel about his experience as a runner and writer.

What I talk about when I talk about running

In his novel about writing, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Murakami identifies the top three qualities of a novelist (which, conveniently, also applies to a runner or anyone with a goal) as:

1. Talent
2. Focus
3. Endurance

Shooting Stars

The top quality has to be be talent. You’ve got to have a bit of this to succeed. Murakami acknowledges that talent is more of a prerequisite than a talent. That’s a brutal fact. Talent is a slippery thing. Firstly, you can’t control the amount of talent you’re endowed with. Secondly, assuming you’ve got some, it comes and goes as it wishes, instead of being summonable like willpower (and willpower itself can only be honed through practice and discipline).

Focus, focus, focus!

Murakami describes focus as ‘the ability to concentrate all your limited powers on whatever’s critical at the moment’. Without focus, it’s impossible to achieve anything of value. But it’s not all doom and gloom. The good news is that focus can compensate for erratice or even a lack of talent.

Hasten slowly, steady does it

Murakami compares endurance with breathing, ‘If concentration is the process of just holding your breath, endurance is the art of slowly, quietly breathing at the same time you’re storing air in your lungs’.

You get what you put in

The really good news is that unlike talent, both focus and endurance are disciplines and therefore can be acquired and improved with lots of practice. Apply a regular stimulus to step up your training level, then rinse and repeat. Last but not least, remember to be patient. It’s with this regime that Murakami guarantees results in our endeavours.

As usual, I get a second opinion. ‘How do you get so fit?’ I ask Brad, the gym instructor. ‘Two things. Diet and a lot of effort’. Sounds simple. And it’s anything but easy.

I never wanted to be a consultant. That’s because the recurring pattern I saw among the consultants with whom I’d worked was this: consultants increase waste and reduce value. More often than not, they had less skill than the permanent employees they were brought in to help and, worst of all, they had little or no experience in what they were supposed to be experts at.

The result: client organisations would pay for the privilege of training the consultants while underestimating the competencies of their own people. We all know how the story ends. A legacy of more waste and less value, all at the expense of the client organisation.

Time passes and I learn two key things. One, that many of the consultants I’d met weren’t representative of good consultants. It wasn’t that consultancy was a bad profession, but rather that there were many who were doing it wrong. Two, most of us are consultants at work in that we provide options without being decision makers ourselves.

A Tale of the Unexpected

Once upon a time, I worked with an organisation that provided a bus service between the work campus and the local train station. Fortunately, as a consultant, I didn’t have to rely on the bus service to get to my meetings on time, but I couldn’t help but notice that something wasn’t quite right. Judging from the regular, long queues of fifty plus people stood at the bus stop during wind and rain, I could see the waste mounting up: a waste of people’s time, a reduction in their goodwill and a serious impact on the quality of life for those sentenced to such a terrible, and unnecessary, commute.

At first, I would jump into a taxi and offer a lift to those I recognised in the queue, picking up as many people as would fit into a regular 5-seater. Then I would wait at the taxi rank until I got the people carrier in order to transport more people in one go, all for the same price of a single taxi journey. After that, I practiced Genchi Genbutsu and gave up using taxis all together.

I started documenting my user experience as a bus passenger, recording details such as my waiting time, the number of of people in the queue, the rate at which the queue grew and gathering comments from other bus users and even the bus drivers. Everyone I asked told me they’d given feedback to their respective managers on the poor level of service but nothing had been done.

I continued to collect the data over a couple of weeks until one day, I’m invited out for dinner. ‘Would you like to come out for dinner with our client?’ my boss asks. ‘Will senior managers be there?’ I say.

After a brief conversation about value and quality over dessert, two of the senior managers helped reduce the average passenger waiting time to ten minutes as well as extend the bus service so that folks no longer had to pay for a taxi home if they had to work late.

Be Your Own Consultant

In my experience, a good consultant has a large toolset that’s also wide in range. They should be the kind of generalist-specialists that Agile teams strive to create. Most of important of all, a good consultant understands and enjoys working with people.

To learn more about improving your personal and professional effectiveness, I recommend reading:

• The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully by Gerald Weinberg
• More Secrets of Consulting: The Consultant’s Toolkit also by Gerald Weinberg
• Flawless Consulting by Peter Block
• Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self Interest also by Peter Block

As a consultant, I’ve learnt to be creative when it comes to delivering value because it’s not always obvious and you almost always have to first overcome considerable challenges. And the reward? Knowing that you didn’t get paid just to stand by and do nothing to help people in need.