Category: Insights
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Personal antifragility – A Vision and a Quest
This article summarizes what anti-fragility is, and outlines my own hypothesis on how one can achieve an anti-fragile constitution: personal anti-fragility. I first came across the concept ‘anti-fragility’ in the book of the same name by the writer, risk analyst and philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It immediately struck a chord with me and I’ll explain…
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2020 books
The top influential books I read in 2020 summarized in three sentences. I usually have a curiosity which leads me to the book, or someone recommends it to me. All non-fiction / work related. In no particular order apart from the first: “Anti-fragile” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb Probably my favourite book of 2020. Become anti-fragile!…
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Personal OKRs and Personal Agility
How on Earth do people get things done? I really don’t know how some people achieve anything in their private lives – myself included. I got so fed up with myself for constantly forgetting things that I needed some way of ‘sorting myself out’, especially at a point in my life when time itself was…
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Personal agility: Objectives, Small Bets, Big Rocks
We all have blind spots. It turns out that during my journey in the world of Objectives, I stumbled into a parallel world of personal agility. I suppose it had to. Both literally and metaphorically. But I need to add a bit of context first. What does it mean to be agile? (A good friend asked…
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Lean UX Jira Workflow
It took quite a lot of discussing and experimenting in order to get a UX workflow in to Jira that worked for us. We wanted UX tickets to have their own workflow. How work gets done in UX, needed to represented the nature of UX – i.e. that it is a creative and fluid affair…
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A Start Up, a Small Bet and some Agile Hardware
This is a story about having some fun with scrum (agile hardware) and doing a start up with a friend. But it’s also more than that. It’s another journey. It was setting out with a clear mission, ‘giving it a go’ and seeing what’s out there. It was an experiment. This was about applying scrum,…
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Reflections on the PGCE Teacher Training
A few years ago I did the PGCE. By the end of it, I was burnt out (I very nearly failed the course) and due to policy changes was unable to find a suitable role after completion. I was only offered a maternity cover on the starting graduate salary (despite having 10 years experience in…
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Stopping some fishing increases overall catches
This was an interesting title I spotted in the Economist the other day! Instantly, I thought it was a relevant metaphor for some of our own work-related issues, so I posted a message on our internal work channel asking what it could be an metaphor for. One of the designers responded that it sounds like…
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Start up: Saltwood
A quick post about a small start up that I’m doing together with a friend. This all started during my earlier journey about experimenting with objectives which, at one point in the story, included Craig as the mentor during our surf trip together. During that trip, we got talking about objectives and we decided to…
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Agile Burn Out in ‘The Achievement Society’
In his book ‘Burn Out Society’, Byung-Chul Han, suggests that today’s psychological maladies (from a psychoanalytic perspective) do not stem from the negativity of repression (i.e. repressing what you shouldn’t do) as was the case in Freud’s times. Instead, today’s maladies such as depression, burn out and ADHD etc., stem from an excess of positivity – an excess of können / an excess…