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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…
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Mastery, Autonomy & Purpose
We took a few days off and stayed on a houseboat in Bath. One morning, we walked on the path along the canal. Near one of bridges, tucked away behind a hedge between the canal and the traintracks was a small shop. It was almost invisible except for a chalk sign. It was a vegetable…
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Helping a friend to ‘lift off’
A couple weeks ago I helped a friend to do a “lift off” for a new business venture. The problem was that he had had the idea for many years but had so far never been able to start it. There was absolutely no reason why he couldn’t start this business – he had all…
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The Swedish Fishmonger’s Formula
We were walking around Stockholm on a cold and windy autumnal day, when we chanced upon a fishmonger’s near the harbour side, overlooking the water. I opened the door and it went ping and I walked in. I looked at all the fresh fish and artisan produce from the coastal regions of the Baltic, Atlantic…
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The Best Sailors Navigate via the Stars – Writing Objectives
Last year after a swimming race, a group of us were standing by the warm-down pool talking loudly about USRPT (ultra short race pace training) – the next big thing, maybe. A friend of mine – who is a competitor of mine but who also coached me for a short while – stubbornly insisted that…
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WFH and the Misery or Mastery of One’s Work
Whilst re-reading the book, “How to make yourself miserable”, I realised that my current home office set up is much closer to the “perfect room for being miserable” than it is as a place to do high quality work. But, upon reflection, my open plan office wasn’t much better either. In fact, the open plan…
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How Good Pricing Built Hamlet’s Castle
This is a short story about the history of value and pricing. Between the shores of modern day Denmark and Sweden, there is a slim body of water only a couple of miles wide. Hundreds of years ago, merchant ships sailed to and fro between the Baltic Sea and North sea, carrying their cargo to…
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Agile and Sushi
There’s a nice documentary about a sushi chef called Jiro who owns a Sushi joint in a metro station subway. It just so happens to have three Michelin stars which, by definition, means you would travel around the world just to go to the restaurant – it’s that good. At one point in the documentary…
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An Exchange of Value
Last night, I spent the evening looking around my grandmother’s house to see what I could keep for nostalgic reasons and (don’t tell anyone) but I was also rooting around to see if I could find some booty that has some value. In a week or so the whole lot is going to get chucked.…
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A Lesson from the Gym
In our gym we have a few good rowers. Being a swimmer, whenever I’m in the gym with them, we can’t help but swap stories about early morning training and best times but we also like to exchange important facts about things like bodyweight to strength ratios, potential one-rep max calculations, the nutritional benefits of…
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Remote onboarding / Onboarding Retrospective
This article is a combination of a retrospective that I created (the ‘feelrospective’!) based on Non-violent communication, and the subsequent insights about onboarding a new team member remotely (which I feel will become increasingly common). If you don’t know anything about Non-violent communication (NVC), this post will hopefully serve as a nice introduction and, ideally, inspire you…
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