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What’s Quality?
“I think there is such a thing as quality, but as soon as you try to define it, it goes haywire.” Robert Pirsig was trying to define it, rationalise it. In the end, he went haywire trying in the process. Grades in school don’t equte to quality. People can identify quality but cannot define it.
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Schrödinger’s Email
The cat is either alive or dead, but in quantum physics there is a scenario where it hypothetically could be both. I entered that quantum space today where I experienced both realities simultaneously. For a moment, for an eternity. I looked, read and then paused. Like those rugby players scoring a try, but not yet
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How are you?
We’ve been doing some annual reviews and making a renewed effort to check in with people’s well-being. One thing that was pointed out was that it might be necessary to ask someone ‘how are you’ more than once because the first time people are inclined to just say ‘fine’. It reminded me of learning Arabic
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How reliant is your team on you to achieve ‘HA’ status?
This was topic of discussion for last week’s Agile Coaching Academy. I stumbled across the quote somewhere, and now I cannot find it! Ha – from Shu Ha Ri, a distillation of the path towards martial arts mastery. 守 – shu: learning the rules 破 – ha: make them your own 離 – ri: transcend
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Future proofing your Agile career
Last week at the Agile Coaching Academy, we talked about future proofing your agile career. Were others doing this, and if so, what approach were people taking? This was initially prompted by reading Jeff Gothelf’s book ‘Forever employable’ as well as a keen interest from myself in the idea of antifragility. I also read somewhere
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Learning to Cycle & the Role of a Mentor
Yesterday my daughter learned how to cycle. She perched herself on the seat of red bicycle, put both her feet on the pedals, and then I slowly started pushing her forward till she could cycle on her own. She was pedalling and steering at the same time. After a short while she started wobbling, started
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Weekly Agile Coaching Reflection
This morning I loaded up my calendar after a few days off work, only to discover that I was late for my own ‘weekly review’ with myself! After quickly apologizing to myself and making up an excuse about connection problems, I started reflecting. In fact, I had completely forgotten that I had even committed myself
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The subtle power of coaching conversations
A colleague at work was overstretched (fearing burn out) and the response from the business was inadequate to his predicament. In the past I would’ve gladly offered my opinion about the situation. Instead, this time, I offered a coaching session, and booked some time in the diary. In the end, my colleague didn’t need the
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A lesson from a four year old and a washing machine
Yesterday morning I was sat in the kitchen with my four year old daughter on my lap. I was humming a nursery rhyme and I was becoming increasingly hypnotized by the slow spinning of the washing machine. Round, round, gush, gush. We recently moved house, and for the past two weeks we had been trying
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Personal Antifragility – a New Community
How can I start applying antifragility to my own personal life? This was a question that I set myself earlier in the year. I also realised that, upon reflection, I had always been attracted to the concept of antifragility before even knowing what the concept was, and conversely, I had always been cautious of decisions
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Antifragility for Agilists
Yesterday we hosted a talk at the Global Scrum Master Summit about antifragility for Scrum Masters (or any agilists, really!), and what Scrum Masters can learn and gain from antifragilty. We first guided participants through the concept of antifragility, starting with a story about chaikhanas (Afghan tea houses and how they’re antifragile), then we looked at an example from
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What’s still missing from Agile Coaching? A comparison with Teacher Training
After completing the agile coaching course, I have been trying to think of a way to continue to develop my skills and competencies. I thought back to my teacher training and I wondered whether I can apply the models that we used in teacher training. After all, there are a lot of similarities between the
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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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