Category Archives: Thoughts on Thoughts

Better Conference Calls

Agile, Software Development, Thoughts on Thoughts

So, I was talking with A earlier this week about meetings, and she mentioned the issues that many people have with conference calls.

But what are those issues? I can only talk about issues that I’ve had with conference calls.

For those who are not familiar, we’ll start with audio conference calls.

A humorous video by Tripp & Tyler may help illustrate.

To me, these problems can be broken down into the following categories:

Human factors:
– Absence of body language
– Outside distractions

Technical factors:
– Lag
– Other audio artifacts of VOIP
– Technical issues with audio conferencing software

We’ll start with the Technical factors.

Lag:

Lag feels like it’s only gotten more prevalent with greater use of mobile phones and VOIP. Of the two components of lag (encoding/decoding time and routing/travel time), you can probably improve routing/travel time the most by spending more money on better dedicated VOIP connections. You may also get some mileage from having your conferences during off-peak hours and being on a wired (rather than wireless) connection. The anti-jitter algorithms described in this ‘how VOIP works’ article inherently have a tradeoff* between jitter/dropout and lag. If you make things easier for them, they should be able to improve both for you.

Other audio artifacts of VOIP:

These other audio artifacts are also products of the packet data nature of VOIP. ‘Toilet bowl audio’ is caused by VOIP losing packets and the sound being recreated artificially by the algorithms. (Before they figured this out, you would hear pops or crackles or even more annoying sounds, like in early mp3 encodings.) Sound cutting out is the result of too many consecutive packets being lost.

Feedback is an interesting one. I’ll use the iPhone as an example. When you have the speaker on a device very close to the microphone, you’re liable to get feedback. The device gets around this by analyzing the sounds coming in through the microphone, and ‘subtracting’ them from the output stream. The echoes you may hear sometimes is what happens when this fails. These algorithms were required to make satellite communications viable.

(A better history of echo cancellation is here, for those who are interested: ECHO_history_of_echo_cancellation )

Other audio artifacts of VOIP have similar origins and solutions.

Technical issues with audio conferencing software:

This one still puzzles me. Like microwaves, they seem to be all different, and none of them intuitive. I can’t tell if this is because the industry has not converged on a solution, or the problem is actually that unsolveable. My current favourite is Google hangouts, but that could be because I generally use them for one-on-one conversations. Perhaps this problem is because of the always problematic nature of security, when controlling access of people to be able to phone into a conversation. But even when there is no conference call security, there are still always issues, with people trying to call into the conference, calling the wrong way. I feel like the solution is to have an intuitive interface, where you can see all the calls coming in to your phone and then drag them together to make a conference.

We could even make a game of this. We could call it ’21st century switchboard operator**’.

Now, on to human factors.

Absence of body language:

This is a tough one. Interestingly, humans figured out a method for showing body language in text at most 11 years after the first email*** was sent, while 140 years after the invention of long-range audio communication****, we still do not have an effective method of conveying body language over audio transmissions. I would say that video conferencing will supplant all audio within our lifetime, but there is still space communication, satellite communication, dark rooms, non-working cameras, etc… Perhaps some sort of interstitial click language would work.

In the meantime, the best solution is to have people meet each other, in person if possible, over video or at least a one-on-one audio before they engage in a conference together.

The other elephant in the room is people who are normally bad at in-person body language cues for when it is time for them to finish talking. In person, this can be difficult, even with a strong moderator. In an audio conference, this can be well nigh impossible. A moderator with the ability to selectively mute participants might work. The social hierarchies in many organizations may not permit this, but improving the flexibility of those hierarchies and teaching people to *listen* is one of the key components of Agile.

Outside Distractions:

This one feels like a tossup between having a strong moderator and having an engaged workforce. Sometimes life does indeed intrude into work, but if this is occurring on a regular basis, perhaps it’s an indication that the meeting is at the wrong time, or too long, too low a priority, or the participants are not as engaged as they could be, for whatever reason. Addressing those issues is probably the best next step here.

So, that was a lot of words. Apparently I have a lot of thoughts about this. If you want more, comment below!

Some other useful links:

An explanation of packet loss and discards.

*Because you’re sending voice data in packets, these packets have to be reassembled at the other end. Because the packets are going over the internet, they can be delayed. A delayed packet either has to be left out or waited for. This causes jitter and lag, respectively. If you have a better connection, the algorithms can make better decisions for you.

**This just makes me appreciate the people who did this job even more, and I always thought it was difficult.

***The article also goes in depth about the specific strengths of email, and how it may be a more natural method of communication for humans than some other types…

****I did not know before reading this article that Alexander Graham Bell was “Professor of Vocal Physiology at Boston University [and] engaged in training teachers in the art of instructing deaf mutes how to speak”

Multidimensional Word and Sentence Rotation

Analysis, Internet Culture, Puns, Thoughts on Thoughts, Words!

I was talking to G during a life coaching session, and the topic of ‘Opposites’ came up. Specifically, the use of ‘Opposites’ to swap out parts of a sentence to gain more understanding of the sentence, the topic, or perhaps something else.

There are a number of different ways one can swap out parts of a sentence. I’ll go in approximately the order I use them, but the fun ones are at the bottom. 😀

We will use a famous* sentence to illustrate:

“The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.”

First, we can start by swapping parts of the sentence:
– Spoonerisms swap the first characters or syllables of words, such as ‘linc and zead’ for ‘zinc and lead’, or ‘The quick frown box jumped over the dazy logs’, which is nonsensical, but highly creative, especially if you drew it.
– One can swap words, swapping the subject and object: (‘The quick brown dogs jumped over the lazy fox.’), or descriptive words with nouns: (‘The quick brown dogs jumped over the foxy laze.’) This second one could be nonsensical, but could also refer to lasers, which could trigger other thoughts or creativity in the listener.
– We can completely swap the object half of the sentence: (‘The lazy dogs jumped over the quick brown fox’)
– We can move words around and change their parts of speech: (‘The brown fox quickly jumped over the lazy dogs’), in this case changing the meaning from descriptive/innate (quick fox) to intent (fox quickly).

There are more ways to do this, but they are generally more complex combinations of the above.

Second, we can remove parts of the sentence:
– ‘The brown fox.’
– ‘The fox jumped over the dog.’
– ‘The quickly.’

Third, we can change the cultural referent of the sentence or parts of the sentence:
– ‘The swift vulpine soared over the meddlesome cur.’
– If I knew enough Japanese, I could give examples of different levels of formality here.

Fourthly, we can do what I can only describe as ‘Word Rotation’, where you chose a word in the sentence, and rotate about one of the axes that the word is on, similar to a gimbal or leather punch.
– You can rotate animal species, such as ‘the quick brown bear jumped over the lazy cat’
– You can rotate action words
– You can rotate tightly or loosely:
– Tight: Dog, cat, mouse, hamster
– Loose: Dog, horse, panda, bear**
– Absurd: Dog, mushroom, amphioxus, pool table
– You can rotate senses*** (my favourite, although ‘propriocept’ is not a very good verb.)
– You can take a sub-word and rotate it. This one is clbuttic.
– You can rotate more than once (although this is only very subtly different from rotating once more loosely).
– You can exchange words or word parts for the ‘more formal’ version: ‘Mark my words!’ becomes ‘Marcus my words!’
– Rotation also works with antonyms.

Basically, any way you could #hashtag a word in a sentence, and then replace that word with a different word that also qualified for that #hashtag.

Join us next time, when we explore the mysteries of %tags, and try to figure out whether a single open bracket or closed bracket is more annoying. As always, let me know what you think in the comments below!

*This sentence was commonly used to test typewriters, as it uses each of the letters in the alphabet and is reasonably short and easy to remember.

**Banda, pear.

***Space Quest IV had an icon which alternately allowed you to look, touch, or taste objects. It’s possible this is where my analogy of rotation comes from.

Predictive Punning

Analysis, Puns, Thoughts on Thoughts, Words!

I tell many, many, many bad puns, as anyone who has hung out with me knows. What many may not know is how much preparation and mental remapping has gone into this process.

The two key factors in the success of a pun are Timing and Obscurity*.

By Timing, I mean that the pun has to be said close enough to the sentence it is riffing on so that the short term memory of the listeners is willing to go back and look and compare, to find the humour/reference. If you wait too long, you risk your listener timing out** and ignoring you, as they have already forgotten the specifics of the original sentence. Too soon, and the listener has not finished understanding the meaning of the original sentence, and the pun sentence will pass them by.

By Obscurity, I mean that puns which are too obscure will cause the listener to think about the pun for a brief while, then time out and move on. Puns which are too obvious will cause a groan as the pun wave collapses, and the listener will move on. Only a pun somewhere between these, where the listener is subtly forced to engage their brain will get the reaction you desire***.

Complicating matters is that Obscurity is defined differently for each listener****, as each listener will have different amounts of knowledge in each area. So, you’re constantly juggling what you know of the knowledge levels of each of your listeners, and trying to find puns that will fit inside enough of the Timing and Obscurity windows of your audience.

What can help is Sentence Prediction. Just like Amazon can tell that you will need toothpaste before you do, you can predict what words someone will say in a sentence before they know themselves. Once a person has started a sentence and is about halfway through, it is remarkably simple to predict how they will finish the sentence*****. More importantly, it is easy/possible to predict the exact words****** they will use, as you will need the exact words they will use in order to generate your pun.

So, you’re listening to someone speak. Partway through their sentence, you fill in their sentence with what they’re going to say. You then spend the next couple/few seconds planning your pun, you wait until they’re done speaking, and then you strike! Mental chaos ensues! Coyote is happy.

Want to hear more about this? Let me know in the comments below!

*I use ‘Obscurity’ instead of ‘Difficulty’ here because a specific pun will have different ‘Obscurity’ levels for each listener, depending on the specific shape of their knowledge/experiences.

**I’m using ‘Timing Out’ in the sense of the computer term ‘Timeout‘, where after a certain defined period of time, the computer will simply go and do something else. If you want a great example, watch two cats interact. You will see one or both of them timing out on a regular basis.

***If they start hitting you, you’re probably doing this right. Or wrong. It’s all the same. Dada is the anti dada.

****Timing is probably different for each listener as well, but I haven’t studied that in as much depth.

*****I’m sure someone has studied this, but I can’t find a link.

******Incidentally, I quite enjoy the feeling of ‘cache miss‘/’branch misprediction‘ that I get when someone uses a word I don’t expect. It jumbles my neural net and makes me think.

Three

Nostalgia, Thoughts on Thoughts, Words!

Warning: 25-year-old TNG spoilers below! Imbibe at your own risk! If you wanted to see Dr. Crusher at her finest, read further!

It’s always interesting how certain things lodge themselves in your brain, to be retrieved only at certain personally defined times…

There’s a scene from ‘A Matter of Perspective*’ where Riker says “Riker to Enterprise, I’m ready to leave. Now.” I often replay these words to myself when it is clearly (in my head) time for me to leave. 8 words from a TV show I saw once 25 years ago, and yet it has stayed with me and the memory has perhaps only gotten stronger with time.

This brings us to the title of the post, ‘Three’. This is from a different TNG episode: ‘Cause and Effect****’, where the Enterprise is caught in a time loop, and Data** sends himself a message so that they can break free. This message is ‘Three’, which represents the number of pips on Riker’s collar that Data glances at just before the Enterprise is destroyed. Data surmises that he was trying to tell himself that Riker was correct and he was not***, and vents the shuttle bay doors, saving the ship. Earlier, he and Geordie had described the effect as a ‘post-hypnotic suggestion’. Interestingly, this may have been more powerful than they realized. Often, when I am asked a question, I will randomly answer with ‘Three’. Sometimes I do this because I enjoy putting people into ‘Mu*****’ space, but sometimes it’s probably just because of my memories or subconscious effects from this episode.

Incidentally, this was probably my most favourite episode for Beverly Crusher. I feel like she was the only one who could play the part she played, bringing together the early detection of Deja Vu, with the scientific and analytical mind to analyze what was going on and to gather the data that no one else would think to do. Data may have sent and received the message, but Beverly told him and Geordie that something was going on, and gathered and analyzed data to prove it. If you like this character (or want to), watch this episode.

Also incidentally, it felt almost like the scenario may have been designed by Q (or some being like him), as there are just enough clues for the crew to figure it out, without that legendary crew, they would have been trapped for 90 years, just like the Bozeman, but also because it hints at helping humans understand space and time just a little bit better, like Q was talking about in ‘All Good Things…’

*A really interesting look at perception and consent, as well as other things.

**And Geordie. They have an excellent bromance, from before such a thing was named.

***Riker wanted to decompress the main shuttle bay to move the Enterprise away from the collision, Data wanted to use the tractor beam to push the other ship away. Why they didn’t simply use both from the start, or have established emergency procedures for moving the ship when engines and thrusters are down is anyone’s guess.

****Incidentally, one has to google ‘data three tng’ to retrieve this episode. ‘data three’ is a data center, and ‘tng three’ is the third season of TNG. Interesting to think how Google and its pseudo-venn-diagram method of searching has changed the way we think******.

*****I like to refer to this as ‘the space between meaning’, similar to the effect of asking the question ‘What is the difference between a duck?’. (This will be the subject of a later post.)

******I used this when I was playing a party game many years ago. (I thought it was Cranium, but it looks like it was more likely Taboo.) I would get a word like ‘Superman’, then name two words which, if you googled for them, would return ‘Superman’.

Focusing Meetings

Agile, Idle Speculation, Organizing Systems, Software Development, Thoughts on Thoughts

What kinds of meetings do you actually need in an organization? I don’t really know the answer to this. What I do know are the meetings that work for me on an ongoing basis. I would call my process ‘Scrum-like’, in that I think it takes the best features of Scrum, but I’m sure I’m not doing it exactly by-the-book.

1) Daily 5-minute standups. When I say ‘5 minutes’, I mean 5 minutes. I have said much more on this here: http://nayrb.org/~blog/2016/01/15/the-5-minute-standup/ They keep people up to date, and should spawn whatever conversations you need to keep things flowing

2) Bi-weekly* planning and retrospective meetings. You may be able to get this down to 1 hour every two weeks for both if your team is well defined and has been working together for a while. You may need an hour each plus one hour for backlog grooming every two weeks. Again, depending on how defined the work is that your team is doing, YMMV.

3) One-on-one weekly meetings with each of your direct reports. Long term, probably the most important of any of these. This is where you find what is actually happening, how your people are actually feeling. ‘Managing Humans’ by Michael Lopp has multiple chapters on this. Fundamentally, you want to establish trust with your reports. This includes listening, asking them about what they want (both now and in the future), followed by more listening, then following up to actually get them what they want and need as much as you can.

4) Broadcast meetings. I’m talking about town halls, other meetings where you want to get news out to a lot of people quickly. Best to keep these reasonably short, and choose your most interesting public speakers. If you have a CEO that can hold a room and answer questions, this is a great opportunity for them to shine. Many of these meetings can be avoided by a fanout leading to 30s announcements by leads in your daily standups (or email).

5) This last category is more fuzzy. It includes all those meetings outside your regular schedule. These are generally a mix of long term planning meetings (vision/strategy/etc…), short term planning meetings (figuring out what we’re doing with this project so we can make it into bite-sized tickets), and unblocking meetings (this project is behind, these people disagree, this thing you want us to do is physically impossible, etc…).

It is this fuzziness that that can be the death of a meeting. The first four types have pretty defined schedules and agendas**. This last type is pretty free form. Here are some things we’ve found that help:

A) Make sure the meeting is ‘Ready’

In Agile, there is the concept of a ticket being ‘Ready’, where before someone starts work on something, that something has to reach a certain level of definition. Generally, this would include things like ‘Acceptance Critera’ (how you know it’s done), and a ‘Why’, ‘What’, and some idea of ‘How’ you are going to do it***.

For our meetings, we had a pretty simple of ‘Ready’:
– Someone is in charge of running the meeting
– The meeting has a stated purpose
– The meeting has an agenda

B) Make sure the person**** in charge of running the meeting can run a meeting

This generally means:
– They are familiar and can follow the purpose and agenda described above
– They can tell when a conversation is going off topic or over time
– They can bring the conversation back

This last point can be as simple as ‘in the interest of time’. Having a written agenda on a whiteboard or flipchart can help a lot with this. If you include time allotments, this will give your meeting runner something to point to to get people back on track.

C) Have plans for action items

– Assign action items

Often, this is the role of the meeting runner (chairperson, really), but could be some other person in the room with the gravitas/authority to persuade/compel people to do the required/decided on things.

– Track action items and follow up if necessary

You want the follow up assignments to be in a place where everyone in the meeting can track their progress (whatever ticketing system you have is ideal, or perhaps whatever wiki system your organization uses).

– Avoid a further meeting on this topic

Depending on your particular participants, someone may need to be assigned to follow up, or it could be ‘homework’ for the next meeting. Ideally, you want to make these meetings as infrequent as possible, so subsuming the action items into your regular ticketing and tracking system is ideal and obviates the need for a specific follow-up meeting.

And that’s it! If you follow these simple steps, your meetings should be much more focused and productive!

Let me know what you think in the comments (as well as if you want me to delve deeper into parts of this).

*I say bi-weekly because we do two week sprints. YMMV.

**If you want me to talk more about agendas for planning meetings, retros, one-on-ones, and broadcast meetings, I can do so, but this is out of scope.

***The exact contents of this definition of ‘Ready’ are generally defined on a team-by-team basis.

****There are a bunch of specific skills here which are out of scope. Comment if you want more on this.

The Luxury of ‘Picking Your Battles’

Economics, Idle Speculation, Thoughts on Thoughts

“He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot will be victorious.”
– Sun Tzu

Choosing which battles you fight and do not fight has been a cornerstone of strategy probably for as long has strategy has existed. One can look at the history of military strategy* as a sequence of wrestling** matches writ large, with each of the opponents trying to force the other to fight on their terms.

More recently, the strategy of ‘Picking your battles’ has been applied to many other, more mundane confrontations. When someone accosts you on the street, when the phone company charges you two dollars extra, when that person bumps into you in the supermarket.

And this makes sense. You don’t want to go through your life fighting or arguing with everyone all the time.

But what if you don’t have a choice?

What if every time you walk downtown near your office by yourself, people make sexual comments about you? What if you’re never selected for a job interview because of your name? What if every time you express yourself online, you receive death threats?

Yes, you could avoid doing all those things, or you could do them and simply endure, but is that really picking your battles? You’re having wars of attrition waged against you every day.

Huge parts of the modern reading of ‘pick your battles’ implies that you can win some, or some substantial portion of them.

If you can’t win most, or even any of them, can you really be said to be ‘picking your battles’?

Having battles that you can win is a privilege. Choosing which battles to fight is a privilege. Even choosing which battles to choose from is a privilege.

A privilege that not everyone has.

*This is assuming they knew what they were doing…History is rife with examples of belligerent parties who did not know what they were doing***.

**Perhaps more ‘push hands’ than wrestling…

***Of course, this is often difficult to know with certainty, as the victors generally write the history books…

It takes privilege to be able to do this…

Facebook, Consent, and Pictures of your Kids

Idle Speculation, Internet Culture, Politics, Thoughts on Thoughts

Earlier today, I was having a conversation with an old friend of mine about the idea that parents oversharing about their children is ‘ruining their lives’, as mentioned in this article:

http://aplus.com/a/sharenting-parents-oversharing-facebook-social-media

My initial response was to say that this was a social change that people were going to need to ‘learn to get over’, and that they should focus on doing the things they want to do, and ignoring those who want to judge them over unimportant things.

After some discussion, I realized that my opinion was coming from a place of significant privilege, not just cis/white/male/etc, but because I’d never experienced that horribly invasive mocking and worse that so often happens to people on social media.

I think this really revolves around issues of consent, and I wonder how much the posting of pictures of children without their consent is similar to giving them a hug without their consent. It could be that in a few years, this will be seen as just as important.

We have very stringent laws about privacy of medical records. Why not for photos? I’m assuming this is mostly about the ability of photographers to do their jobs and the total unenforceability of such an idea.

But if you can be denied a job because of something you did in your spare time the same way you could be denied a job because of an existing condition, why would we not extend those protections?

alt.comp.risks and Swiss Cheese

Analysis, Engineering, Nostalgia, Teaching, Thoughts on Thoughts

If you’ve never read alt.comp.risks, you should do so. In fact, you can read the digest here:

https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/

If you don’t know what alt.comp.risks is, it is 30 years of all the things that can go wrong with complex systems (especially computers). Anyone who has done a post-mortem or incident report or accident report will familiar (if not happy) reading there. They will probably also notice that the same problems keep happening again and again and again.

Young Drivers mentioned a study* which said that a typical traffic accident requires four errors on the part of the drivers (two each). In the accident and risk analysis world, this is often referred to as the ‘Swiss Cheese’ model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model

The ‘Swiss Cheese’ model is the idea that adding more layers of checks and protection can help make a system safer, as long as the holes in those layers do not align.

This is a major reason why it is just as important to investigate incidents as it is to investigate accidents. ‘Incidents’ are occasions where something ‘almost went terribly wrong’, where two or more of the ‘Swiss Cheese’ holes aligned, ‘Accidents’ are where all of the ‘Swiss Cheese’ holes aligned, and something terrible actually happened. In the Diagram below**, the ‘Accident’ is the arrow that made it all the way through, all of the other arrows are incidents, which left unchecked, could lead to accidents some day.

raeda-icam-image

Why do we not just spend our time and energy closing those holes in the ‘Swiss Cheese’ (or to making sure they don’t align)? All of that takes money or other resources***. So, given the modern legal system, most organizations balance money and safety in some way, shape, or form. This balance between resource allocation and safety is such an issue that there is an entire regulated profession whose purpose is to properly maintain the balance.

I’m speaking of course of Engineering. The perception of Engineering is perhaps of people building things, or Leah Brahms and Geordi arguing about how to make warp engines go faster, but fundamentally Engineering is about balancing safety with costs.

Probably the most pernicious obstacle to this proper balancing is the dismissal of incidents as unimportant or contained. Any incident which makes its way through 3 of your 4 layers of safety is one mistake away from a disaster, and should be treated accordingly.

*I can’t seem to find it at the moment, but I believe them, as it is consistent with my experience.

**From http://raeda.com.au/?p=115 “The ICAM (Incident Cause Analysis Method) Model Explained

***Often not stated is that spending time on safety-related things is a distraction, both in time and context switching.

The 5-Minute Standup

Agile, Organizing Systems, Software Development, Thoughts on Thoughts

Many people have written about daily standups*, and many people have written about the benefits of short meetings**.

I want to talk today about the idea of the 5-minute standup. This is an evolution of the daily standup that is part of the Scrum*** Agile methodology. I’m writing this from a Development perspective, but this could just as easily be applied to many other types of organizations.

The purpose of the daily standup as I see it is twofold:
1) Let everyone know what everyone else is working on
2) Let everyone know when someone is in trouble/blocked, so they can help

Classically, the daily Scrum standup has three questions:
A) What did you do yesterday?
B) What are you planning to do today?
C) What is blocking you right now****?

In my (limited) experience, people are pretty good about the status update part of things (what did you do yesterday?), and the forecasting part (what are you planning to do next?). You may need to explicitly ask the blocking question for a while until your team fully trusts you and the rest of the team to listen to their (often embarrassing) blockers and actually help them.

For me, I’m very much a proponent of short meetings. I love being as concise as possible (Think Ulath*****). I have an acute sensitivity for people who are uncomfortable with a situation or have checked out, and I try to do everything I can to fix that. (This makes me a good host, but it can be very tiring.) If I’m running a meeting, it will have a defined purpose, and it will be only as long as it needs to be.

I’ve found that developers especially will check out of a standup within minutes. Having a meeting of 5 minutes or less was the only way I could find to keep people engaged in a status meeting.

The way we’ve found best to run these meetings is to have the current set of tickets up on the screen, and we go through them in order. People are generally only working on one or two at a time, so it’s effectively the same as going around the circle, but with the added benefit of the visual aid. You can also do all of your ticket status changing at this time, along with asking for code reviews. Anyone who was missed then gives their update, then you break out to whatever after-meeting conversations were deemed necessary during the meeting. This way, only the people who need to be in those conversations are, and everyone else can get back to whatever else they were doing.

Some tips:
– If you find your standups routinely taking longer than 5 minutes (or 1 minute per person, max 10 people in a standup******!), try giving the most ‘detail-oriented’/rules-based person on your team the timer, and telling them to give each person no more than 1 minute to talk. It worked wonders for us. (I often do this myself, by being the most impatient one in the meeting.)
– Announcements should happen very quickly (max 30s), or over email. Discussions can happen after the standup is over.

To Recap:

Pros of the 5-minute daily standup:
– Less time
– No time spent on details, just high level, in depth discussions pushed to smaller groups
– Devs are much less likely to check out
– Not dreaded like interminable meetings
– A good outlet for the detail-oriented member of your team who cares about process, and wants to time things

Cons of the 5-minute daily standup:
– Still takes devs out of the flow, distracting them for much time before and after
– You still have to have all the one-on-one meetings to resolve things afterwards…
– It can make you think you’re having full communication when you’re not

*Interestingly, this is a very old tradition, as the UK privy council only has meetings where all members stand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privy_Council_of_the_United_Kingdom#Meetings

**Randy Pausch gave an excellent lecture on Time Management https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTugjssqOT0 and the benefits of making meetings as short as your scheduling software will allow.

***https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_%28software_development%29

****Many people would say “Is anything blocking you right now? I mostly avoid yes or no questions, as they’re too easy to dodge with a one word answer, and a lot of having effective meetings is getting people to be present and trust you and not dodge.

*****http://davideddings.wikia.com/wiki/Ulath

******If you have more than 10 people on your team, your team is too big. Note that more than 10 people can be listening or watching, if they also want an update, but there should be no more than 10 people talking, at 1 minute each.

Emotions and Control

Idle Speculation, Nostalgia, Organizing Systems, Teaching, Thoughts on Thoughts

So, I was listening to Adema’s “Everyone”, and one line in particular stood out to me:

“Why am I so angry inside my head?”

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/adema/everyone.html

A classic question that people have been asking themselves for generations, and one of the questions that we’ve been trying to answer for the next generation I imagine for as long as we’ve been trying to answer things. (It also seems to be consistent fertile ground for many genres of music…)

Every generation brings new people, angry about new things (or the same thing, again and again).

Do we have more anger in our youth than usual?

Kondratiev wave theory would suggest yes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave

At least in North America, there’s been a squeeze going on for probably 20 years (a whole slew of other topics, out of scope). Add that to they standard “Is that all there is?” as you approach adulthood, and that’s fodder for whole genres of music.

But really, the original question, about trying to control the non-grey matter portions of your brain…

When I was doing safety training, I used to say that I could deal with no sleep, or crappy food, but not both at the same time, or I would get cranky.

And how do you teach the next generation to control their brain? Do you want to?

How do you educate them to control the ‘proper’ parts of themselves, while still expressing their creative and exploratory sides?