Methodical First-Observer Atheism

                “In that the NEW psychologist is about to put an end to the superstitions which have hitherto flourished with almost tropical luxuriance around the idea of the soul, he is really, as it were, thrusting himself into a new desert and a new distrust–it is possible that the older psychologists had a merrier and more comfortable time of it; eventually, however, he finds that precisely thereby he is also condemned to INVENT–and, who knows? perhaps to DISCOVER the new.” – Nietzsche, BGE

There has never been and will never be a logically necessary first-observer. Within the enquiries of intelligent consciousness, Schopenhauer and Russell easily expose the fallacies of Bishop Berkeley’s watchful deity – the overuse of one sign for many significations. The “mind” and its “idea” – representing too many problems with too little nuance. As an English-speaking population, appropriating, sampling, and remixing any word of any era we so choose, we see readily the corruption of discoveries inherent in translating all thought to Latin. The Germans of the modern era found this readily after Kant. A dead language is a closed system. While closed systems provide control for a centralizing power, open systems with semi-permeable boundaries and decentralized redundancies adapt and evolve.

                That is not to say that a theoretical first-observer lacks usefulness, likewise with a universal transcendent observing itself, or manifold object-oriented observations, aggregated in generalized observation. Our issue is methodical. Invasive Ideology builds up closed systems that refuse any hint of disposability in their first-observer constructs. There are those in the Jesuit or Vedic traditions, and more recently in the quantum sciences, that relish the Mystery itself. Mystery as an absurd realm where each of these first-observers are simultaneously the same argument.

Invasive Ideology is not content with relevance. Closed systems fight all disposability, despite all the after-market additions that accrete upon their dogma over time. Such symbols have been the source of immense harm, bigotry, and despotism. The fallacy of the anthropic argument, that an intelligent observer implies that some metaphysical entity must likewise exist, something intelligent capable of producing intelligent observers, lies precisely in the first half of the argument – if an intelligent observer is looking for an observer, they are the observer. The anthropic fallacy attempts to obscure the presence of the narrator, a tradition as old as story-telling itself.

When we watch these anthropic narrator-observers seek evidence through existential instantiation, particularized examples for the confirmation bias of their echo chamber, we find the anthropic fallacy axiomatizes the particles under one Prime Axiom. The denial of death gives rise to many closed systems of bigotry. They bring all specific examples of truth-value exchanged for strategic purposes in our species, then regard each one as an idea that lies some standard deviation from their Hegemonic Truth. Meanwhile, the actual observer, creating the narrative, pretends they were not at the scene of the crime – a sad cover-up. They deny their moral agency for all the truncating and noise canceling required, their responsibility for selecting variables and samples, their agency in establishing the level of observation and the orientation of the coordinate system.

While science willingly bears responsibility for their own distortions, doing so with great transparency, maintaining transaction histories, methodical doubt of selection parameters, external audits with peer review, in context of a liberated and intense competition of ideas, the opposite of this lies in prophecy. To many philosophers have been nothing more than hyper-vigilant prophets. In their pedantry and precision, they hide that they have merely written a long poem. The theologian writes a poem about their feelings toward human life and society, while the maxims, edicts, and constructs are axiomatized. “We hold these truths self-evident.” No matter how unreal, self-contradictory, or unhealthy those axioms become in the absence of observers that will bear full moral responsibility for the consequences of their contributions to the ideological system.

Moreover, once the system is no longer in the traceable control of moral agents but becomes independently continuous, the effects become taught as the first-causes of the closed system. Therein lies our need for suspicion, because a continuous closed system of values that requires no believers is implicitly amoral. Every effort to keep it afloat reveals an exploitation, domination, and enslavement for political economy. Thus, while nowhere in the Bible do we find judgment against suicide, the horrors of the feudal system made it necessary to keep exploited laborer alive, even against their will. Preach the sin of suicide, else the workers unable to flee political economy will flee through death instead!

The abstraction of a metaphysical construct is not merely generalization of empirical reality, it is backpropogation that elevates its place in its semiotic closed loop. As a wave function of truth-value, metaphysical effects become miraculated into a causal hegemonic category: truth-in-itself, god-in-itself, libido-in-itself, spirit-in-itself, and capital-in-itself. Each have been miraculated into a position of first-observer for their own moral and political purposes. When an effect becomes swapped for its cause, when a systemic result becomes treated as the uncaused cause, the actual observer conceals all agency. “In the beginning…” The author, meanwhile hides, with or without leaving a record of authorship! Herein lies an important discovery: transformation is the art of convincing everyone that something new is something old. The Magician-King arises with this revolutionary goal, to prepare for the future by convincing the masses of something eternal that must come to fruition.

Plato hides behind the prophecy of Socrates to tell us that we are witnessing mere shadows of truth-in-itself. Some hidden author hides behind the three major Christ narratives, wherein this philosophical messiah, strangely endowed with Buddhist stories and Stoic egalitarianism, claims his purpose is to testify Truth. The “Nature” of stoicism synthesized with the jealous god of monotheism. The hidden author axiomatizes the metaphysical construct, then miraculated it into the narrative so that Pilate can ask “What is Truth?”

One man as an honest testimony: a claim that, if treated as a sociopolitical insurgent caught between the ideological systems of the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes, we might agree. Joshua of Nazareth (Jesus) as social critic, supporting the rhizomes and nomads rather than the arborescence creating systemic dysfunction. Yet this did not serve the political economy of the Popes after Roman centralization crumbled. When the market forces of freely-exchanged ideas fail to establish hegemony, the ideological production systems must go to war!

This is the ultimate political victory of the Zoroastrian ideological production process, continuously developed in the factories of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic military-industrial complex of faith: only one god, only one truth, one-in-the-same; one light, one authority, one messiah-prophet. Everything else is darkness, evil, sin. Either faithful and true, or worthy not merely of eradication, but eternal torture. Imagine any contemporary individual presenting these symptoms – bipolarity of morals, lost in the mania of creation followed by the depression-rage of annihilation, borderline in the totalitarian separation of perfect-me, unworthy-them, narcissistic in the determinism of value, and sociopathic in the application of fascist conformity. Imagine this person purchasing the largest global consumer goods corporation, the largest global mercenary and security corporation and amassing an overwhelming inventory of nuclear armaments.

More rational, albeit violent if necessary, sociopolitical constructs deal swiftly with such psychosis. The Zoroastrian traditions lie in a propensity of death-denial that arises exclusively from our diurnal instincts. They allow “THE” god-in-itself to be miraculated as first-cause and we allow its ideological systems to axiomatize every depravity of bigotry and injustice with impunity. How foolish to allow tolerance of intolerance!

Freud, at least, although gaining more mass popularity than the equally inventive constructs of Nietzsche, signs his name to theories, argues with peers and students – the First Observer in the case of psychodynamic theory, as a counter-movement to the dysfunctions of religious indoctrination, recorded and known in an autograph. Whatever fiction he created, however unreal it was, he used these anti-historical myths to achieve a purpose – helping his patients. He did not, however, remove his Agency or Intent from his narrative, ensuring (at least) that the mythology could not be miraculated into prophecy – some fiction with god-in-itself as the origin.

More importantly, we can thank Freud for modeling a new behavior for scientists and philosophers. His mythologies prove the utility, when necessary, of building a metaphysical construct that is plausible enough to keep the inquiry moving forward, but unreal enough to receive significant criticism. This forces the ideological system to remain open and adapt as additional information becomes available. Even though the libido gets abstracted beyond the existential instantiation of any individual human’s complex thoughts, emotions, and behaviors regarding their own sexuality and gender, as well as the sexuality and gender of others; even though psychodynamic theory places the handy metaphysical construct in a First Observer role. It is a cosmos of sex, of desire, and a tradition worth continuing in its various fantasies precisely because sexuality is a ubiquitously significant construct. The difference lies in maintaining strict atheism toward the miraculated libido-in-itself. Sex-in-itself is not the First Observer of the cosmos causing all other supply and demand. If we hold it (or some variation) constant in our metaphysical constructs, some law of attraction we echo as well, we know this is a mental construct instead.

The facticity of human existence includes the capitalistic exchange of genetic capital, an obsession about sexual reproduction and its “standard deviations” easily explained by evolutionary emergence. Mutation, selection, and endless becoming. Those with consciousness see sexuality everywhere. We may forgive this penchant as a strategy orders of magnitude more probable to succeed in reproduction. Our generations of descent did not remove us so far from our earliest mammalian ancestors that we should ignore the existence of rodent species for which the males completely lose all personal survival instinct in favor of a relentless spread of their genetic material, at the expense of sleep, food, and safety; sex, sex, sex. The same phallic obsession drove industrial revolutions and neoliberal economic policies: supply, supply, supply!

“Where there is nothing more to see or to grasp, there is also nothing more for men to do”–that is certainly an imperative different from the Platonic one, but it may notwithstanding be the right imperative for a hardy, laborious race of machinists and bridge- builders of the future, who have nothing but ROUGH work to perform. – Nietzsche, BGE

Marx enters the arena to analyze this self-similar inherent flaw of Classical Capitalism, the propensity of the system to miraculate capital-in-itself; money as the First Observer preceding society, economic, relationships, family. Marx elucidates a psychotic causal vector of capital-in-itself as causa prima of labor, causing supply, causing demand. We will return to this problem extensively, because we burn the brand of capitalism into every theoretical construct. We see it everywhere once we tell ourselves to look for it; all these floating values of valuation and signification are so relational and exchange-driven. We can spread this as our market-based view of sex, the trickle-down economics of anti-entropy, some exchange value of god-in-itself.

To the extent this phallic-capitalistic mindset could be entirely cultural, a long-shrouded instinct, or even a category of mind, we must take care to explore each point and its counter-point. If capitalism is a projection of mind, we should pursue and test additional theoretical possibilities along its fractal ontology, but we must also, with extreme diligence, pursue every anti-construct to the best of our ability or find competitors who will. If capitalism is an underlying constant of physicality, we must likewise pursue its implications in areas that claim this as a moral justification, holding it implicitly with domineering potential bias.

5 Reasons I Would Fire You

Originally posted April 2016. 

Disclaimer: I currently work solo on this blog and could only fire myself – so this isn’t veiled threat.  I have done my best to mentor individuals and lead teams aways from these dysfunctions; and disrupt processes that perpetuate them.  These are also part of my personal introspection process.  This is not an accusation of anyone  in particular.  Instead, these are traits we can all continuously work to improve.  On the other hand – “You’re so vain, I bet you think this song is about you.”  

The Top 5 Reasons I Would Fire You

Tech professionals on teams trying to innovate:  Speaking on behalf of managers, your peers, and individual contributors everywhere, these are the top five reasons you aren’t just a poor performer, you’re bringing down the people around you as well.


Reason #1 – You Default to One-Way Communication

Collaborative problem solving cannot happen without meaningful and timely feedback.  There is a time for group chat and a time for well-argued prose (email).  To avoid death-by-chat and long CYA email chains, you need to set clear expectations about when you need to focus and when you can discuss issues – and respect that prerogative in others. 

Whining about documentation, instructions, or a process as document brings you no closer to a better workplace experience for yourself, improved team health, or a product you can feel a lasting pride, prestige, or sense of legacy about.  Bring a solution to the table, own your responsibility for following up, and escalate to a scheduled meeting if needed.  Folding your arms and leaving work unfinished is childish.  You know you can do better – do it.

Mantra – There are no documentation problems, only communication problems.


Reason #2 – You Repeat the Same Words When I Say I Don’t Understand 

Speaking of childish, self-advocacy is an important milestone.  It requires enough vocabulary, understanding of abstract concepts, and recognition of similarities and differences to allow a child to not only imagine a future state that is desirable, but also solve the most likely path to attain it, and make a rational statement to an adult who can permit, empower, or provide.  My three-year-old daughter, forgivably, needs an enormous amount of assistance, and patience, when she attempt this.  As an adult, you should not.

As a leader, I will do my best to bridge the gap between your words and my words.  I will cue you when I am unable to build that bridge, repeat back to you what I understood you to say, and ask you to demonstrate or show me where and what you mean so that I have the context I need for a deliberate and logical decision.  I will do all of this without patronizing you, even when it is mentally exhausting for me.

Not everyone has learned to lead this way, and I admit I can be imperfect at it as well, so you absolutely need to learn to self-advocate.

That said, I cannot heroically be an adult on your behalf.  The real dysfunction that brings down team performance through your own sub-par performance is the continued repetition of the same words when I (or others) explicitly ask you to re-word the request, argument, or question.  You are obstinately anti-try-something-else.  You refuse to paraphrase, assist my incorrect understanding, or demonstrate the meaning of your words.  It is only through my strong personality and insistence that I convince you to show me exactly what the problem is so that I solve it rather than answering a question that sounds like utter nonsense out of context.  Unfortunately, even that is not always effective.  I can carry my pre-school daughter to the cabinet and let her pick the exact afternoon snack she wants.  I cannot “carry” you as an engineer into a realm of creative solutions where emerging technology and emerging market segments meet.

Mantra – Communication is the responsibility of the communicator.


Reason #3 – You Feel No Pride of Ownership Over Your Work

Having coached, worked with, or heard the complaints of hundreds of tech-focused professionals in various, I have found this can often be more a symptom of the dysfunction of an organization than the root cause of poor performance.  The tech industry today is too mentally demanding and excitingly disruptive to attract genuinely lazy people, looking for a free ride.  So when you start giving into distraction, procrastination, or laziness, my leadership spidey-sense goes off.  I will tell you the secret to motivating innovation-based technical teams – empower them to know the impact a line of code will have on an end user. 

Karl Marx’ philosophy describes this exact phenomenon in its examination of the individual worker’s separation and alienation from the product.  Superficially, the question seems quite simple:  Which is more rewarding, a carpenter who makes custom-installed wooden shutters, getting to know the customer, their home, and tastes in the process, or working in a factory running a machine that produces millions of shutters for a big-box store’s generic one-size-fits-all product line?

If you have lost pride of ownership over your work as a software professional, though, shame on you.  You have no excuse for complacence, apathy, or becoming disengaged.  Your skills are a premium product in a seller’s market.  Companies of every size will fight to win you to their side. With one idea and a few colleagues, you could start a company of your own in a heartbeat.

Now, let’s be adults here.  We all have to collaborate and negotiate.  When the majority or a manager makes a call that goes against your individual dissenting opinion, don’t stomp away and pout.  Losing pride of ownership over work, and settling into a free-rider paradigm brings down the team, the product, the end user, and your career.  You better woman-up or man-up and either do a great job that you can be proud of, work to change the organization that is stifling you and your peers, or move on.

Change takes courage, but our virtue is the outcome of our habits.  When you accept and justify your childish, dysfunctional, lazy, sub-par effort and excusing yourself through an external locus of control hurts no one more than you.

Mantra – Anything worth doing is worth doing well.


Reason #4 – You Hide Behind Uncertainty

Deconstructionism is a dangerous game, especially when you are part of a team that is teetering on the edge of a cliff overlooking the seas of chaos, moments from falling into market risk or technical risk that could engulf you.  Since I coach teams on how to become a room full of adults solving the pains of a real person through a collaborative, unified, inspired collective brilliance and sheer power of will, I have a radar for someone  who is hiding. 

You are playing a dangerous game.  You signed up for this, after all.  You wanted to be brilliant, in the thick of it, defining emergent market segments using emerging technologies – but the minute you lost faith in the cause, lost hope for your job security, or lost belief in yourself as a builder and creator of new tech that can change the user’s world… that was the moment the inherent uncertainty of our goals became apparent.  You shut down.  You got stuck.  You became intolerant of technical risk AND market risk and looked to your leaders to spoon-feed you.

At first, a good leader can give a big speech, host a team-building event, or roll up the proverbial sleeves to help.  When the team as a whole needs some slack but they still have their eye on the prize, I have a long list of tools and tricks to re-energize the whole team.  When an individual begins the process of deconstructionism, and moves every conversation into an infinite regress in which the certainty of any word or any intention or any risk is now more important than the product discovery process, that’s when a tough love heart-to-heart happens.  Agile demands small increments.  Innovation requires trial and error.  You must remain infinitely curious.  You must self-advocate for the size of the risks you take.  Escalate when time-to-feedback is hurting you.  Sturdy yourself and your tenacious attitude about the “failure” intrinsic to empirical discovery – otherwise you don’t belong in this work space.

Mantra – Fail fast to succeed sooner.


Reason #5 – You Give Up Before Attempting to Solve a Problem 

This issue if often comes hand-in-hand with insecurity toward uncertainty.  When it comes to coaching a product visionary in agile, this means whipping them with the importance of setting goals for the product, an end user to empathize with, and a pain to solve in the target user’s particular context.  Once that is in place, a team – as a whole – may need some encouragement that a 100% success rate is not the goal.  Innovative, defect-free software that fits the user’s needs is the goal.  As it turns out, some people fear failure too much to risk it.  If that’s you, make sure you are in the least innovative technical space possible.  Sink your teeth into a legacy system and never complain about the spaghetti code you manage again.  That slow-moving space is perfect if you prefer to play it safe.

Innovation may not be important to SOME people, but it is VERY important to the REST of US.  The courage to risk failure is essential to experimentation. 

The real issue, of course, is not the fear or the failure.  It is a lack of proper perspective that puts your short-term ego ahead of long-term viability.  It is a base rate logical fallacy in which you are ignoring the most important variables.  Pretend for a moment that we have a product for which any given User Story – which we’ll restrict to less than two weeks of effort to get from planning to production – has a 70% chance of success (completion in two weeks) due to technical uncertainty and 20% chance of success due to market uncertainty (i.e. “is it really what the end users need?”).  If you take the risk of a false-positive – succeeding in releasing a working product increment that the market doesn’t demand – as the only indication of your own failure, you are sure to be unhappy. 

Now, imagine a breathalyzer has a 5% probability of a false-positive.  A police officer pulls over drivers truly at random at a random time of day.  What is the probability that a driver who tests positive is actually drunk?  Guess what!  A dreadful 2% chance.  Luckily, officers are trained not to play the odds like that.  The time of day, the day of the week, the location selected, and driving behavior all weed out the risk of a truly random selection.  Then recognition of symptoms, through human interaction must give probably cause. 

When you stop trying to overcome technical risk or market uncertainty prior to even attempt to solve a problem, you’re like a cop who stops pulling over anyone due to the statistical uncertainty of a false positive.  If you attempt to solve 0% of the problems you face, you’ll come away with a 100% lack of solved problems. 

Tackle 100% of the tough challenges tenaciously, courageously, and look for an assist as needed.  Anything else makes success incredibly unlikely.  The market risk of success is hard enough.  Don’t ruin the odds further by quitting in the face of technical risk.

Mantra – You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.


Grow Up or Move On

If these sound like you, work to grow as an individual or you are likely already on your way out the door.  If you, your peers, and even your manager exhibit these traits and the organization seems unlikely to change despite a heroic group effort – it’s time to move on.  Complacence, apathy, and passive aggression is terrible for your career.

I’ve taken to saying, “Some people just want to watch the world burn – the rest of us build it anyway.”  If you aren’t a builder, at least stop burning down what the rest of us will happily accomplish with you.

Strength to Compete

Excess of strength is the only proof of strength.  

We must strive, fight, and harden ourselves, continuously improve and overcome, to outstrip and outpace our rivals.  We must brace ourselves, proud and resilient, against risk – and even welcome loss when justified – because even in a wound there is the power to heal.  It is a first-principle from the military school of life:  

What does not kill me makes me stronger.

As warriors we expose our weakness happily, welcome vulnerability, fail often, delighted, and inspect, adapt, evolve, and innovate – hard and fast.  We make pain our truth, we make learning our competitive strategy, we make ourselves immune to the setbacks that ruin the weak around us.  In the face of tragedy the warrior in our soul celebrates, and even honors life as the most worth adversary we will ever face; because, more consistently than any other rival, “life” brings its most formidable weapons against us.  Every artist needs his torture, even more the disrupter and creator of values.

The warrior-champion is born out of, and evermore accustomed to, suffering, and extols his existence by means of tragedy and hardship, because he knows the value of a thing often lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it; what it truly costs him. Liberated by perseverance, gritting our teeth against pain and loss, war becomes a training in freedom – after all, what is freedom?

Freedom is the will to self-responsibility.

Freedom is a state of spirit; that one embodies the will to self-responsibility.  That one preserves the distance that divides us, even in an embrace.  That one is ready to sacrifice men to one’s cause, oneself not excepted.  Freedom means that the instincts that delight in war and victory within us have gained mastery over all other instincts.  The truly free man is a creator, destroying the past and disrupting the present, a warrior constantly overcoming resistance, five steps from becoming a tyrant while standing on the threshold of servitude.  He combats the tyranny of the pitiless, dreadful instincts with maximum authority and discipline toward himself.  After all, what is strength?

Strength is the will to self-discipline.

It is great danger, our thorough and deliberate exposure to risk, and winning against it, that makes us deserving of reverence.  It is only the real danger of losing everything that first teaches us to know our resources, our virtues, our shield and spear, our very spirit; it is danger that compels us to be strong.  Thus the first-principle:

One must need strength; otherwise one will never have it.

The strongest among us, champions respected throughout history, have felt precisely this way – freedom is something a man attains but can never own, something one always pursues, something for which we must fight, a state one continuously conquers.

Stay strong, rise to the fight!



– An adaptation, extension, paraphrasing from the works of Friedrich Neitzsche

Photo Attribution:  Rob Weir‘s photo of “Atlas (1937) Statue” by Lee Lawrie, Rockefeller Center, NYC

What Westside Barbell has taught me about Scaling Agile

Agile Portfolio Management:

There is a new way of doing things in delivering a complex product portfolio.  It focuses on delivering value both incrementally and iteratively.  It utilizes empirical process control and hypothesis-driven planning.  It utilizes test-driven development in both convergent and emergent delivery, even when budget and scope are fixed.  It utilizes a Lean kaizen approach to maximize velocity.

This philosophy is by nature, object-oriented and modular.  No one framework is right for every product, so it is highly customizable.  It may sound new to you, but it has been around for quite awhile.  But wait – I’m not talking about Agile, Scrum, or Lean software principles – I’m talking about Westside Barbell’s approach to powerlifting.


Waterfall Weightlifting:

Powerlifting is a sport in which the lifter competes for the highest single-repetition maximum in the Squat, Deadlift, and Bench Press for their weight class.  The traditional approach to training powerlifters relied on linear periodization – a method still very valuable for beginning athletes because each phase builds on the last while progressing toward competition-specific strength.

At a basic level, here is a 12-week competition plan:

3 Week Hypertrophy Phase (muscle size, stamina): Sets of 12 to 15
3 Week Strength Phase (movement form, ability to move weight): Sets of 5 to 7
3 Week Power Phase (Explosive speed, maximum weight at progressively higher volume): Sets of 1 to 3
3 Week Peak & Rest (Highest weight, lowest volume): Sets of 1 to 3, tapering off to a few rest days
Competition: Three chances to get three lifts correct, competing against others who are doing the same

As agilists, this correlates perfectly with the “waterfall” approach we try to leave behind:

Hypertrophy phase: Business planning, creative design, and thorough documentation
Strength phase: Database layer, middle-tier
Power phase: Client-side logic, front end development
Peaking phase: Testing, beta release, focus group and stakeholder reviews
Rest days: Code freeze and marketing
Competition: Release to the market, in which you may not recover from failure

Then the lifter starts over.  If there was a big loss (e.g. an injury) pre-competition, the weight lifter might not compete at all – just like software project that gets cancelled after key engineers leave or technical debt gets too high to meet the release date.  More problematically, if there is a big loss or injury at the competition, the lifter may never compete again- just like the software team with a botched release that gets “reassigned” or laid off.


Repeating the Cycle:

The weightlifter who perseveres, win or lose, still has big “waterfall” problems.  The lifter rests a little and repeats the linear progression cycle, an exercise in bodily context-switching.  When the next hypertrophy phase starts post competition, most of what was developed in the previous cycle is gone!  The same is true of each phase.  When the lifter resumes focus on 3-rep max, some hypertrophy and stamina is lost.  As the lifter peaks for competition, the 1-rep max may increase but the 5-7 rep range decreases.  Studies show that after a few weeks in the subsequent hypertrophy phase, up to 15% of single-repetition strength is lost.  The disconnect between foundational planning (by increasing stamina and size) sacrifices a considerable amount of value captured (ability to perform the same single-rep max).

What does this specificity-switching cost the lifter?  As a beginner, not very much – any work will improve size, conditioning, and maximal strength, and fantastic progress can occur.  The discipline of repeating the movement pattern likewise increases maximal strength even with little planning.  However, once the lifter goes from a beginning athlete – a time when nearly anything will improve the lifts – to an intermediate athlete – subsequent peaking phases will see little or no increase.

The process requires disruption if total stagnation is to be avoided.

If this sounds like delivering software in waterfall, it is!  As you read this quote from a strength coach describing the “waterfall” lifting approach, think about the Waterfall PMO:

Having now gotten away from this type of training and looking back as an outsider, I can see where the program is lacking and why I had so many problems. I used to feel it was the only way to train (mostly because it was all I ever knew). It was also the only type of program for which I could find a lot of research. Some of the limitations to this linear style of periodization include:

  • It’s a percentage-based program
  • It starts with a high volume
  • It only has one peak
  • Your abilities aren’t maintained
  • The program has no direction to the future

– Dave Tate via T-Nation.com

Here are the parallel problems we see with waterfall:

  • “It’s a percentage-based program” – accounting-based statistical process controls are applied to an emergent system
  • “It starts with a high volume” – a significant portion of the budget is spent planning, designing, and fighting about features that no user wants (and if the project is cancelled, 100% of this sunk cost never drives user- or owner- value capture)
  • “It only has one peak” – A major release attempts to market itself to all segments simultaneously and a flop may kill the product line completely
  • “Your abilities aren’t maintained” – once the waterfall project plan is set in motion, market evaluation, user feedback, and stakeholder review is non-existent
  • “The program has no direction to the future” – a waterfall project plan is delivered based on the knowledge available at the beginning of the project when the least is known and has no intrinsic method of looking to the future relationship between the user market that might exist and the software that could be produced.

Westside Barbell’s “Conjugate Method”

The Conjugate Method attempts to balance all phases across preparation for competition. At the “enterprise level” three movement patterns are continuously tested as the measure of the process. At the “business level” a new variation of a similar movement may become the focus for 3 to 5 weeks (e.g. training rack pulls instead of full deadlifts when “lock out”, the upper portion of the movement, is the weak link). At the “team level” (the lifter + coach), the two-week sprint has a consistent set of ceremonies and artifacts (workout plan, workout log, the workout, etc).

Here is an example:

Week 1
Monday – Max effort lower body day (squat + low back + hamstrings), focus on strength and power
Wednesday – Max effort upper body (bench press), focuses on strength and power
Friday – Dynamic effort lower body (squat, deadlift), focuses on speed and hypertrophy
Sunday – Dynamic effort upper body (bench press), focuses on speed and hypertrophy
Week 2
Monday – Max effort lower body day (deadlift + low back + hamstrings), focus on strength and power
Wednesday – Max effort upper body (bench press), focuses on strength and power
Friday – Dynamic effort lower body (squat, deadlift), focuses on speed and hypertrophy
Sunday – Dynamic effort upper body (bench press), focuses on speed and hypertrophy

This correlates nicely with “core” Scrum concepts:

  1. Maximal strength is tested every week – working software every sprint
  2. The metric (1-rep max / story points delivered), is improved (strength / velocity over time), through hypothesis and experiments (empirical process control)
  3. The entire body is trained for size, stamina, strength, and power per every week – vertical slicing and user stories
  4. The lifter gets to experiment with new exercises without fear of wrecking a 15-week cycle – sprint retrospective, sprint planning
  5. The coach focuses exercise planning on addressing weak points – a ScrumMaster, removing impediments
  6. The Power Lifting competition is not a unique event with a long lead time – working software every sprint, TDD, XP, continuous integration and release

Now the lifter, like our Scrum team, gets to plan, experiment, and deliver often.  The overall roadmap (Lean + Scrum) might have a basic end-game or vision (increasing 1-rep competition max performed on 3 lifts the same day is equivalent to convergent product delivery), but planning only looks forward up to 5 weeks, commitment at 1 to 2 weeks.  Likewise, the lifter and coach is always looking at the most recent data, the newest lessons learned, and quickly reacts to whether a behavior, practice, or process should be continued or not – just like the Product Owner, ScrumMaster, and Team are always planning and executing based on the most recent market and team data.


Applications to the SDLC:

Now we can extend the metaphor and draw conclusions.  The powerlifter’s body equates to a complex large-scale digital portfolio.  The lifter needs to increase value three programs that focus on convergent product delivery while also developing several programs that utilize emergent product delivery.  In waterfall these two program methods are separated by functional division and project lifecycle, in conjugate (Scrum) these two are handled in tandem.

For the powerlifter, the three convergent products are squat, deadlift, and bench press.  Quality must stay constant or the increase in value does not qualify.  The same is true in software products – adding a high-value feature while allowing a 50% increase in crash on launch is absolutely unacceptable.  Your users will disqualify you!  Whether your have a three-application enterprise CRM program or a three-iOS app consumer program (see LinkedIn or Facebook as examples), adding an exciting feature to an app that causes mass user drop out is a risk no business can tolerate in today’s market.  The competition is too fierce, barrier to entry too low; someone will blow you away.

At the same time, the powerlifter needs to maintain several emergent delivery programs, some for function (increasing grip strength), some for fun (increasing bicep size).  Ongoing workout plans, building size, stamina, and maintaining joint health, addressing weak points by focusing on a new accessory exercise for 5 weeks – all of these priorities must be balanced and evolved.  Keeping a workout log is the only way to be sure that exercise volume, intensity, and density are increasing.  The relationship between the convergent product value and the emergent product investment is the only metric rationally applicable.  The same is true in software delivery.  Emergent-delivery programs like R&D, marketing, UX, product planning are all critical to the health and success of the portfolio as a whole – but the end goal must be clear.

  • Over-planning and under-delivering is not acceptable.
  • Over-researching and under-user-pleasing is not acceptable.
  • Over-designing and under-testing is not acceptable.
  • Over-marketing and and under-releasing is not acceptable.

Conclusion:

The Conjugate Method as an analogy for Agile, Scrum, XP, and Lean at scale works for me because I love lifting.  I realize it may not be right for you, especially if neither agile or weightlifting are familiar territory.  So, like everything, find how this applies to your life so that you can find inspiration in ordinary – then start a conversation about it.  I’m happy to discuss anytime:  224.223.5248

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Enterprise Mobility – You and your team need more green time!

As a consultant and delivery owner for custom mobile application development, discussing with people outside the industry regarding the various ways in which people think about “enterprise mobility” is always a great conversation. There are three basic ways the terminology is used:

  1. Mobile Device Management:  Devices and data security management in enterprises environment that COPE (corporate-owned, personally enabled) versus BYOD (bring your own device)
  2. Consumer Marketplace Apps: Consumer facing solutions created custom by an independent contractor (I would typically point out this is not what I consider enterprise mobility)
  3. Internal Enterprise Apps:  Proprietary solutions used exclusively by a single enterprise, in which the operational effectiveness gained with on-the-go, on-demand employee activity that is supported by one or more mobile applications

Let’s talk about #3.  I love enterprise mobility and being a member of the mobile workforce.  I love to build and manage employee solutions for enterprises.  Every day is a good day when I am consulting, planning, and delivering on-the-go, on-demand, notification-driven enterprise user experiences – that is my specialty.  Part of how I stay “in touch” with the users these solutions serve is by finding and using the marketplace and proprietary apps they use, getting out of the office and off wifi, making every effort to be an ultra-mobile worker – and I love doing it!

Worker Mobility

Talking Stick Resort – Scottsdale, AZ

Why do I love being an on-the-go, on-demand employee?  Less screen time, more green time.  As valuable as note-taking can be when it truly captures the full context of what is discussed, I find conference calls and meetings where I have a computer in front of me are consistently sub-par.  So when I have several calls in a row (with no screen sharing), I plan to spend that time at a park or forest preserve.  I love walking meetings – not the indoor kind on treadmills (though I support that option too) – so when I need a one-on-one “meeting of the minds” with a mentor or mentee, we take it outside and walk around.  I go to the gym at lunch most days to give my eyes a break and get my body awake.  After all, I can chat, text, and email as easily by mobile between sets as I can between bites at a desk.  When there is a tough problem to solve, a couple beers and a whiteboard can help a small group hash out a solution better than a chat group.

We are part of an increasingly mobile workforce.  Take advantage of that freedom, encourage it with your peers, empower your employees.  You will see immediate benefits!

Walking Meeting

Illinois Forest Preserve – Chicago, IL


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Frameworks for Scaling Agile and Scrum

3Back:

I had the pleasure of attending 3Back consulting’s “Scaling Scrum with Scrum” training last week with Dan Rawsthorne.  It was an EPIC day due to the dense amount of information provided, philosophical analysis completed, and a very worthwhile way to spend eight training hours.  I also completed my Certified Scrum Product Owner training with 3Back’s Doug Shimp because, as a repeat customer, I know Doug and Dan present more than one perspective, offer their personal experiences to the mix, and drive collaborative discussion.  There is no one way to Scrum, and 3Back gives a broad yet practical introduction to the debate.

Frameworks:

The fundamental element of Scrum is the Well-Formed Team.  Philosophical Scrum, your Scrum 101, might make it easy to gloss over this building-block of Scrum – there is an immense amount of information to cover and the importance of the Well-Formed Team is quickly lost on the beginner.  However, after three years of driving Agile, Scrum, XP, and Lean in various organizations, I must reiterate:  the need to build on the Well-Formed Team as a paradigm cannot be overstated.

What does a Well-Formed Team – a “Scrum” in the truest sense, huddling around a problem to solve – look like?

  • It is Self-Organized:  No one on the team directs the work of anyone else on the team.  Everyone is self-started, self-directed, and accountable for their commitments to the Product Owner
  • It is Self-Contained:  We often call it “cross-functional” but this is insufficient.  A truly well-formed team has every resource it needs in one room, ready to solve an issue on a whiteboard together.  The members value working together as a team, work constantly to improve, take pride in their “chores” (effort not directly involved in completion of committed backlog items), take seriously the due-diligence and appropriate standard of care for the product increments that are built for the stakeholders and users, and practice this excellence with complete integrity as professionals.

This Well-Formed Team is completely self-contained – every discipline necessary for working software is in a room, sharing a proverbial pizza.  Pragmatically speaking, “classic” Scrum would have a team that looks like this:

  • 4 iOS developers
  • 1 Middle-tier/ DBA
  • 2 QA testers
  • 1 UX/UI designer

How they grow to become cross-functional is part of their self-organization:  The iOS developers will assist the Middle-Tier and QA in System Integration Testing, collaborate on Human Interface Guidelines with the UX/UI designer.  The middle tier looks to UX/UI and the iOS developers for what information needs to be delivered by a web service.  The QA testers are perfect for “hallway” testing of the UX/UI designer’s rapid prototypes.

framework is a collection of patterns– the Scrum framework is built from the pattern of the Well-Formed Team.

The second pattern consists of the Scrum Ceremonies – the feedback loop of Daily Stand Up, Planning, Review, Retrospective.  The last pattern is the role of the Product Owner as the single point of accountability to the users, stakeholders, business owner, and team for the value created by the prioritize Product Backlog (for more on this, see my post Why Product Owners?).  In traditional Scrum, the Product Owner is outside this Well-Formed Team.  50% of the Product Owner’s time is spent collaborating with the team about the backlog, 50% is spent with the Stakeholders.  Adding a Business Owner that handles most of the sales and business “chores”, this could be an effective Lean Startup!

Scaling the Patterns:

The 3Back course reviews three approaches to scaling the patterns set up by Scrum:

In the interest of time, and because I recommend learning this from 3Back, LeSS, or SAFe yourself, I will skip to my take-aways.  The number one thing to recognize one a framework scales is where accountability is shifted.  This is the biggest with the concept of the “Product” Owner in traditional Scrum – once several teams are delivering a single large product (imagine Spotify or Microsoft Office for desktop), or a single team becomes responsible for a long series of very different products (imagine a team in a typical custom software development company, delivering 4 to 7 products per year), the “ownership” becomes an expectation that must be made clear.

SAFe – Scaled Agile Framework:

SAFe takes the large organization and introduces agile in a scaled manner (in juxtaposition to scaling from small to large as a company grows).

SAFe

It divides the delivery of a large organization into the product, program, and portfolio levels.  The Agile Release Train and (presumably) the ceremonies are on a single schedule for the entire portfolio.  At each level, backlog development is done at the program and portfolio level, leaving the teams to deliver groomed and prioritized backlogs to deliver.  While the Agile Release Train teams, whether delivering a distinct Product or features as part of a large system, have an accountability owner, the key issue with SAFe is how accountability is scaled.  The pattern indicates scaled scrum teams, but those teams do not have Accountable Owners for the decisions or the teams!  You can see how, despite sprint-based delivery, this will eventually result in the Waterfall Witch-Hunt”.

LeSS – Large Scale Scrum:

Large Scale Scrum, is the methodology currently supported by ScrumAlliance.org for its new Added Qualification: Scaling Scrum Fundamentals.  The Body of Knowledge presented on the LeSS site is thorough and full of terrific information on the Well-Formed Team, organizing in the Large, and bringing together the  – I am still revisiting the content and will likely write more on the topic in the future.

As Dan Rawsthorne quickly pointed when tying together the patterns in SAFe and LeSS, the owner of accountability, regardless of what (s)he is called, emerges in three ways from:

  1. Traditional Scrum: The Product Owner is outside the team and gives them a prioritized but not fully groomed backlog
  2. Modern and Scaled Scrum: The Product Owner is part of the team that is handed a prioritized and groomed backlog, some level of interaction with stakeholders is sacrificed
  3. Dysfunctional Scrum: The Product Owner is outside multiple teams serving multiple competing stakeholders for several products (typically, a proxy owner ends up with responsibility but no accountability

In SAFe, the key problem breach-of-pattern is that the diffusion of responsibility overcome through a Product Owner does not scale to the Program and Portfolio levels.  The key issue with LeSS, in contradistinction, is that the the pattern forgets to give each Scrum team their product owner!  It may be be implied that a Business Analyst or Technical Lead is meant to take on the responsibility of ensuring the backlog is fully groomed, but without recommending a solution for this I predict Dysfunctional Scrum – the person accountable, the person responsible, and the person empowered are not housed in a single role.

Scaling Scrum with Scrum:

The Scaling Scrum with Scrum framework recommended by Rawsthorne and Shimp at 3Back attempts to maintain the patterns that make Scrum successful and repeat them across several teams working on cohesive product offering.  Partly drawing on the success of Spotify there is a clear effort to maintain a clear chain of accountability ownership at any level of the organization.  This is not by necessity a command-and-control hierarchy – the reporting structure can rely on Communities of Practice so that skill-specific positions can report to an expert in that field despite working on separate teams.  The goal best driven by SSwS is organizational learning.  The clarity of the One Big Role at each level, where the is a facilitator and aggregator of feedback (scaling the ScrumMaster) and a clear point of accountability for decisions related to the feedback (scaling the Product Owner) stayed true to the philosophical line of thought set up in the first half hour.

Having spent several hours with a pattern-based critique, I quickly realized the main limitation of SSwS – the pattern “scales” 50 to 100 developers in scrum teams up to a cohesive Product Offering.  As the other half of my career was focused on Management Strategy Consulting, I could see that scaling accountability beyond SAFe’s portfolio level in a many-product firm competing with unique strategies in disparate markets quickly becomes management problem, not Scrum problem.  Dividing up strategic divisions, defining positioning in the market, and set the focus of a complex portfolio of investment is strategy solution, not a process solution.  Rawsthorne alluded to the longer discussion of how to Scale SSwS with SSwS and I plan to reach out to him regarding it – Chief Operating Officer as ScrumMaster and Chief Executive Officer as Accountability Owner?  “Clark, I can picture it in my mind and its breathtaking.”

Conclusion:

Scaling Scrum with Scrum is a terrific crash course for someone looking for a philosophical comparison of multiple approaches to scaling agile or taking a large organization and introducing scaled agile.  I would primarily recommend it to trainers, coaches, and change agents.


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Never Hold Back, Never Give Up

Fail fast and learn quickly.  Free yourself from fear.  Take control of who you are, the value you create, and the judgement of that value.  Be “The Good” as you define it for the world around you.

#life #power #strength  #philosophy  #psychology